Mediagazer: Oxford students to protest at Assange ‘visit’ (Alexander Rankine/Guardian)

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Amazon's “AutoRip” Service Goes Live, Giving Customers Free MP3s For CDs Purchased On Amazon As Far Back As 1998 (Hands On) — Amazon is today introducing a new service called Amazon AutoRip, which automatically gives customers free MP3 versions of any CDs they've purchased from Amazon since the launch of its Music Store back in 1998.

Discussion: CNET, Pocket-lint, Brave New World and Lifehacker

Glenn Greenwald / Guardian:

Why are Bob Woodward's WH sources - or Woodward himself - not on trial next to Bradley Manning? — The extremist prosecution of Manning, accused of “aiding and abetting al-Qaida”, poses a real threat to US press freedom — There are numerous travesties defining the ongoing prosecution …

Discussion: New York Times, Daily Kos and Pressing Issues

Discussion: The Huffington Post and Guardian

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.

Alexander Rankine / Guardian:

Oxford students to protest at Assange ‘visit’ — A row has erupted on campus over an invitation to Julian Assange to address the Oxford Union via video link — Outraged Oxford students are planning demonstrations following news that Julian Assange, the controversial Wikileaks founder …

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 and Eater National

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

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: NetNewsCheck Latest and AdExchanger

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: The Next Web, PandoDaily, paidContent and Mashable!

Michael Learmonth / AdAge:

Aereo CEO: The Days of the $200 Cable Bundle Are Numbered — At CES, Web TV Service Announces $38M Infusion, Multicity Expansion — The most disruptive technology at CES wasn't launched here at all. But Aereo, the web TV service backed by Barry Diller, did announce some news …

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 …

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 …

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

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 and Softpedia News

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

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

Charlie Warzel / Adweek:

The Biggest New Media Trend Is Analytics Transparency — If we've seen one trend in the past few years across digital media (besides large-scale growth), it's a transparency that is often lacking in the corporate boardroom culture of major tradtional media brands.

Discussion: PandoDaily