Mediagazer: AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong: reports AOL seeking a buyer for TechCrunch and Engadget are “100% untrue” http://www.reuters.com/... (Josh Halliday/@joshhalliday)

11:40 AM ET, May 9, 2012

Top News:

Sarah Lacy / PandoDaily:

Sources Say AOL Seeking Buyers for Engadget and TechCrunch. Arrington “Not In The Least Bit Interested” — We weren't sure about this one at first, but now we have two independent sources confirming that AOL is exploring the sale of its cornerstone technology sites Engadget and TechCrunch.

Discussion: Gawker, TechCrunch, New York Magazine, AllThingsD, Forbes, FishbowlNY, Poynter, VentureBeat, WebProNews, Business Insider, Betabeat and Tech Trader Daily

Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:

AOL First-Quarter Profit Increases on Advertising Gains — AOL Inc. (AOL), owner of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, reported a more than fourfold jump in first- quarter profit as online-advertising revenue increased. — Net income advanced to $21.1 million, or 22 cents a share …

Discussion: @edmundlee and AdExchanger.com

Josh Halliday / @joshhalliday:

AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong: reports AOL seeking a buyer for TechCrunch and Engadget are “100% untrue” http://www.reuters.com/...

John Fahey / Press Association:

Milly Dowler's deleted messages to stay a mystery — The truth about how murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone messages were deleted may never emerge, the Leveson Inquiry heard today. The now defunct News of the World admitted hacking the 13-year-old's mobile phone but it remains unknown whether …

Roy Greenslade / Guardian: News International misses another accounting deadline

Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch's big backer sounds News Corp warning

Discussion: Guardian, New York Magazine, Media Matters for America, Hillicon Valley, Free Press and Guardian

Patrick Wintour / Guardian: David Cameron texted Rebekah Brooks before she quit NI, claims biography

Bill Dedman / msnbc.com:

Conservative author Jonah Goldberg drops claim of two Pulitzer nominations — On the dust jacket of his new book, “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas,” best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having “twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.”

Discussion: mediabistro.com, FishbowlDC, Mediaite, JIMROMENESKO.COM and The Huffington Post

Keach Hagey / Digits:

LA Times Developer Begins Archiving Newspaper Websites — Newspaper front pages are considered such an important mirror of American culture that they get their own rotating daily museum exhibit at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. — But there has never been an equivalent archive for the more ephemeral …

Discussion: Poynter

Reuters:

Romeo Langlois: Colombia Won't Negotiate With FARC Rebels Over Kidnapped French Reporter — Colombia on Tuesday rejected a call by FARC rebels to debate freedom of information and news media bias as a condition for the release of a French reporter they hold hostage.

Discussion: BBC

Elyssa Pachico / Christian Science Monitor:
Is French journalist kidnapped in Colombia a prisoner of war?

Discussion: Colombia Reports

Betsy Rothstein / FishbowlDC:

An Editor's Dangerous Mea Culpa — In a most unusual editor's note on the Chronicle of Higher Education website last night, Editor Liz McMillen apologizes profusely for what turned out to be a controversial post written by now fired “Brainstorm” blogger, former WSJ editor and Harvard graduate Naomi Schaefer Riley.

Discussion: Poynter, Gawker, mediabistro.com, WebProNews, Brainstorm and Poynter

Dan Mitchell / SF Weekly:

Desperate Newspapers Pin Hopes on Annoyed Readers — News publishers have always treated readers like commodities — because that's what readers are. The real customers for publishers aren't readers, but advertisers. Readers are the product. It's not quite that simple, of course …

Discussion: Mashable!, eMedia Vitals, NetNewsCheck Latest and BuzzFeed

Tom McGeveran / Capital New York:

The making of a brand-new iPad magazine that's already sick of the Internet — Jim Windolf, a contributing editor and writer for Vanity Fair, was sitting in a large, multi-desk cubicle in a warren of similar cubicles in a 10th floor office on West 27th Street on a rainy afternoon, explaining his new project.

Voice of America:

Chinese Official Questioned About Al Jazeera Reporter's Expulsion — Al Jazeera English announced Tuesday that its Beijing correspondent Melissa Chan did not have her visa renewed. That is in effect, an expulsion from China. The following is a transcript of some of the questions and answers …

Discussion: Reuters, Journalism.co.uk, Global Voices, Committee to Protect …, FP Passport, China Digital Times, IHT Rendezvous, The New Yorker Blog and Globe and Mail

Farhad Manjoo / PandoDaily:

Nobody Seems to Understand What Jeff Bezos is Doing. Does He? — A couple months ago, realizing it would be futile to hold out any longer against the tsunami of pop cultural peer pressure, I decided to go ahead and read The Hunger Games. I jumped over to Amazon, searched for the Kindle edition …

Discussion: ReadWriteWeb and GeekWire

Gail Shister / The Philly Post:

Wendy Ruderman Talks About Why She's Leaving the Daily News — How bad are things at the Daily News? New York Times-bound Wendy Ruderman, a 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner, is urging her colleagues to jump ship. “I hate to say it, but if people at the Daily News aren't looking, they should be …

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM

Jennifer Saba / Reuters:

Demand Media raises outlook on first-quarter revenue beat — (Reuters) - Demand Media Inc (DMD.N) reported better-than-expected first-quarter revenue and raised its 2012 outlook, suggesting it is finally moving past changes that Google made to its search engine that hobbled the company last year.

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Ongo, an attempt at a pan-media paywalled aggregator, is closing — Less than a year and a half after launch, the subscription aggregation startup Ongo — a newspaper-industry effort to create a pan-media subscription system — is shutting down. It'll close its doors by month's end …

Discussion: Poynter, The Awl, AllThingsD, paidContent, eMedia Vitals and @rafat