Mediagazer: How does BuzzFeed intend to crack a $1B valuation? By embracing journalism's past (Hamish McKenzie/PandoDaily)

6:40 PM ET, January 9, 2013

Top News:

Ken Layne / The Awl:

SF Weekly, Seattle Weekly Latest Victims Of Alt-Weekly Newspaper Industry — Staffers and free-lancers at two West Coast alt-weeklies are nervously awaiting whatever unpleasant news comes with the sale of those papers to local conglomerates. Like all of the once-mighty urban weekly papers …

Discussion: The Snitch, NetNewsCheck Latest, LA Observed, Eater National and AAN

Jim Romenesko:
Village Voice Media sells SF Weekly and Seattle Weekly to Black Press properties

Discussion: SF Appeal, The Daily Weekly, Slog and The Huffington Post

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Business Insider Traffic Revealed — A couple of years ago, I revealed a lot of internal information about Business Insider—the sort of information that most companies paranoically guard for a litany of stated reasons. — I said that, if nothing horrible happened, I might one day do the same thing again.

Discussion: PandoDaily

Charlie Warzel / Adweek: The Biggest New Media Trend Is Analytics Transparency

Guardian:

Bradley Manning trial delayed until June after sentence reduction granted — Judge reschedules former US soldier's trial to give more time for review of classified information related to WikiLeaks case — A military judge has pushed back the trial of Bradley Manning …

Glenn Greenwald / Guardian:
Even a military judge recognizes what many progressives denied: Bradley Manning was mistreated

Discussion: @freedomofpress, The Huffington Post, New York Times and New York Magazine

China Real Time Report:

Face-Off in a Beijing Newsroom: An Insider's Account … Fallout from a high-profile conflict over censorship between Chinese propaganda officials and journalists at Southern Weekly, one of China's most daring newspapers, has spread to sister newspaper Beijing News, which lost a dramatic stand-off …

New York Times:
Chinese Officials Pledge to Loosen Controls Over Embattled Newspaper

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog, The Daily Beast and Prof Chris Daly's Blog

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke / The New York Observer:

Wired EIC Scott Dadich Names New Editorial Team — Wired's new EIC Scott Dadich is settling into the magazine's San Francisco office, where he moved over the holidays, and his new role on the masthead. And as part of the transition, he has named a new editorial team.

Cory Bergman / Inside:

Why Twitter's army of ‘Mechanical Turks’ will not conquer breaking news — Twitter revealed this week that it uses Mechanical Turk — a croudsourced pool of people — as an innovative way to help identify and classify search queries as soon as they're trending.

Discussion: Digiday, GigaOM and Softpedia News

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

At Huffington Post, everything old is new again: All reporters get blogs — Once upon a time, The Huffington Post was a left-wing, Drudge-like aggregator with a stable of celebrity columns that eventually metastasized into a sort-of group-blog empire for unpaid “experts” and “citizen journalists.”

Andrew Pugh / Press Gazette:

Lance Armstrong to give ‘no-holds-barred’ interview with Oprah Winfrey amid confession claims — Lance Armstrong, the disgraced US cyclist stripped of his seven Tour de France titles last year, will breaks his silence on the doping allegations that destroyed his career in a “no-holds-barred” interview with chat show host Oprah Winfrey.

Discussion: Fast Company, Huffington Post UK, The Week, ABCNEWS, Guardian, Telegraph, Quartz, Sky News, Financial Times, New York Magazine and Softpedia News

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:

News International payout to Cherie Blair and 130 others for phone hacking — James Nesbitt and Tamzin Outhwaite among those who have settled at a cost to the company expected to run into millions — News International has agreed to settle 130 civil damages claims for News of the World phone hacking …

Hamish McKenzie / PandoDaily:

How does BuzzFeed intend to crack a $1B valuation? By embracing journalism's past — It was just over a year ago that BuzzFeed hired editor-in-chief Ben Smith away from Politico to help build the cat-happy publication into a major media company. In the intervening months …

Tim Molloy / The Wrap:

NBC Chief Says Strategy Worked, Talks Newtown Shootings, Notes Aging CW Audience — A year to the day after he had to announce that his network had had “a really bad fall,” NBC entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt returned to the Television Critics Association winter press tour Sunday to talk …

David Bauder / Associated Press: NBC execs say it's not a 'shoot-'em-up' network

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Self-publishing site Lulu drops DRM on ebooks, sort of — Self-publishing site Lulu will stop offering DRM as an option on ebooks created through its site — though ebooks created on Lulu and sold through other retailers, like Amazon, will still be subject to DRM.

Discussion: Good E-Reader and Lulu Blog

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

A Tale From Gore's Quest for Current TV — I left one out. — Last week, in an article detailing Al Gore's negotiations with cable and satellite carriers about the sale of his cable channel Current TV, I wrote, “Mr. Gore, who lost his last big legal argument — the one in 2000 — succeeded.”

Discussion: mediabistro.com and Stories I'd like to see