Mediagazer: Mashable Gets A Facelift (Josh Sternberg/Digiday)

12:20 PM ET, November 15, 2012

Top News:

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

YouTube Blocks Israeli Hamas Assassination Video — And Puts It Back Up Again — Israel has gone to war with Hamas in Gaza, and it is using the Internet as weapon, employing services like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr on its behalf. — The idea is familiar to anyone who has a message to push in 2012 …

Discussion: mediabistro.com, Telegraph, Betabeat, FP Passport, Forbes, IDF Blog and Mother Jones

Nick Bilton / NYT Bits:

In Israeli Attack on Hamas: Shock, Awe and Social Media — As Israel on Wednesday launched an attack on Hamas, killing a top military commander, the government also took to Twitter to live-tweet the strike as it unfolded. — @IDFSpokesperson, the official Twitter account for the Israel Defense Forces …

Discussion: GigaOM, Fast Company, CNN, Wired, AllThingsD, The Daily Beast, The Hill, Softpedia News, The Stream and BuzzFeed

Max Fisher / Washington Post:
The story behind the photo: Journalist's 11-month-old son killed in Gaza strikes

Discussion: Gawker and Telegraph

Ellis Hamburger / The Verge:

Exclusive: Spotify to begin rolling out browser-based music app in beta today — Spotify today plans to begin the roll out of its first ever browser-based music player, The Verge has learned from sources close to the company. From the looks of it, the web player looks a lot …

Discussion: iDownloadBlog.com, The Next Web, SocialTimes, WebProNews, Gizmodo and hypebot

Ben Rooney / Wall Street Journal Europe:
Spotify Valued at $3 Billion, but Where is the Missing Billion?

Discussion: The Next Web

Media Decoder:
Spotify Attracts Investments From Coca-Cola and Fidelity

Discussion: Page-Turner, Radio & Television …, hypebot, PandoDaily, GigaOM, Digital Media Wire, Betabeat, The Next Web, WebProNews, SocialTimes and TechCrunch

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Brauchli's wife: Washington Post has become 'place where you can't speak truth to power' — Former Los Angeles Times reporter Maggie Farley is married to outgoing Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli. In a public posting on Facebook Tuesday evening, she wrote:

Discussion: City Desk

Ryan Chittum / CJR:

Marcus Brauchli's impossible task — The Post's ultimate problem is the business side, not the newsroom — I can't think of any editor whose last few years ran headlong into the financial collapse of the newspaper industry more than Marcus Brauchli's. — Brauchli got the top job …

Discussion: Erik Wemple and Media Decoder

Paul Sonne / Wall Street Journal:

BBC Faces Probe Over Abuse Scandal — LONDON—Britain's communications regulator is investigating the British Broadcasting Corp. for a recent broadcast of its current affairs program “Newsnight” that improperly accused a former Conservative Party official of child sex abuse …

Discussion: Press Gazette, Media Decoder and New York Times

Martin Robinson / Daily Mail:

Lord McAlpine to sue Twitter users who called him a paedophile as BBC agrees taxpayer-funded payout for Newsnight slur — Lord McAlpine's lawyer has today issued a chilling warning to anyone who called him a paedophile on Twitter: 'We know who you are and what you've done'.

Discussion: @lisaocarroll and @iankatz1000

Chris O'Shea / FishbowlNY:

Guy Fieri Responds to Pete Wells: ‘He Had an Agenda’ — Guy Fieri got his restaurant blasted by Pete Wells in The New York Times, so this morning he went on the Today show to defend his food and American Bar and Grill. Fieri said that Wells' review was over the top, and that it seemed …

Discussion: Gawker, TVNewser and Eater National

Mallary Jean Tenore / Poynter:
Pete Wells explains his review of Guy Fieri's restaurant

Discussion: Speakeasy, Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post, The Wrap, The Awl and PAPERMAG

Arif Durrani / MediaWeek:

Audit Bureau of Circulations changes name after 98 years to AAM in the US — The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the US has become the first member of IFABC to change its name in an attempt to better reflect the changes sweeping across the publishing business in the digital age, opting for the Alliance for Audited Media.

Discussion: Folio, FishbowlNY, Poynter, New York Times and NetNewsCheck Latest

Chris O'Shea / FishbowlNY:

Will Bourne Named New Editor-in-Chief of The Village Voice — Will Bourne has been named the editor-in-chief of The Village Voice. He replaces Tony Ortega, who left the paper in September. — Bourne comes to the Voice from Inc., where he served as editor-at-large since July.

Discussion: Capital New York and GalleyCat

Harrison Weber / The Next Web:

Flipboard teams up with Apple to launch new iBookstore-powered “Books” section in its iOS apps — Expanding upon what is now surely one of the most important roles of Flipboard, commerce, the magazine-like app has partnered with Apple (yes, Apple) to launch a slightly surprising new section: “Books.”

Discussion: paidContent, TechCrunch, MediaPost, MacStories and iDownloadBlog.com

Penelope Green / New York Times:

The Loft That Mediabistro Built — IN 2007, when Laurel Touby, the freelance writers' saloniste, sold her online media company, Mediabistro, for $23 million, she banked a little more than half that amount and looked forward, she said at the time, to having a new car with a driver, a new apartment and a whole new life.

Discussion: Gawker, The Awl, @laureltouby and @laureltouby

Aileen Gallagher / Poynter:

University sanctions journalism student for ‘disruptive’ interview request — Alex Myers, an undergraduate journalism student at the State University of New York at Oswego, isn't so sure he wants to be a reporter when he graduates. — The Australian exchange student experienced …

Discussion: The Oswegonian and splc.org

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

Is it time for the New York Times to embrace sponsored stories? — As news publishers confront a troubled online ad market, many of them are turning to “native advertising” which lets marketers create content that resembles a website's natural content. The New York Times is resisting …

Discussion: Noted, Poynter and Digiday

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:
Ads That Get More Love Than the Stories Around Them? Pulse Has Them

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest

Rebecca Greenfield / The Atlantic Wire:

Nate Silver Thinks Voting Is for Pundits — There is a 100-percent chance that after spending years and many blog posts predicting the outcome of the election, Nate Silver did not vote, he admitted during a Q&A on Deadspin. His reasoning: “I don't think that somebody who is observing …

Discussion: Deadspin and Betabeat