Mediagazer: Pearson CEO Scardino's departure could lead to FT sale (Kate Holton/Reuters)

8:35 AM ET, October 3, 2012

Top News:

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Financial Times sale could raise £1bn — Pearson could offload the Financial Times for as much as £1bn in a “trophy hunt” by potential buyers, after the head of the company's education division was announced as the new chief executive, replacing Dame Marjorie Scardino.

Kate Holton / Reuters:

Pearson CEO Scardino's departure could lead to FT sale — LONDON, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Pearson Chief Executive Marjorie Scardino will step down after 16 years, potentially clearing the way for her successor at the global educational and media group to sell the Financial Times newspaper.

Discussion: @eileentso

Guardian:

Pearson chief executive Marjorie Scardino to step down — Dame Marjorie Scardino, one of the UK's highest-profile female corporate leaders, is to step down as chief executive of Financial Times and Penguin owner Pearson at the end of 2012, and will be replaced by the head of its international education division, John Fallon.

Discussion: paidContent, Media Week and NetNewsCheck Latest

Robert Andrews / paidContent:

Google rebooting content micropayments initiative under Wallet — After retiring its experimental OnePass news payments system this spring, Google is now going ahead with a fuller version of its content micropayments platform under the Google Wallet moniker.

Katherine Rushton / Telegraph:

BBC working on music equivalent of iPlayer — The BBC is working on a music equivalent of its iPlayer catch-up service, The Daily Telegraph can disclose. — Lana Del Rey has shot to fame through music streaming services such as Spotify — The service, dubbed Playlister …

Discussion: Pocket-lint, Softpedia News, The Verge, Gizmodo, Engadget and NME

Dylan Byers / Politico:

The Drudge hype falls flat — DENVER, Colo. — One night before the first presidential debate, conservatives Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson hyped footage of a five-year-old speech by then-Sen. Barack Obama, widely covered at the time, in which the presidential candidate suggested …

Discussion: Business Insider, Gawker and CNN

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

U-T San Diego plans 80 layoffs at recently purchased North County Times — U-T San Diego notified the California Employment Development Department Monday it plans to lay off 80 people at the North County Times. “One-third of the total North County Times' staff, including 24 from the newsroom …

Christine Haughney / New York Times:

Burlington Free Press Loses Ground in Vermont — BURLINGTON, Vt. — Vermonters may be quick to boast about their locally sourced foods, their ability to tolerate bitter winters and their celebrated entrepreneurs like Ben & Jerry's and Burton Snowboards. But lately, they have not extended that praise to their newspaper.

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

How a Washington Post reporter crossed paths with one of the ‘Beltway Snipers’ — This week marks the 10th anniversary of the beginning of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo's sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C., area and beyond. Josh White interviewed Malvo for a commemorative feature …

Discussion: WTOP.com

Andrew Wallenstein / Variety:

TV studios too strong for Apple disruption — Syndication biz projected to reach $20 billion — The economics of Hollywood's TV studios have been strengthened so much by new windows that even Apple won't be able to disrupt their business, according to a new research report.

Patrick Kingsley / Guardian:

The German newspaper saved by its readers — While the British press debates the merits of paywalls, the once-threatened Berlin-based paper Die Tageszeitung is thriving under a new co-operative model — To paywall or not to paywall: it's a question that plagues the media.

Discussion: magCulture.com/blog

Bill Carter / Media Decoder:

Delayed Viewing Brightens the Outlook for Some TV Series — In what may be a telling sign of things to come, the football announcer Jim Nantz took a moment during Sunday's game between Denver and Oakland to urge viewers who had recorded CBS shows during premiere week not to forget …