Mediagazer: American News Consumers Have Gained the World but Lost Their Backyards (Conor Friedersdorf/The Atlantic Online)

8:50 AM ET, March 22, 2013

Top News:

Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic Online:

American News Consumers Have Gained the World but Lost Their Backyards — The Internet affords cheap, easy access to priceless information. But local news coverage is a casualty of its rise. — Is the American news media in better shape than ever before?

Discussion: Street Fight and Fortune

Brooks Boliek / Politico:

Sources: Julius Genachowski to step down from top FCC post — Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is expected to announce on Friday that he will leave the commission, high-ranking sources tell POLITICO. — His decision would bring to an end a tumultuous term …

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, GigaOM, USA Today, VatorNews and VentureBeat

Phillip Smith / MediaShift Idea Lab:

Ranking the Slowest-Loading News Sites and How They Can Speed Up — I present your winner (or loser?) for slowest loading feature article, the Chicago Tribune, at 16.68 seconds, almost 6 megabytes of data, and with more than 300 requests for resources to display the page in question.

Discussion: Poynter

Reuters:

HBO CEO mulls teaming with broadband partners for HBO GO — (Reuters) - HBO could widen access to its HBO GO online streaming service by teaming up with broadband Internet providers for customers who do not subscribe to a cable TV service, according to HBO's Chief Executive Richard Plepler.

Discussion: VentureBeat, Deadline.com, Business Insider, Consumerist, Home Media Magazine, Fast Company, Engadget, BGR and ParisLemon

Brian Merchant / Motherboard:

For Over a Year, BP Has Worked Hard to ‘Clean Up’ Its Wikipedia Pages — A BP oil platform, from its Wikipedia page. — According to a statistic I just submitted for review on Wikipedia, Wikipedia provides the average American with 88% of their knowledge.

Discussion: The Bulletin, Betabeat and CNET

Addy Dugdale / Fast Company:

BBC Commissions Six Original Dramas For Its iPlayer Streaming Service — Once it was all about the online catch-up. Now the Beeb's terrestrial channels will be catching up with online. — Promising writers of TV scripts just got a new conduit for their work.

Discussion: BBC, The Independent, Digital Spy, Gizmodo UK, The Verge and Pocket-lint

David Cameron / The Review Review:

The New Yorker Rejects Itself: A Quasi-Scientific Analysis of Slush Piles — It began as the kind of logical argument that seems airtight to anyone who has never studied logic. If the New Yorker is the most desirable literary magazine in the world, and if the New Yorker can have any short story …

Discussion: Columbia Journalism Review

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

Filing Says Glenn Beck's Network TheBlaze Is Raising $40M — TheBlaze, a set of online ventures run by conservative pundit Glenn Beck, is raising $40 million in new funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. — The filing states that the company has raised $1.5 million so far.

Economist:

Binding the press: A rotten deal — THE regulation of the British press is an area where this newspaper usually treads lightly. It is not just that The Economist has an interest in opposing irksome rules—albeit a less obvious one than the tabloids, many though not all of them owned by Rupert Murdoch …

Discussion: Guardian and Spectator

Wall Street Journal:

Web Fan Base Tips Scale To Fallon — Jimmy Fallon's recent two-minute skit “Evolution of Mom Dancing,” featuring the late-night TV comic and Michelle Obama performing a series of funny dance moves, racked up more than 15 million views on YouTube. That is about five times the average nightly audience …

Discussion: @dfsaavedra and Bloomberg

Michael Cieply / New York Times:

Global Ticket Sales for Movies Rise 6% — LOS ANGELES — Movie ticket sales around the world rose 6 percent last year, to $34.7 billion from $32.6 billion in 2011, as China became the world's second-biggest market for theatrical films after the United States, according to statistics released …

Discussion: Los Angeles Times

Matthew Weaver / Guardian:

How Brown Moses exposed Syrian arms trafficking from his front room — Leicester-based blogger's monitoring of weapons used in conflict has been taken up by media and human rights groups — Eliot Higgins has no need for a flak jacket, nor does he carry himself with the bravado of a war reporter.