Mediagazer: The World Tomorrow: Julian Assange proves a useful idiot (Luke Harding/Guardian)

5:05 PM ET, April 17, 2012

Top News:

Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

Read It Later Rebrands As Free App, Pocket; Updates UI With Filters, Favorites And More — Read It Later, an app that allows you to save articles and other content on the web to “read them later, is debuting a new version of its service and rebranding as “Pocket.

Discussion: The Next Web, Ideashower, VentureBeat, AllThingsD, MacStories, CNET, 9to5Mac, Lifehacker and Poynter

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Read It Later's app goes free and gets a new name, Pocket — Read It Later is making its app completely free — no more $2.99 Pro version — and renaming it Pocket to express “how simple it is to take any content users discover with them, no matter where they go.”

Michael Hastings / BuzzFeed:

Chelsea Clinton, TV's Dork Diva, Struggles At NBC — Hillary and Bill have worked their way back into our hearts, and now it's Chelsea's turn. The only problem: she's “terrible” on television, as network executives privately admit. — Amy Sly for BuzzFeed

Discussion: New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, Gawker, newsfeed.time.com and TVNewser

Katie J.M. Baker / Jezebel:

Chelsea Clinton's Journalism Career Won't Be Helped by Her “Opening Up” — Hilary Clinton is currently the badass star of an insanely viral internet meme, and Bill is a journalist-rescuing, Nobel Prize keynote speech-giving superstar, but their daughter, Chelsea, isn't faring so well in the court of public opinion.

Discussion: nation.foxnews.com

Stefanie Botelho / Folio:

EXCLUSIVE: Inside Huffington Post's Weekly Magazine App — Arianna Huffington, Tim O'Brien and Josh Klenert on HuffPo's new endeavor. — On the heels of its seventh anniversary and its first Pulitzer Prize, all-digital online publication Huffington Post is breaking into the magazine business.

Discussion: WebProNews and Journalism.co.uk

Erik Wemple:
Pulitzer's embrace of the Web goes only so far

Discussion: paidContent, Free Press and LA Observed

Jeff Bercovici / Mixed Media:
Arianna Huffington and Tim O'Brien on HuffPost's Pulitzer Win

Discussion: VentureBeat, New York Magazine, Poynter and The New York Observer

Erik Wemple:
Pulitzer Prizes: Editorial writers come up short

Discussion: BusinessJournalism.org …, Poynter, Lens and Gawker

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:
Why the Huffington Post doesn't equivocate on issues like global warming

Discussion: Grist

CJR:
Six degrees of aggregation

Discussion: GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb, NetNewsCheck Latest, @peretti, VentureBeat and The Huffington Post

Ryan Kim / GigaOM:

Hulu Plus subscriptions hits 2 million, accelerates revenue — Hulu Plus, Hulu's paid subscription service, has hit 2 million users and is helping put the company's revenue on a faster pace than last year, said Hulu's CEO Jason Kilar. Speaking at the Ad Age Digital conference in New York …

Discussion: MediaPost, AdAge, the Econsultancy blog, NetNewsCheck Latest, MarketingVox News & Trends, TechCrunch and The Verge

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Politico Pro, one year in: A premium pricetag, a tight focus, and a business success — Most nights on Capitol Hill, the Senate and House press galleries begin to thin out around dinner time. The deadline rush subsides, and all but a scatter of reporters remain.

Discussion: Free Press and Politico

Richard Hall / The Independent:

New book ‘exposes links between Murdoch, politicians and police’ — A new book which promises to expose the connections between Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper group and senior politicians and police officers is to be published this week. Dial M for Murdoch, by the Labour MP Tom Watson …

Andrew Pulver / Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch's battles with Harold Evans at the Times to become a film

Discussion: The New York Observer, Digital Spy and Variety

Luke Harding / Guardian:

The World Tomorrow: Julian Assange proves a useful idiot — The WikiLeaks founder's Hezbollah interview on his TV show debut leaves Luke Harding with more questions than answers — It was billed as Julian Assange's “explosive” TV debut. The choice of word was perhaps unfortunate given …

Discussion: Forbes, TVNewser, The Wrap, New York Magazine, New York Times, @harrisj, @davidleigh3, News RSS : Today, Huffington Post UK and BuzzFeed

Inside BreakingNews:

A BreakingNews ticker for every TV channel — We're all familiar with TV news tickers, scrolling along the bottom of news channels. But what if a ticker only appeared for a few moments when a story breaks? And what if it worked across all live TV channels?

Discussion: Lost Remote

Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:

Study: Those Social Media Logos On TV Actually Work — There is hardly a program or ad on TV these days that doesn't ask its viewers to like its Facebook page or tweet about it. According to a new survey by global consulting firm Accenture, there's a simple reason for this: those social media symbols actually work.

Discussion: Multichannel, Broadcasting & Cable, CNET, Media Buyer Planner, Business Wire and Home Media Magazine

Chris O'Shea / FishbowlNY:

Nick Denton Defends Pathetic Fox News Mole Posts By Saying They Brought Traffic — Today Gawker announced that it was blowing up its commenting system, which of course brought out the crazies. And while they were entertaining in their passion — what ever will Gawker do with all the people lying …

Discussion: TVNewser and Gawker

Andrew Kirell / Mediaite:
Why I Never Became Mediaite's Fox News Mole

Discussion: TVNewser

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

China's communist state news website aims for $245 million IPO raise — What's the difference between communism and capitalism anymore? — The People's Daily newspaper, an organ of China's ruling Communist Party, has tripled the amount it expects to raise through the IPO floatation of its online publishing operations.

Discussion: Forbes and Reuters

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Curation Service Storify Partners With Pulse In First-Ever Syndication Deal — Storify, the startup that lets anyone “curate” stories from around the web by collecting posts from social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is today announcing its first-ever syndication deal.

Reuters:

Falling ad revenues to hit Daily Mail profits — (Reuters) - British newspaper group Daily Mail & General Trust said it expected profits in the first half of the year to be lower than in 2011, hit by falling national advertising revenues and higher newsprint and promotional costs.

Discussion: This Is London and Guardian