Mediagazer: BBC suspends Sri Lankan broadcasts (Roy Greenslade/Guardian)

5:15 AM ET, March 27, 2013

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Hashtags considered #harmful — The noble hashtag is cursed by a problem Yogi Berra could appreciate: Too many people use it, so no one goes there. — Presumably, most Twitter users use hashtags intending to add their tweet to a river of similar information and to expose their own thoughts to a wider, interested audience.

Discussion: @jbenton, @mykola, @marksluckie, @aschweig, @pwthornton, @chanders, @caseymcdermott, @smalera, @digiphile, @michaelroston, @kev097, @jaredbkeller and NetNewsCheck Latest

Mackenzie Weinger / Politico:

USA Today announces ‘two big changes’ — USA Today is making “big changes” by putting the cover story in the newspaper “on hiatus” and keeping story jumps to a “bare minimum, if at all,” editor in chief Dave Callaway announced to staffers in a memo on Tuesday.

Discussion: @andreastonez and @mathewi

Nellie Andreeva / Deadline.com:

Anderson Cooper Approached For Matt Lauer's ‘Today’ Job — Embattled Today anchor Matt Lauer, already the focus of blistering criticism for the ouster of co-anchor Ann Curry and the ratings slide at NBC's morning show, has long been rumored to be on the chopping block …

Discussion: Inside TV and New York Magazine

Nicholas Carlson / Business Insider:

Here's Why Marissa Mayer Is About To Spend ~$200 Million On A YouTube Wannabe — Last week, Amir Efrati and Sam Shechner of the WSJ reported that Yahoo is close to acquiring a controlling stake in the YouTube-of-Europe, Dailymotion, at a valuation somewhere around $300 million.

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Media start-up hatched at Columbia, ‘The Big Roundtable,’ looks for a new long-form business model — Anyone who has experience writing for magazines can tell you that pitches tend to be approved or rejected based on the whim of any number of editors on the masthead.

Discussion: Kickstarter

Nellie Andreeva / Deadline.com:

It's Official: CBS Acquires Half Of TV Guide, Partners With Lionsgate — CBS Corp. just announced that it is acquiring 50% of of TV Guide, the company that encompasses TVGN (formerly TV Guide Network) and TVGuide.com. The deal adds a basic cable network to its TV portfolio …

Discussion: Variety, VentureBeat, New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Benzinga and Broadcasting & Cable

Eduardo Porter / New York Times:

In a Copyright Ruling, the Legacy of the Betamax — Before Napster and LimeWire, before Megauploads and the Pirate Bay, media companies' epic struggle against copying, piracy and generally losing control over their creations can be traced to a legal fight more than 30 years ago over a device …

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:

BBC suspends Sri Lankan broadcasts — The BBC's World Service has suspended all its broadcasts on the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) because of what its calls “continued interruption and interference” to the corporation's Tamil programming. — World Service director Peter Horrocks said …

Discussion: Committee to Protect …

Jenna Wortham / NYT Bits:

Instagram and the New Era of Paparazzi — Earlier this week, a rare and new photo of the pop star Beyoncé and her daughter, Blue Ivy, quickly spread around the Internet, on various celebrity and gossip sites. — There was nothing particularly unusual about the photo itself …

Discussion: People.com

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

Flipboard 2.0 aims to get people curating their own digital magazines — Having attracted 50m users so far, can news app's Pinterest-like new features make it even more mainstream? — When it first launched in July 2010, Flipboard was an interesting new spin on news aggregation …

Discussion: Forbes, TIME, Wired, GigaOM, The Next Web, TechCrunch and ParisLemon

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

CBS asks for tax break for Super Bowl week coverage — CBS broadcast its show “The Talk” from New Orleans in the week leading up to Super Bowl and is asking for a $700,000 tax credit, Tyler Bridges reports. “The Motion Picture Investor Tax Credit statute specifically excludes televised news …

Discussion: The Lens

Jack Shafer:

Is this story less than the Summly of its parts? — Like children at bedtime, news consumers love nothing more than to be told the same story again and again. Oh sure, they need the names of the principals to change, the location to vary, and the supporting cast of characters to shift.

Discussion: philosophically and UPROXX