Mediagazer: Digital magazine sales are still tiny overall, but titles like Cosmo see big growth (Laura Hazard Owen/paidContent)

11:15 AM ET, February 7, 2013

Top News:

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

News Corp. Admits 'World's Worst-Kept Secret': It's Planning ESPN Clone — Quarter after quarter, analysts have asked News Corp. executives about report that the media conglomerate intended to start its own national sports network to compete with ESPN, and the executives have duly played it coy.

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

News Corp. says its split-up is on track — The separation of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. into two separate publicly traded companies is on track to be completed by the end of the current fiscal year, executives said today. — On a quarterly earnings call with Wall Street analysts …

Discussion: Poynter, NetNewsCheck Latest, Media Week and New York Magazine

Andrew Pugh / Press Gazette:
Phone-hacking scandal: News Corp costs rise to $360m

Discussion: Management Today, The Week UK, The Independent and Guardian

Amy Chozick / Media Decoder:
News Corp. Posts Gain on Strength of Cable Channels

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable, AdAge, Home Media Magazine and The Wrap

Colin Kruger / Sydney Morning Herald:
News Corp shares fall as publishing struggles

Discussion: ninemsn, Crikey and Bloomberg

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

New York Times posts ho-hum numbers, slow digital growth — The New York Times Company posted earnings on Thursday morning that show the company's ongoing struggle to create significant growth in its digital operations. While circulation revenues continue to rise, all forms of advertising …

Discussion: The New York Times Company, Poynter and CNET

Robin Wauters / The Next Web:

The New York Times now boasts 668,000 paying digital subscribers, Q4 revenue rises to $575.8m — The New York Times Company today reported strong earnings for the fourth quarter of and full year 2012. — The publisher's total revenues increased 5.2 percent to $575.8 million from $547.4 million in Q4 2011 …

Discussion: Poynter, The Wrap, Bloomberg, @edmundlee and New York Times

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Digital magazine sales doubled in second half of 2012, as newsstand sales dropped — The number of U.S. consumer magazines sold on tablet devices and other mobile platforms in the second half of 2012 more than doubled from the same period a year earlier, according to the latest figures released today …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Digital magazine sales are still tiny overall, but titles like Cosmo see big growth — Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition, but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation: That's the latest news from the Alliance for Audited Media …

Discussion: Alliance for Audited Media

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Circulation and ad revenue down at McClatchy — McClatchy's circulation revenues were down in the fourth quarter of 2012, the company said in an earnings report released Thursday morning. Circulation revenue fell 1.9 percent, and advertising revenue was down 6 percent.

Discussion: Sacramento Bee and PR Newswire

Mathew Ingram / paidContent:

Business Insider vs. Digiday: One man's aggregation is another man's traffic hijacking — Plagiarism. Copyright infringement. Traffic hijacking. These are all terms publishers like to use when someone excerpts their content without permission, whether it's Google News or The Huffington Post.

Discussion: Poynter, PandoDaily and Digiday, Thanks:@mathewi

Henry Blodget / Business Insider: Thank You For Aggregating Us!

Ryan McCarthy / MediaFile:

Another blog post that won't make any money — It's been a strange and daunting decade for print journalism — it's now an even stranger time for web journalism. We've become accustomed to reading headlines like BuzzFeed's recent $19 million fund raising, followed by news of buyouts for veterans at the New York Times.

Discussion: @niemanlab, @wfrick, @mathewi and @jeffjarvis, Thanks:@mccarthyryanj

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Copy editors ‘have been sacrificed more than any other newsroom category’ — The decline of newspapers has fallen especially hard on copy editors, Natascia Lypny writes. … The figures are actually worse if you go back another few years: ASNE's annual survey of newsrooms, released last April …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and The Newspaper Guild

Christine Haughney / Media Decoder:

Magazines React to Post Office Cutbacks: ‘The Friday Evening Post’? — Updated The magazine industry, which has already been hurt by advertising declines and the loss of readers, spent Wednesday afternoon reeling from the latest news that they no longer would be able to get magazines delivered on Saturdays.

Discussion: Forbes, magazine.org, Democrat And Chronicle, Home Media Magazine, New Yorker, BtoB Magazine, AdAge, Poynter and Politico

Neal Ungerleider / Fast Company:

How Jihadists Use Twitter, And Soon Even Instagram — A new research paper tracks how and why Al Qaeda-linked terrorist organizations and their sympathizers use social media. — Violent jihadists prefer foreign-language online web forums for their online social networking …

Discussion: The FJP

Glenn Greenwald / Guardian:

US media yet again conceals newsworthy government secrets — The collective self-censorship over a US drone base in Saudi Arabia is but the latest act of government-subservient ‘journalism’ — The US media, over the last decade (at least), has repeatedly acted to conceal newsworthy information …

Discussion: New York Times, NBCNews.com, Politico, Daily Download, Erik Wemple and BBC

Andrew Pugh / Press Gazette:

Sky News Arabia Twitter accounts hacked by ‘Syrian Electronic Army’ — One of Sky News Arabia's Twitter accounts — Sky News Arabia's Twitter and Facebook accounts were targeted by hackers last night, the broadcaster has revealed. — A group calling itself the “Syrian Electronic Army” …

Discussion: Softpedia News