Mediagazer: Web Fan Base Tips Scale To Fallon (Wall Street Journal)

4:20 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: 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, VentureBeat and VatorNews

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: Deadline.com, Engadget, Home Media Magazine, Consumerist, Fast Company, BGR and ParisLemon

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

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

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

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.

Robert X. Cringely / InfoWorld:

Here lies Web journalism, dead at the hand of the almighty advertiser — Don't know if you've noticed, but there's a hullabaloo over online ads masquerading as editorial on the Web these days. I'm here to tell you that the situation is actually much worse than you might think.

Discussion: Kirk LaPointe's …, Thanks:@steverubel

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Small Business Web Ad Dollars: Still Way Too Small — Hey, Google! And Yahoo, and Yelp, and Twitter and Facebook and every other Web company that says it wants to sell ads to mom-and-pop shops: Try harder. — So says Boston Consulting Group, out with a new report that shows only 3 percent of small-business ad dollars going online.

Greg Mitchell / The Nation:

Margaret Sullivan, an Ombud Who Cares — This article appeared in the April 8, 2013 edition of The Nation. — The first Times public editor, Daniel Okrent, raised some tough issues, such as his criticism of executive editor Bill Keller for failing to fully come to grips with the paper's misconduct in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, @froomkin, @jayrosen_nyu, @ggreenwald and @nickfoxnyt

The Huffington Post:

Pope Personally Calls To Cancel His Newspaper Subscription In Argentina — Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was elected the 266th pope of the Catholic Church last week and took on the name Francis. Like any other person moving to a new city (in his case - The Vatican) …

Discussion: Catholic News Agency

Emily Bell / Guardian:

The press regulation charter is illiterate about the internet — The Leveson-inspired draft bill deals with the past, not the future, of the press in failing to address the myriad ways we now receive ‘news’ — If Maria Miller, the culture secretary, has sat in as many conferences on the …