Mediagazer: Filing Says Glenn Beck's Network TheBlaze Is Raising $40M (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

9:55 AM ET, March 22, 2013

Top News:

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

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

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 and eMedia Vitals

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.

Jemima Kiss / Guardian:

Vevo boss says intelligent, data-centric services could revive music industry — International senior vice-president Nic Jones says music service users want opportunity to be curated by more than algorithms — Intelligent, data-centric services could herald the rebirth of the music industry …

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, lustigletter.blogspot.co.uk and Spectator

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: AllThingsD, Deadline.com, VentureBeat, Business Insider, 9to5Mac, Mashable!, Consumerist, Home Media Magazine, Fast Company, Engadget, BGR, ParisLemon and The Chutry Experiment

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Columbia chose an eminent outsider over a popular internal choice to lead its journalism school — When Columbia University President Lee Bollinger appointed Steve Coll dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism earlier this week, he brought in one of the world's most eminent journalists …

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

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: Los Angeles Times, Corporate Intelligence, @dfsaavedra and Bloomberg

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, Pocket-lint and Digital TV Europe

Reuters:

Analysis: Big Tech tests the waters of the music stream — (Reuters) - Technology giants Apple, Google and Amazon are furiously maneuvering for position in the online music business and looking at ways to make streaming profitable, despite the fact that pioneer Pandora has never made a profit.