Mediagazer: Paywall startup Piano believes it can fix publishers' problems (Cyrus Farivar/Ars Technica)

8:00 PM ET, April 17, 2012

Top News:

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

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

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

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

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: GigaOM, Journalism.co.uk and WebProNews

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

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

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

Discussion: VentureBeat, New York Magazine, VentureBeat, The Huffington Post and Poynter

Erik Wemple:
Pulitzer Prizes: Editorial writers come up short

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

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

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, the Econsultancy blog, MediaPost, MarketingVox News & Trends, TechCrunch, New York Times, paidContent, NetNewsCheck Latest 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: 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 …

Discussion: Deadline.com

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

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.”

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.

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Newfangled Aggregator Trapit Hires an Old-Timer: Yahoo Editor Liz Lufkin — Liz Lufkin used to have a big say about what most of the Internet read. Now she wants to do it again. — The difference is that at Lufkin's last job, running the home page for Yahoo, she helped shape …

Thanks:@dmfreeman

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