Mediagazer: Smart Readers Are Too Distracted to Dig Smart Content (Pete Brook/Wired)

6:30 PM ET, April 7, 2013

Top News:

Dominic Patten / Deadline.com:

CNN's ‘Crossfire’ Back In June; Cancelled In 2005 — After the failed week long experiment of (Get To) The Point and the unsteady The Lead With Jake Tapper, Jeff Zucker is looking for a blast from the past to revive CNN. The ratings-struggling cable new network is bringing back Crossfire in June, network insiders tell me.

Discussion: Inside Cable News, @brianstelter, @ncroal, All Things CNN and The Huffington Post

Alex Weprin / TVNewser:

CNN Looking To Revive ‘Crossfire’ — CNN is looking to bring back “Crossfire,” TVNewser hears. The long-running political debate show was canceled in 2005. — It isn't entirely clear what time the program would air, though we hear it would likely be a 30-minute format.

Discussion: Politico and The Huffington Post

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.

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: @codybrown

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.

Reuters:

Exclusive: Former News Corp President Chernin bids $500 million for Hulu — (Reuters) - 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.

Discussion: AllThingsD, Radio & Television …, AllThingsD, Electronista, VentureBeat, Home Media Magazine, CNET, Variety, The Verge, Deadline.com, Engadget 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: VentureBeat, @martinsfp and Business Insider

Eriq Gardner / Hollywood Reporter:

Dish Network's Charlie Ergen Is the Most Hated Man in Hollywood — His company has been labeled the “worst place to work in America,” he's being sued by all four networks, and his ad-skipping Hopper could decimate TV industry economics as THR examines the troubling potential outcome of the entertainment business' ugliest fight.

Wikimedia France:

French homeland intelligence threatens a volunteer sysop to delete a Wikipedia Article — Wikimedia France strongly condemns pressure on Wikipedia sysop by French homeland intelligence agency (DCRI) — In early March, the DCRI (Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur) …

Discussion: ZDNet and Geekosystem

Rezwan / Slate:

Bloggers in Bangladesh Face Threats Online and Off — Bangladeshi bloggers form a human chain to protest the detention of three bloggers. — This post combines content from two recent posts on Global Voices Advocacy. — With political protests raging in the capital city of Dhaka …

Discussion: Gawker and Al Jazeera English

Romain Dillet / TechCrunch:

Meet Penguin Random House, The World's Largest Book Publisher That Will Counter Amazon — After the U.S. cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin.

Discussion: Forbes and Guardian

Jeremy Greenfield / Digital Book World:

Indie Bookstore Sales of Kobo Ebooks Dwarf Google; Still Small — The Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. has sold about 80 e-readers, three tablets and few hundred ebooks with Kobo so far. — Just six months after forging a partnership with the American Booksellers Association (ABA) …

Discussion: Forbes