Mediagazer: Mail Online's 69% revenue growth suggests paywalls not the answer (Dan Sabbagh/Guardian)

3:15 PM ET, July 28, 2012

Top News:

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

NBCOlympics' Opening Ceremony Tape Delay: Stupid, Stupid, Stupid — If you were paying attention to Twitter today, you were probably met with two conflicting sides of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. On the one hand, you had those who were on the ground (or who had access to the live stream somehow …

Discussion: CNET, The Wrap, Rolling Stone, Deadspin, Yahoo! News, Forbes, Lost Remote, Guardian, GigaOM, Multichannel, @wjcarter, Speakeasy, AllThingsD, Pocket-lint and summergames.ap.org

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

NBC Hit For Editing Opening Ceremony Segment Seen As ‘Victims Tribute’ — NEW YORK — NBC has come under fire in the British press for editing out a performance during the London Olympics opening ceremony that has been interpreted by some as a tribute to victims of the “7/7” terrorist attacks that rocked that city in 2005.

Discussion: entertainment.time.com, Mediaite, Guardian, Mediaite and BuzzFeed

Bryan Bishop / The Verge:

NBC insults viewer intelligence, says Olympic Opening Ceremony is too ‘complex’ for online audience — The 2012 Summer Olympics have finally kicked off, and while NBC has been boasting about the digital options it's offering US sports fans, the broadcaster offered no live streaming of the opening ceremonies …

Discussion: Los Angeles Times and CNET

Tom Watson / Forbes:

Olympics Coverage: NBC Apparently Thinks It's 1992, Seemingly Unaware Of Twitter's Existence — Well, NBC was trending this afternoon on Twitter across the U.S. - and not because of some hilarious new sitcom. No, it's the wired multitudes taking to that interconnected series of tubes to blab …

Discussion: GigaOM, Broadcasting & Cable, Multichannel, A VC, The Daily Fix, Inside Higher Ed, Guardian, The New Yorker Blog, AllThingsD, GigaOM and Washington Post

Jordan Zakarin / Hollywood Reporter: London 2012: Primetime TV Will Rule Over Digital For Years, Says NBC Olympics EP Jim Bell

Sarah Marshall / Journalism.co.uk:
How a software firm is helping the BBC and PA deal with vast Olympics data

Discussion: Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Big News Network.com and Twitter Blog

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:

Mail Online's 69% revenue growth suggests paywalls not the answer — Is the website's £27m in projected revenue this year already taking it levels of turnover that paywall-only sites cannot match? — Been bored today? Chances are you logged into Mail Online. Seven clicks later, you remembered who you were.

Discussion: paidContent

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Context, code, and community: Source is one-stop shopping for newsroom developers — A lot of newsroom developers are doing good work, and part of that good work is talking about their work. See ProPublica, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the Chicago Tribune for a few examples.

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

‘CNN Needs New Thinking,’ Says Departing President. ‘Duh,’ Says Everyone Else. — Jim Walton took over CNN at a moment of crisis. Just a year earlier, it had been knocked out of first place in the ratings by the surging Fox News. It took a few years, but Walton managed to solve the problem …

Discussion: Mediaite and BtoB Magazine

CNN:
CNN Worldwide President Jim Walton announces he is stepping down at the end of the year

Discussion: Associated Press, Media Decoder, Mediaite and The Wrap

Jim Romenesko:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch lays off 23 employees — A three-paragraph story on the Post-Dispatch website says the Lee-owned newspaper has laid off 23 staffers from the newsroom, advertising and production. I reported yesterday that four Post-Dispatch newsroom managers were called at home …

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Poynter, RFTmusic and Storify

Adam Martin / The Atlantic Wire:

James Holmes' Prosecutors Say Notebook Story Can't Be Trusted — That story about the notebook James Holmes supposedly mailed to a psychiatrist, outlining his plans to shoot up the movie theater was a hell of a scoop for Fox News, but now Aurora prosecutors are saying in a court filing that it was probably all a big hoax.

Discussion: @producermatthew and The Latest Word

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:

With its new pop-out markets widget, The Wall Street Journal is after super-niche readers — The Wall Street Journal quietly launched a new function last month, a pop-out Markets Data window that puts a real-time markets ticker in the corner of your screen.

Daniel Frankel / paidContent:

Dish's latest Hopper tweak reeks of legal positioning — Facing a legal showdown with the broadcast networks over commercial-skipping features in its digital video recorders, Dish Network has quietly made several operating-system tweaks designed to put the ad-circumvention process more in the hands of the user.

Discussion: Lost Remote

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

Google says book scanning didn't cost authors a single sale — Google cites everything from Mad Men to minority rights in a fresh attempt to bolster its claim that the scanning of millions of books qualifies as a “fair use” under copyright law. The arguments, set out in court filings submitted on Friday …

Discussion: MediaPost

Bloomberg:
Google Seeks Dismissal of E-Books Case

Discussion: Reuters

Tracie Powell / Poynter:

UT official who reviewed Post story didn't allow that when she was a reporter — Tara Doolittle, one of the University of Texas press officers who recently reviewed a Washington Post story prior to publication, is a former reporter for The Austin American-Statesman. So did she ever allow sources to do what she did?

Discussion: The Buttry Diary and City Desk