Mediagazer: Piracy witch hunt downs legit e-book lending Web site (Violet Blue/CNET)

7:45 AM ET, August 12, 2012

Top News:

Matt Williams / Guardian:

Bowing to pressure, NBC will stream Olympics closing ceremony live online — Ceremony that will feature Spice Girls and The Who will not be available on television but will be shown online — Olympic broadcaster NBC has bowed to pressure and agreed to stream the Games' closing ceremony live.

Discussion: Associated Press, @nbcolympics, SBNation.com, Examiner, Los Angeles Times and Deadline.com

Violet Blue / CNET:

Piracy witch hunt downs legit e-book lending Web site — commentary: Several authors on Twitter mistook an e-book lending Web site for a piracy hub, a mistake that eventually took the site offline. As the dust settles, a disturbing picture of file-sharing hysteria emerges.

Discussion: The Verge, GigaOM and digitaltrends.com

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Olympic winners: How NBC's authentication helped VPN providers — NBC is streaming some 3,500 hours of video live from the London Olympics - but access to the live streams is restricted to pay TV subscribers who have access to MSNBC and CNBC as part of their TV bundle. — That leaves out quite a few viewers.

Steve Myers / Poynter:

Few news orgs cross the ‘Continental Content Divide’ between social and immersive journalism — Steve Rubel outlines what he calls the “Continental Content Divide” that has emerged among media companies: … The goal of the social strategy is to create news that finds you, while the immersive approach results in “news you find.”

Richard MacManus / ReadWriteWeb:

Olympics Online: Who Wins The Gold Medal For Best Website? — We're well into the second week of the London 2012 Olympics, so which media website is winning with its online coverage? NBC fell at the first hurdle with its TV scheduling, but did the network get back into the race with its website?

Discussion: Bleacher Report and BBC

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:

Under Copyright Pressure, Google to Alter Search Results — Big media companies won a battle in the fight to combat online piracy on Friday when Google said it would alter its search algorithms to favor Web sites that offered legitimate copyrighted movies, music and television.

Brad McCarty / The Next Web:

From BuzzFeed to Flipboard, The Clip Report Vol. 2 predicts the future of media — In our changing media landscape it's important to note the ways in which different sites are being used and are seen - not only by their readers but also by the people who are using them for effective marketing.

Dave Smith / International Business Times:

Paul Ryan: How Mitt Romney Failed to Announce His VP Before Twitter — Mitt Romney needed to announce his VP decision by Aug. 11. His plan? Supporters of the campaign would download a free app for iPhone or Android called “Mitt's VP,” which promised they would be the first to know the official news of Romney's running mate.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, Twitter Blog, Examiner, Gizmodo and ABCNEWS

Alexander Abad-Santos / The Atlantic Wire:

Fareed Zakaria Apologizes for ‘Lapse’; Faces Time and CNN Suspensions — Update: 5:17 p.m.: CNN, where Zakaria hosts the show Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), has suspended Zakaria as well. Here's an official statement: … Though CNN has pulled the blog post, we found it thanks to Google cache.

Kevin Breen / The Skeptical Libertarian:

Jonah Lehrer's Teller Deception — Tuesday night, I showed a printed excerpt from Jonah Lehrer's bestselling book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, to Teller, the quieter half of the magic duo Penn and Teller. Teller read what was allegedly a statement he made about a previous point in his career …

Discussion: Poynter

Arthur Delaney / The Huffington Post:

Laid Off Times-Picayune Vets Reinvent Themselves — Two journalists fired by the New Orleans Times-Picayune have a plan to escape a struggling industry and the unemployment into which it is dumping them. — The paper announced in June that it would lay off 200 or so employees, including photographers Susan Poag and Rusty Costanza.

TechCrunch:

Another Big Social Marketing Exit: Gannett Will Buy BLiNQ Media For Up To $92M — On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media.

Discussion: Gannett Blog, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, AdExchanger, Inside Facebook and NYConvergence.com