Mediagazer: Paragraph Shorts Helps Readers Discover Great Short Stories Enriched With iPad-Friendly Media (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

7:20 AM ET, January 10, 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, AAN and Eater National

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

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:
Censored Newspaper Returns to Publication Amid Struggles

Discussion: Guardian

Maggie Lu Yueyang / Reuters:

Australian pension fund pulls out of News Corp after failure to oust Murdoch — (Reuters) - An Australian pension fund said on Thursday that it would sell down its A$7 million (4.6 million pounds) stake in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), following the failure of proposals for a more independent board at the media empire.

Discussion: Deadline.com, Bloomberg, Sydney Morning Herald, ABC News, Hollywood Reporter and The Australian

Janet Stilson / Adweek:

Why do community news sites, once hailed as the future of journalism, so often flop? — Spelunking equipment, climbing gear and snowshoes are Steve Sutorius' life. That's clear watching him as he peddles outdoor-sports merchandise in his shop, Wildernest, on this 10-mile-long jewel in Puget Sound just off the coast from Seattle.

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

Paragraph Shorts Helps Readers Discover Great Short Stories Enriched With iPad-Friendly Media — Most of you probably have lots of distractions and relatively little free time, so short stories could be a great way to get some fiction into your life — they're more manageable, anyway, than a big doorstopper novel.

Discussion: paidContent and Mashable!

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: GigaOM, Softpedia News, VentureBeat and Marketing Pilgrim

Craig Silverman / Poynter:

Google's Gingras: Journalists need to focus on invention, not transformation — Richard Gingras says that at this moment in journalism, “transformation” is a four letter word. — Gingras, the head of news and social products for Google, spoke to a group of journalism professors …

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

Jason Boog / GalleyCat:

Publishing Projects Raised $15 Million on Kickstarter Last Year — Publishing projects raised $15,311,251 on Kickstarter last year, but only 30 percent of attempted projects succeeded. There were 5,634 publishing projects launched, but only 1,666 of those projects actually got funded.

Discussion: bookforum.com, FishbowlNY, Softpedia News and AppNewser

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.

Mathew Ingram / paidContent:

NYT public editor: Sometimes transparency triumphs over objectivity — Is the status of objectivity as a sacrosanct principle of the journalism industry beginning to weaken? There have been some encouraging signs lately, not the least of which are some recent blog posts …

Discussion: Boing Boing

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

Online radio will start serving ads based on your web browsing — Picture yourself sitting in Cleveland and using the internet to explore places to visit in France. Later, you pull up online radio service Pandora on your web browser to listen to Motown songs and what do you hear?

Discussion: AdExchanger

Paul Sawers / The Next Web:

The Atlantic Wire taps Sencha to launch a new HTML5 iPad Web app fit for the digital era — American magazine The Atlantic has been providing literary and cultural commentary for more than 150 years, but its traditional roots haven't hindered it from evolving into a publication fit for the digital age.

Discussion: Audience Development

David Lieberman / Deadline.com:

Lionsgate Lends A Hand To Samsung's 3D TV Technology: CES — Consumers aren't going to buy many 3D TV sets unless they have more content to watch on them. The independent studio said at the International CES confab in Las Vegas today that it will help the cause by using Samsung's image processing technology …

Discussion: The Wrap

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 …

Discussion: The Huffington Post