Mediagazer: Legimi Wants To Be The ‘Spotify For Ebooks’ With A Business Model That Relies On You Reading Less (Steve O'Hear/TechCrunch)

5:55 AM ET, January 4, 2013

Top News:

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Time Warner Cable Says It Will Keep ‘Open Mind’ on Reinstating Al Jazeera — Time Warner Cable minced no words when it announced on Wednesday night that it was dropping Current TV, just hours after Al Jazeera acquired the channel. “Our agreement with Current has been terminated …

Discussion: The New Republic, Mediaite, Guardian, The Huffington Post, AdAge, Inside TV, Wall Street Journal, The Week, Los Angeles Times, @jackshafer, The Daily Dish, Tampa Bay Times, The Stream, TVLine, Business Insider and DealBook

Reuters:

Al Jazeera's new channel struggles for U.S. distribution — (Reuters) - Al Jazeera's announced plans to establish a new U.S. cable news channel via the purchase of Current TV isn't even 48 hours old and already it finds itself in a vicious battle to retain distribution rights.

Discussion: PandoDaily

Jeanine Poggi / AdAge:

New Cable Channels Keep Coming Despite Content-Cost Crackdown — Players ranging from WWE to ABC News and Univision will again try to elbow their way onto pay-TV program guides this year. But 2013 may prove particularly inhospitable for upstart networks as cable and satellite distributors …

Discussion: Globe and Mail

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Bad news for cord cutters: Al Jazeera America won't be live streamed online — Cord cutters won't be able to tune into Al Jazeera America, the new cable news network that was announced Wednesday in conjunction with the news that Al Jazeera has purchased Al Gore's Current.tv.

Discussion: Media Decoder, Bloomberg, The Daily Caller, AllThingsD, DealBook and Business Insider

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

Questions Linger for Hosts After Sale of Current TV — Eliot Spitzer, Jennifer Granholm, Joy Behar and the other hosts on Current TV have no idea what comes next. — On Wednesday, their television home was sold to Al Jazeera, which plans to remake Current into an international news channel …

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:
Al Jazeera will face hurdles to succeeding with Current TV

Discussion: @rafat and ABCNEWS

Nicholas Carlson / Business Insider:
Glenn Beck Tried To Buy Al Gore's Current TV, Which Instead Sold To Al-Jazeera For $500 Million

Discussion: Glenn Beck, TVNewser and @mlcalderone

Ann Friedman:

Journalism Is Personal — You probably read this post at Gawker, in which Hamilton Nolan aims to put the fear of Cronkite into the aspiring Thought Catalog contributors of America. You probably also read that Andrew Sullivan is striking out on his own, hoping his readers will pony …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Guardian, TIME, CJR and Gawker

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Sullivan's new Dish raises $333,000 from over 11K people in first 24 hours — On Thursday, Andrew Sullivan pronounced himself “somewhat gob-smacked” by readers' response to his immensely popular blog the Dish leaving the Daily Beast, going independent and charging $19.99 a year.

Discussion: The Daily Dish, Pressthink, The New York Observer, The Atlantic Online, Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog, PSFK and Felix Salmon

Mathew Ingram / paidContent:

Why Tumblr and Buzzfeed are on a collision course in 2013 — The decline and fall of traditional media empires is one side of the ongoing turmoil within the industry, but the other side is the rise of disruptive new players, and two of the most prominent names in that category are BuzzFeed and Tumblr.

Discussion: Bloomberg, Forbes, Elapsed Time and parislemon

Alyson Shontell / Business Insider:
BuzzFeed Is Now Valued At ~$200 Million, But Investors Think It Has Billion-Dollar Potential

Discussion: AdAge, NetNewsCheck Latest and VentureBeat

Jason Del Rey / AdAge:
Buzzfeed Raises $19.3 Million to Make LOL Content for the Social Web

Nat Ives / AdAge:

Digital Cracks 50% of Ad Revenue at Wired Magazine — First for the Title Is an Encouraging Sign for the Industry — Digital contributed half of all ad revenue at Wired magazine in the final three months of 2012, a first for the title and an encouraging sign for an industry …

Steve O'Hear / TechCrunch:

Legimi Wants To Be The ‘Spotify For Ebooks’ With A Business Model That Relies On You Reading Less — Legimi is definitely a startup I'll be watching closely in 2013. Put simply, it aims to be the ‘Spotify for ebooks,’ in which for a monthly subscription, users get access to a potentially infinite library …

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

The Atlantic Will Experiment With Online Pay Models In 2013 — The Atlantic is two things every legacy publishing company would like to be: profitable and more reliant on digital advertising revenues than on print. But while that may have been good enough in 2012, for 2013 the magazine has a new goal …

Discussion: Capital New York, FishbowlNY, Media & Entertainment, @dylanbyers, NetNewsCheck Latest, Politico, Poynter, @rajunarisetti and @keachhagey

Evan Osnos / The New Yorker Blog:

China, the American Press, and the State Department — It's time for the State Department to take up the matter of American reporters in China, and Chinese reporters in America. — The work of the American press in China has become so contentious, and so central to our understanding …

Discussion: China Law & Policy