Mediagazer: Bill Adair, setting pants ablaze no more (Brendan Nyhan/Columbia Journalism Review)

11:45 AM ET, April 8, 2013

Top News:

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.

Hollywood Reporter:

Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Roger Ebert's Funeral — The anti-gay group says it will protest outside the movie critic's memorial service Monday in Chicago. — Leaders of Kansas' Westboro Baptist Church, notorious for picketing at the funerals of soldiers and gay teenagers …

Discussion: Business Insider, The Huffington Post, Washington Times, DNAinfo.com New York, nbcchicago.com, Guardian, CNET, The Daily Caller, Mashable, The Raw Story and Softpedia News

Associated Press:

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: Newspaper Association …, Guardian, European Journalism Centre and PandoDaily

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, Fortune and Business Insider

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

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: Mediaite, Fox News, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review, Politico and The Daily Caller

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.

William Turvill / Press Gazette:

Guido Fawkes closes blog for day following death of Margaret Thatcher — The Guido Fawkes blog has closed for the day as a mark of respect to former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. — The blog, www.order-order.com, announced the decision on Twitter shortly after Baroness Thatcher's death was declared.

Discussion: TVNewser, Gawker, The New Yorker Blog and Spectator

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

Andrew Rice / New York Magazine:

Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret? — Jonah Peretti's viral-content machine purports to have solved the problems of both journalism and advertising at once, all with the help of a simple algorithm. — Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the website BuzzFeed—though this is increasingly unlikely, as it's currently enjoying a viral moment.

Discussion: New York Times, @jeffjohnroberts and @jayrosen_nyu

Brendan Nyhan / Columbia Journalism Review:

Bill Adair, setting pants ablaze no more — The PolitiFact founder on his move to academia and the state of the factchecking movement — The Tampa Bay Times announced last week that Bill Adair, the newspaper's Washington bureau chief and the founder and editor of the award-winning …

Discussion: Poynter