Mediagazer: Iran's Fars agency sorry for running the Onion spoof story (BBC)

4:05 PM ET, September 30, 2012

Top News:

Clyde Haberman / New York Times:

Arthur O. Sulzberger, Publisher Who Changed The Times, Dies at 86 — Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper's founding in 1851, died on Saturday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 86.

Discussion: Quote and Comment, The Daily Beast, The Week, NYC GOV, The New Yorker Blog, Associated Press, entertainment.time.com, Politico, Forbes, Gothamist, New York Magazine, Deadline.com, Mediaite, Associated Press, FishbowlNY, Chickaboomer, The Raw Story and JIMROMENESKO.COM

Julie Moos / Poynter:
Former New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger dies Saturday

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, The New Yorker Blog, The Daily Beast, Guardian and WWD Media Headlines

Dylan Byers / Politico:

Paul Ryan breaks ‘no whining rule’ — On Wednesday, Mitt Romney told CBS News that he doesn't worry about media bias, signalling that the campaign was abandoning a blame-the-media strategy it had courted a week earlier. The very same day, senior Romney campaign adviser Ed Gillespie told Fox & Friends …

Discussion: Politico

BusinessWeek:

The New Al Jazeera: More ESPN, Less CNN — Remember Al Jazeera, the network that was supposed to be an Arab CNN, offering a counterweight to Western cable news? That plan appears to have been scaled back as the Qatari government-controlled network makes deep cuts in its English-language …

Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:

Who Controls the Story? — JEREMY PETERS was doing a routine reporting job earlier this year when he stumbled across something that, as he put it, “smelled funny.” — Mr. Peters, a New York Times political reporter, had asked an Obama press representative at the campaign's Chicago headquarters …

Discussion: @sulliview

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Free the Files! ProPublica taps the crowd for a database-building sprint to election day — Political transparency geeks got both good news and bad news from the Federal Communications Commission last April. — Good news first: The FCC decided it would require television stations to put information about political ad buys online.

Reuters:

Iran jury finds Reuters guilty over video script, pending judge's ruling -Press TV — (Reuters) - An Iranian jury voted on Sunday to convict the Reuters news organisation over a video script that contained an error, Iran's Press TV reported. The final decision will be made by a judge, who is expected to issue his verdict next month.

BBC:

Iran's Fars agency sorry for running the Onion spoof story — An Iranian news agency has apologised after being fooled by a spoof story from a US satirical website. — Fars news agency said on its website that its news item “was extracted” from the Onion website on Friday, but was taken down in less than two hours.

Discussion: AllThingsD, Al Jazeera English and Fars News Agency

Lewis DVorkin / Forbes:

Inside Forbes: What Mobile Means for Journalism and My Restless Nights — As the founder and CEO of a startup, VC's would always ask me, “What keeps you up at night?” It was a tedious question with only one honest answer: raising more money from you guys.

Discussion: Monday Note

Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEight:

Poll Averages Have No History of Consistent Partisan Bias — Presidential elections are high-stakes affairs. So perhaps it is no surprise that when supporters of one candidate do not like the message they are hearing from the polls they tend to blame the messenger.

Discussion: Media Nation, Washington Wire, AlterNet and CNN

Greg Mitchell / The Nation:

Yes, Newspaper Endorsements for President Do Matter, and We'll Be Charting Them — This may come as a shock to most of you, but: newspaper endorsements in the race for the White House do seem to matter (at least a little). It's become fashionable to argue otherwise, and with good reason.

Media Matters for America:

STUDY: TV News Covered Paul Ryan's Workout 3x More Than Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss — Arctic sea ice is declining much faster than scientists expected, which has important implications for the rate and impacts of climate change. But the major TV news outlets have largely ignored …

Chris Roush / Talking Biz News:

The business media needs to improve its Twitter use — The business media use Twitter as a promotional tool and are not building an online community, according to research presented Friday by two Virginia Commonwealth University professors. — Vivian Medina-Messner and Marcus Messner found …

Discussion: @jayrosen_nyu and @ksablan