Mediagazer: Writer dares to defend Jonah Lehrer (Erik Wemple/Washington Post)

9:15 AM ET, August 2, 2012

Top News:

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Lehrer's publisher runs ads telling bookstores to send back “Imagine” for a refund — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is running digital ads telling booksellers to send back copies of Jonah Lehrer's Imagine for a full refund. — Earlier this week, Tablet magazine's Michael Moynihan reported …

Craig Silverman / Poynter:

4 warning signs that a promising young writer may be developing dangerous habits — When it was merely a matter of self-plagiarism, some saw the coverage of Jonah Lehrer's transgressions as an overheated case of schadenfreude. — The fact that his previous books had previously come under fire …

Discussion: bookforum.com

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Jonah Lehrer Was Going To Give A Speech On Ethics. It's Canceled, Obviously. — Jonah Lehrer's fabrications have already cost him his gig at The New Yorker and an unknown number of future book sales, and now they're cutting into his lucrative sideline as a speaker.

Erik Wemple / Washington Post:

Writer dares to defend Jonah Lehrer — It wasn't just the research that made Michael Moynihan's gotcha piece on Jonah Lehrer so definitive. Nor was it the evidence that he marshaled against Lehrer for those hard-to-trace quotes attributed to Bob Dylan in his book “Imagine:How Creativity Works.”

Discussion: Poynter and VICE

Paul Tullis / The New York Observer:
L'Affaire Lehrer: In Defense of Jonah

Discussion: The Daily Beast, @sisario, @dylanbyers, Stephen Baker, Poynter and @ethanwsj

Nieman Journalism Lab:

The Verge is giving extra credit (and links) to primary sources — When technology site The Verge site launched last fall, Josh wrote a broadly laudatory review on the site's design and infrastructure. We had one quibble, though, about how The Verge gave credit to other sites …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals

Washington Post:

The Washington Post Launches Crowdsourcing Platform — The Washington Post today announced it has launched a new platform for crowdsourcing. “Crowd Sourced” is The Post's special feature that allows Post journalists to ask questions about today's concerns and begin a conversation about these issues.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Time Out listings magazine goes free — Reviews and events mag begun in 1968 looks to advertising revenue based on circulation boost to 300,000 — Almost 45 years after Tony Elliott launched Time Out, charging a shilling an issue, the grandaddy of listings magazines is set to be reborn …

Discussion: Digital Spy and paidContent

Liz Gannes / AllThingsD:

A Further Blow to Online Lurking: Quora Will Now Publicly Show Who Has Read a Post — Quora today is introducing a feature that shows which of its users have read each Quora post, and how they found it. It's another move by a social Web service to share passive activities …

Discussion: eMedia Vitals, Quora, broadstuff, GigaOM, VentureBeat, CNET and TechCrunch

Andrew Phelps / Nieman Journalism Lab:

SoundCloud expands its effort to become the YouTube of public radio and podcasts — SoundCloud is arguably the biggest music-sharing community since MySpace, but now the company is eyeing a different kind of audio: the spoken word. — The website was founded five years ago by two sound guys …

Matt Buchanan / BuzzFeed:

Twitter Launches Political Index: The Twitter Pulse Of The Election — The Twitter Political Index could be one of the most powerful social media tools of the election. — Right now, if you want to know how the country feels about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, you have to rely …

Discussion: Twitter Blog, eMedia Vitals, NetNewsCheck Latest, NYT Bits, VatorNews, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Caller and The New Republic

Dylan Stableford / Yahoo! News:

Jose Canseco hired as a paid columnist by Vice — Vice, the irreverent, Brooklyn-based magazine-turned-multiplatform media brand, has hired Jose Canseco—former professional baseball player-turned-outspoken author and Twitter user—as a paid weekly columnist for its website.

Charlie Warzel / Adweek:

So How Are the Olympics Performing Online? NBC Won't Say Neither will comScore, Nielsen, or anybody else just yet — Five days into the Olympics and here is what we know: NBC is pretty consistently killing it with its TV ratings, beating its Beijing numbers four nights in a row.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and NBCUniversal

Brent Lang / The Wrap:
NBC May Break Even on Summer Olympics Coverage

Discussion: Forbes, Multichannel, Radio & Television …, Reuters and Broadcasting & Cable

Andrew Das / New York Times:

How Swimming Photographers Make Their Underwater Moment — LONDON — As Al Bello struggles to wedge his lean body into his scuba gear, it appears that taking the photographs has to be the easy part. — Bello pulls the skintight black shirt over his shoulders, tugs the legs of his shorts closer …

Discussion: SND, PAPERMAG, AdAge and Deadspin

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Time Warner's New Strategy For CNN: To Find a New Strategy — Does Time Warner have a programming strategy for CNN at the ready to replace the failed one pursued by departing worldwide president Jim Walton? It sure didn't sound like it on the media conglomerate's second-quarter earnings call.

Discussion: Multichannel, Reuters, Guardian, The Wrap, TVNewser, Adweek, Home Media Magazine and Deadline.com

Michael Wolff / Guardian:
So, what's next for CNN?

Discussion: paidContent, TVNewser and Capital New York

Mathew Ingram / GigaOM:

Is Twitter a publisher or a distributor? There's a crucial difference — There are a whole host of issues raised by the case of Guy Adams, the British journalist whose Twitter account was recently suspended and then reinstated — including the potential clash between Twitter's desire …

Discussion: MediaShift and Washington Post