Mediagazer: The Valley Needs A Valleywag — Or Something (Alexia Tsotsis/TechCrunch)

5:00 PM ET, February 8, 2013

Top News:

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Tim Marches On: AOL Turns in Solid Q4 Earnings, With First Year-Over-Year Growth in Eight Years — AOL said it earned 41 cents a share, or $35.7 million in net income, in the fourth quarter, which was right on target with what Wall Street analysts had expected.

Discussion: Business Insider, CNET, Street Fight, AdAge, VentureBeat, Forbes, 24/7 Wall St., San Francisco Chronicle, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, @jeffjohnroberts and FishbowlNY

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

AOL Earnings: Revenue Turns Positive, But Patch Disappoints. Bad Omen For Hyperlocal? — Here's the good news: AOL managed to boost its total revenues on a year-over-year basis in the fourth quarter of 2012, the first time in eight years that's happened. And it wasn't a close-run thing, either.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and AdExchanger

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:
LOL no more: it's time to take AOL seriously as shares soar again

Discussion: The Atlantic Online and Marketing Land

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch: AOL's Hyperlocal Effort Patch Misses $40M-50M Sales Target, Partly Because Of Sandy …

Bernard Lunn / Emergent Business Networks:
Hyperlocal Slough of Despond. After EveryBlock, Hipster & Patch Will Authentically Local Create The Sustainable Model?

Discussion: Street Fight and Nieman Journalism Lab

Brian Stelter / Media Decoder:

A Fish, Er, Storm Named Nemo — “We're ready for Nemo,” the Twitter account for the New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg wrote on Thursday before listing all the tools at the city's disposal for the blizzard that is expected to form on Friday. — Wait — Nemo?

Caity Weaver / Gawker:

Snow Panic Has Driven Weather.com Completely Insane — You know how sometimes the best way to deal with a ranting, screaming maniac is just to leave him alone until he exhausts himself? It's time for us to do that with Weather.com. — Yesterday afternoon, The Weather Channel whipped itself …

Discussion: AccuWeather.com, Quartz, TVNewser, @mathewi, New York Magazine, www.wnyc.org and Gothamist

Amir Efrati / Wall Street Journal:

Pirated Movies Crop Up Again on YouTube — Google Inc.'s YouTube is facing the return of a pirated-content problem. — Hundreds of full-length feature films including blockbusters from Walt Disney Co. and Sony Corp.'s Columbia and Tristar studios have been illegally uploaded to the world's …

Discussion: SocialTimes, Daily Dot, NetNewsCheck Latest and Gizmodo

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Macmillan settles with DOJ, leaving Apple last defendant standing in ebook pricing case — Macmillan, the last remaining publisher holdout in the Department of Justice's ebook pricing antitrust lawsuit against five publishers and Apple, has decided to settle about ten months after the lawsuit was originally filed.

Discussion: Tor.com Frontpage Partial, Media Decoder, Media & Entertainment, The United States Department …, The Wrap, Publishers Lunch, CNET, Reuters, PublishersWeekly.com, AllThingsD, Hillicon Valley, The Week, GalleyCat, Digital Book World and Electronista

Nick Collins / Telegraph:

BBC to launch programmes online first — BBC television programmes are to be broadcast online before reaching TV screens under a new trial as the corporation attempts to rival web services like Netflix. — BBC iPlayer is growing in popularity and last month announced its highest ever number …

Discussion: BBC, The Next Web, The Verge, Electronista and Engadget

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:

Aereo Amps Up Marketing Efforts Before Expanding To New Cities, Hires Former Apple Exec As CCO — Aereo has been making headlines lately, not only for expanding its streaming cloud DVR service to 22 new markets in the coming months, but for being in active litigation with some of the nation's biggest …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Broadcasting & Cable

Filipe Alves / Reuters:

Google must extend payments across Europe for use of content — (Reuters) - Google Inc must extend its offer made last week to pay French publishers for use of their content to all media companies across Europe, the head of the European Publishers Council said on Thursday.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Forbes, Plagiarism Today, Engadget, NetNewsCheck Latest and bizjournals

Jennifer Van Grove / CNET:

LinkedIn eyes future as professional publishing hub — The company seems set on making business content, not social networking, the focus of the site. — LinkedIn spent much of 2012 transforming itself into a place where workers could stay and play awhile — a strategy that paid off handsomely.

Discussion: Wired, Beyond Search, SocialTimes, Adweek, NetNewsCheck Latest, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and VentureBeat

Michael Neibauer / Washington Business Journal:

Washington Post polling users on possible paywall packages — The Washington Post Co. is taking a step toward paid Web content, surveying its users on potential packages. — The email survey, we're told by one recipient, includes standard questions about how often readers visit washingtonpost.com …

Discussion: Poynter

Mike Isaac / AllThingsD:

Former Hulu CTO and Kleiner Perkins Partner Eric Feng Heads to Flipboard — Eric Feng, a mainstay in digital media properties such as Hulu, Airtime and Erly, announced on Friday he will join the executive team of Flipboard, the social magazine app made popular on smartphones and tablets.

Discussion: paidContent and TechCrunch