Mediagazer: Nick Denton Defends Pathetic Fox News Mole Posts By Saying They Brought Traffic (Chris O'Shea/FishbowlNY)

3:00 AM ET, April 18, 2012

Top News:

Jeff Sonderman / Poynter:

How The Tuscaloosa News' post-tornado tweeting helped bring home a Pulitzer Prize — When the Pulitzer Prize Board announced last year it would emphasize real-time reporting for the Breaking News category starting in 2012, some speculated whether we would someday see a Pulitzer Prize for tweeting.

Discussion: Guardian, NYConvergence.com, New York Times and VentureBeat

Dan Gillmor / Guardian:

Don't take me to your leader: the Pulitzer and the lost art of editorials — No wonder the Pulitzer committee withheld any award for editorials this year. With rare exceptions, they're verbal Valium — Does any business or craft hand out awards to itself more fervently than journalism?

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

Discussion: paidContent, LA Observed, Free Press and Columbia Journalism Review

Sarah Kendzior / The Atlantic Online:

The Day Yahoo Decided I Liked Reading About Child Murder — Algorithms are shaping how we see the world around us, with big consequences. What a machine thinks we need to know can become what we fear. — On February 8, 2012, I was on Yahoo's homepage when a headline caught my eye …

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

Michael Hastings / BuzzFeed:
Chelsea Clinton, TV's Dork Diva, Struggles At NBC

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

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, TeleRead, MacStories, AllThingsD, 9to5Mac, CNET, Electronista, VentureBeat and Poynter

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:
Read It Later's app goes free and gets a new name, Pocket

Discussion: AppNewser

Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica:

Paywall startup Piano believes it can fix publishers' problems — It's no secret that American newspaper publishers have struggled to monetize their online content as traditional paper-based subscriptions fall. The Wall Street Journal has famously had a paywall since 1997 …

Robert Andrews / paidContent:
Content payment system Piano takes more funding to go global

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

Jim Romenesko:

NYT labor reporter's take on Guild-Times talks — New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse shares his views on the Times-Guild contract talks with colleagues: — * “As someone who has covered labor negotiations for years, I was baffled why it took nearly a year for management to move beyond its initial draconian offer.”

Chris Barth / Forbes:

Howard Stern's $300M Sirius Suit Dismissed, But Shock Jock Will Appeal — Yesterday brought bad news for the so-called King Of All Media, as Howard Stern's $300 million lawsuit against his employer, Sirius XM, was dismissed by a New York State Supreme Court Judge.

Discussion: Deadline.com, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Media Decoder, Media & Entertainment, Hollywood Reporter and paidContent

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The New York Times' Well blog gets more vertical with a redesign — What you might call the verticalization of The New York Times continues today with the relaunch of Well, the healthy-living section edited by Tara Parker-Pope. Like DealBook and Bits before it, Well has grown in prominence enough …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and FishbowlNY

Ryan Kim / GigaOM:

BuzzFeed's Peretti: Design engaging ads made for sharing — BuzzFeed has been gaining more attention for its ability to lure eyeballs with its funny animal pictures and more recently with its more serious editorial content. But equally impressive is the way the company is pushing the future …

Associated Press:

Lee Enterprises 2Q loss widens on refinancing costs — DAVENPORT, Iowa — Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, on Tuesday reported a wider loss for its latest quarter due to costs associated with an exit from bankruptcy.

Discussion: Reuters and JIMROMENESKO.COM

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: AdAge, Home Media Magazine, the Econsultancy blog, MarketingVox News & Trends, MediaPost, TechCrunch, New York Times, The Verge and paidContent

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

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 …

Discussion: Deadline.com