Mediagazer: How the Prank Call at Kate Middleton's Hospital Turned Deadly (Dashiell Bennett/The Atlantic Wire)

1:25 PM ET, December 7, 2012

Top News:

Hamilton Nolan / Gawker:

Online Paywalls and the Future of Media: A Few Hard Truths — Yesterday, both The Daily Beast (or, more accurately, whatever Tina Brown can toss together after they've absorbed the corpse of Newsweek and laid a bunch of people off) and the Washington Post announced that they may be instituting …

Discussion: The Wrap

Keach Hagey / Wall Street Journal:

Washington Post Considers a Paywall — The Washington Post, one of the last holdouts against the trend of charging readers for online access to newspaper articles, is likely to reverse that decision in 2013, according to people familiar with the matter. — While details are being finished …

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:
Washington Post, Daily Beast Jumping On The Paywall Bandwagon. Too Late?

Discussion: Adweek

Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:
Daily Beast Considers Charging for Website

Discussion: Capital New York, paidContent, FishbowlNY, Noted, Poynter, Business Insider, NetNewsCheck Latest, The New York Observer and New York Magazine, Thanks:@jaredbkeller

Dan Sabbagh / Guardian:

News Corp's publishing arm to focus on losses at Times and Sunday Times — More integration of titles difficult under terms that Rupert Murdoch agreed for Times Newspapers in 1981 — Slashing losses at the Times and Sunday Times, running at an estimated £1m a week …

Bloomberg:

News Corp.'s The Daily Shutdown Affects 126 Employees — News Corp. (NWSA)'s plan to shut down its electronic newspaper The Daily, a move announced earlier this week, will affect 126 jobs, according to a state filing. — News Corp. set a closing date of March 5 for paper, according to the filing with the state of New York.

Michael Moynihan / The Daily Beast:
Why Did The Daily Die? The View From Inside the Collapse

Discussion: Media Nation

Caity Weaver / Gawker:

DJs Behind the Royal Hospital Hoax Have Deleted Their Twitter Accounts; There's Speculation They've Been Fired — The two Australian DJs behind the Kate Middleton hospital prank, now being blamed as a contributing factor to her nurse's suicide, have either deleted their verified Twitter accounts, or had them removed.

Discussion: New York Magazine, TMZ.com and Daily Dot

Dashiell Bennett / The Atlantic Wire:
How the Prank Call at Kate Middleton's Hospital Turned Deadly

Discussion: BBC, Daily Mail, Yahoo! News, The Daily Beast, @johngapper, Guardian, @thematthewkeys, Reuters, NY Daily News, USA Today, Slate, HyperVocal, Softpedia News, UK News and Opinion, The Independent, Sky News Australia and standard.co.uk

Telegraph:

Leveson Report: PM proposes third way to regulate the press — David Cameron is considering establishing a new independent press watchdog by Royal Charter - the mechanism used to set up the BBC and the Bank of England. — Watch Lord Leveson deliver his report

Discussion: BBC and Guardian

Joe Schneider / Bloomberg:
U.K. Judge Who Probed News Says Internet Can Be Tamed

Discussion: Telegraph, Digital Spy, Guardian, Hollywood Reporter, Daily Mail, ABC News, HeraldSun, LSE Media Policy Project and theweek.co.uk

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Guardian News & Media plans to shed 68 editorial posts — Publisher of the Guardian, Observer and MediaGuardian says it must save £7m from the editorial budget — Guardian News & Media, the publisher of the Guardian, Observer and guardian.co.uk, has informed staff of plans …

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Katherine Rushton / Telegraph:
Guardian steps up pressure for staff to volunteer for redundancy

Discussion: @jamesro47 and @jamesro47

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

For Netflix and the SEC, a Facebook Share Should Be Public Enough — Most people worry about over-sharing on Facebook. Under-sharing? Not so much. — Except, that is, for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is considering taking action against Netflix for a Facebook post made by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

Discussion: Business Week and GigaOM

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:
Netflix Being Investigated By The SEC For CEO Reed Hastings' Public Facebook Posts

Rob Fishman / BuzzFeed:

Google's Lost Social Network — Last October, while hundreds of protesters were encamped in Zuccotti Park, a handful of people occupied a glass building in downtown Washington D.C. Wearing sheepish grins and business casual attire, the ninety-nine percent they were not; one demonstrator said he worked for Grover Norquist.

Discussion: Business Insider and The Daily Beast

Leslie Kaufman / Media Decoder:

At Random House, Employees Will Enjoy 5,000 Shades of Green — Random House had its corporate Christmas party on Wednesday night in New York, and word is that Santa likes bondage. A lot. — Markus Dohle, the chief executive of Random House, promised employees — from top editors to warehouse workers …

Discussion: PublishersWeekly.com, Vanity Fair, Bookseller news, bookforum.com, The New York Observer, PAPERMAG and Gawker

Jim Romenesko:

Photojournalism student killed in bicycle accident wrote his own obit in September — Boston University College of Communication graduate student and aspiring photojournalist Christopher Weigl was killed Thursday when his bicycle collided with a tractor-trailer.

Discussion: Boston Globe and The Boston Globe

David Kravets / Wired:

Hollywood's Total Piracy Awareness Program Set for January Launch — UNIVERSAL CITY, California - Beginning in a few weeks, the nation's major internet service providers will roll out an initiative — backed by Obama and pushed by Hollywood and the record labels - to disrupt …

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

BBC Christmas strike averted after Asian Network job dispute is settled — Industrial action centred on row over redeployment of journalists who faced compulsory redundancy — The threat of a Christmas strike at the BBC has been averted, after the successful resolution of a dispute about compulsory redundancies.

Foster Kamer:

The Worst People in New York City, No. 92: Ryan Holiday — Okay, so, The New York Observer for some reason thought it'd be a good idea to put this Ryan Holiday assclown's pieces on their site. Maybe Gell was like: Hey, let's troll everyone while we decide whether or not to keep the media desk …

Discussion: ZDNet

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

Spotify pays out more than $500m in royalties since its 2008 launch — Sean Parker and Lars Ulrich settle differences, with Metallica agreeing to put their whole back catalogue on streaming service — Streaming music service Spotify has now paid out more than $500m (£311m) …

Discussion: AllThingsD, Daily Dot, TechCrunch, paidContent, AdAge and Rolling Stone