Mediagazer: Peter Chernin Offers $500M for Hulu (Reuters)

9:10 AM ET, April 8, 2013

Top News:

Newspaper revenue fell 2 pct to $38.6B in 2012 — ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — The newspaper industry's revenue declined at its slowest pace in six years, as publishers turned to new businesses and raised more money from online subscriptions. The industry's total revenue in 2012 fell 2 percent …

Discussion: Washington Post and @rajunarisetti

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:

Deeper data dive finds $5.5 billion in uncounted newspaper industry revenue — Years of negative reports on ad revenue losses could leave the newspaper industry muttering, “I demand a recount.” The Newspaper Association of America has just completed such an exercise and found some solid gains …

Discussion: Media News and Newspaper Association …

David Carr / New York Times:

Roger Ebert's Legacy as a Relentless Empire-Builder — At journalism conferences and online, media strivers talk over and over about becoming their own brand, hoping that some magical combination of tweets, video spots, appearances and, yes, even actual written articles, will help their name come to mean something.

Teehan+Lax:

The making of Medium.com — There is plenty of media in the world already. And no matter what happens to traditional media economics, there's nothing to stop the torrent of information rushing from smartphones, corporations, and new-fangled media startups onto the Internet, available for the world to see.

Hunter Schwarz / BuzzFeed:

A Fox News Reporter Could Be Jailed For Protecting Her Sources, And Nobody Seems To Care — Jana Winter refuses to reveal who leaked information about the Aurora, Colorado shooter. Judith Miller is “surprised and disappointed” at how little attention the case is getting. — Source: foxnews.com

Discussion: Poynter, Mediaite, Fox News, The Daily Caller, Hit & Run and Big News Network.com

Jenna Wortham / New York Times:

Streaming Sites and the Rise of Shared Accounts — LAST Sunday afternoon, some friends and I were hanging out in a local bar, talking about what we'd be doing that evening. It turned out that we all had the same plan: to watch the season premiere of “Game of Thrones.”

Discussion: @palafo, @ericgoldman, Business Insider and Fortune

Joshua Macht / The Atlantic Online:

Running Out of TIME: The Slow, Sad Demise of a Great American Magazine — The weekly was among the first to invest heavily in the Internet. So how come Time.com never figured it out? — I can still remember how jealous I felt. It was the mid-1990s, and I was a reporter at Inc. magazine in Boston.

Discussion: New York Magazine and @codybrown

Reuters:

EU regulators to approve $15.8 billion Liberty, Virgin deal - sources — (Reuters) - John Malone's Liberty Global will get unconditional EU clearance for its $15.8 billion (10 billion pounds) bid for Virgin Media, two people familiar with the matter said on Monday, in a move which pits the U.S. billionaire against rival Rupert Murdoch.

Discussion: TechCrunch

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Why Google Should Rethink Its Approach to Sponsored Content — Native advertising is changing the economics of digital journalism, offering publishers an alternative to the ever-more-devalued display ad. And Google doesn't want any part of it. — In recent weeks, the web giant …

Discussion: FOLIO

Pete Brook / Wired:

Smart Readers Are Too Distracted to Dig Smart Content — Andrew DeVigal knows how to tell a story. For six years he was the Director of Multimedia at the New York Times, developing groundbreaking interactive news packages like the Emmy award-winning A Year At War.

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

BitTorrent Taps A Bigger Role For Books In Its Content Push — Last year, author Tim Ferriss turned to BitTorrent to market his newest book, the Four-Hour Chef, when the biggest bookseller in the U.S., Barnes & Noble, refused to stock the Amazon-published title.

Discussion: Softpedia News

Reuters:

Peter Chernin Offers $500M for Hulu — Former News Corp president Peter Chernin bid around $500 million for Hulu, the online video streaming service he helped create in 2007, according to two sources with knowledge of Hulu's sale process. — The website, jointly controlled by News Corp and Walt Disney Co …

Discussion: Hollywood Reporter, Ars Technica, Radio & Television …, AllThingsD, Electronista, VentureBeat, Home Media Magazine, Los Angeles Times, CNET, The Next Web and Broadcasting & Cable

Nicole Perlroth / NYT Bits:

Fake Twitter Followers Becomes Multimillion-Dollar Business — Far from slowing, the market for fake Twitter followers seems to be taking off. — The fake Twitter follower phenomenon made headlines last summer after Mitt Romney's Twitter following jumped by 100,000 in a matter of days.

Discussion: SocialTimes, The Wall Blog, HotHardware.com News, VentureBeat, @martinsfp and Business Insider