Mediagazer: Politico Pro, one year in: A premium pricetag, a tight focus, and a business success (Adrienne LaFrance/Nieman Journalism Lab)

12:40 PM ET, April 17, 2012

Top News:

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

Huffington Post Wins Pulitzer Prize — NEW YORK — Huffington Post senior military correspondent David Wood has spent decades covering war, watching as wounded combat troops are loaded onto medical evacuation helicopters and, he said, “go off in a cloud of dust.”

CJR:

Six degrees of aggregation — Of the many and conflicting stories about how Huffington Post came to be—how it boasts 68 sections, three international editions (with more to come), 1.2 billion monthly page views and 54 million comments in the past year alone, how it came to surpass the traffic …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and @peretti

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.

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

Discussion: Poynter and New York Magazine

Jolie O'Dell / VentureBeat:
Huffington Post brings home the blogosphere's first ever Pulitzer

Discussion: GigaOM, paidContent, The Huffington Post, NYConvergence.com and The Editorialiste

Dean Starkman / CJR:

The Value of Prizes — I watched the Pulitzer announcements for the first time this afternoon, just upstairs in the World Room—and, well, it's a bit of anti-climax, as a matter of fact. Sig Gissler read the announcements in the lowest-key manner possible to an unpacked room …

The Pulitzer Prizes:
2012 Winners and Finalists — Journalism Public Service …

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:
Sara Ganim, 24, wins Pulitzer for coverage of Penn State sex abuse scandal

Discussion: BuzzFeed, Softpedia News, PennLive.com, Athens News, @meganhealey, Jezebel, American Journalism Review and Hillman Foundation blogs

Erik Wemple:
Pulitzer Prizes: Editorial writers come up short

Discussion: Lens, LA Observed and ap.org

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:
Pulitzer Committee Confirms: Editorial Writing Is Worthless

Discussion: Speakeasy, ReadWriteWeb, Erik Wemple, Media & Entertainment, Journalism.co.uk, WWD Media Headlines, LA Observed, New York Times, Jacket Copy, The Stranger …, Capital New York, @mlcalderone, @jackshafer and The Wrap

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:
Online journalism shines in 2012 Pulitzer picks

Discussion: The Latest Word and College Media Matters

Andrew Losowsky / The Huffington Post:
No Winner For Pulitzer Prize For Fiction This Year

Discussion: Media Decoder, The Millions, The New York Observer, @sarahw, Publishers Weekly and GalleyCat

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, AllThingsD, Poynter, VentureBeat, CNET, MacStories, 9to5Mac and Lifehacker

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.”

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: Politico and Free Press

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: Digital Spy and Variety

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 and TVNewser

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: Business Wire, CNET, Media Buyer Planner, NetNewsCheck Latest and Home Media Magazine

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: TechCrunch, AdAge and The Verge

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Content payment system Piano takes more funding to go global — Piano Media, the paid content platform currently operating bundled kiosks in Slovakia and Slovenia, is taking a €2 million ($2.6 million) second round of venture investment to boost its globalisation ambitions for and general expansion.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, eMedia Vitals, Journalism.co.uk and TechCrunch

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: Huffington Post UK

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: Reuters

Ed Pilkington / Guardian:

Lawyer pursuing phone hacking in US considers asking FBI for help — Cases involve three unidentified clients who say their phones were hacked by the News of the World on American soil — Mark Lewis, the tenacious lawyer who has been at the forefront of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal …