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

6:10 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, VentureBeat, AllThingsD, MacStories, CNET, 9to5Mac, Ideashower, 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, newsfeed.time.com, Gawker, TVNewser and The Huffington Post

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: GigaOM and WebProNews

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

Discussion: paidContent, LA Observed, Journalism.co.uk and Columbia Journalism Review

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

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

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, MediaPost, paidContent, New York Times, NetNewsCheck Latest, the Econsultancy blog, 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: Politico and Free Press

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.”

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

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, Journalism.co.uk, eMedia Vitals and TechCrunch

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

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.

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

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