Mediagazer: Tim Armstrong Defends Aol's Content Business, Announces New Ad Tool For Publishers (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)

5:20 PM ET, April 9, 2013

Top News:

How did Mother Jones obtain McConnell tape? — Mitch McConnell's political operation today grew in the estimation of the Erik Wemple Blog, thanks to Mother Jones magazine. The lefty outlet scored a secret audio recording of a Feb. 2 strategy session by the team seeking to reelect McConnell …

Discussion: The Wrap, Mother Jones, The Fix, Post Politics, CNN, Yahoo! News, @jackshafer and Mother Jones

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:
Mother Jones' David Corn Lands Another Secret Tape Scoop

Discussion: The Week and Business Insider

Dylan Byers / Politico:
McConnell campaign taps FBI to investigate Mother Jones tape

The Huffington Post:
Mother Jones Responds To FBI Investigation Into Article

Discussion: Los Angeles Times and Mother Jones

Felix Salmon:

The disruptive potential of native advertising — Andrew Rice delivers 6,000 words on BuzzFeed in the latest NY Mag, which means he has the space to tell a number of different stories. The one I'm interested in is the way that BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wants native advertising to disrupt banner advertising.

Discussion: paidContent, @jeffjarvis, Kirk LaPointe's …, bookforum.com, Gawker and New York Magazine

Jim Romenesko:

Pamela Paul is named New York Times Book Review editor — Sam Tanenhaus is stepping down as New York Times Book Review editor to become writer at large. Children's book editor Pamela Paul replaces him. “Her versatility as an editor and writer has strengthened the Book Review and many other sections …

Discussion: The Huffington Post, The New York Observer and PublishersWeekly.com

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:

Fox's threat to go cable-only won't mean much to most viewers — News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey may take “The Simpsons” to cable. (Chase Carey / Bloomberg; “The Simpsons” / Fox) — News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey made big headlines Monday for suggesting …

Discussion: Forbes

Greg Sandoval / The Verge:
Nuclear option: would Fox really leave the free airwaves to undercut Aereo?

Discussion: VatorNews and Business Insider

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Confirmed: Elsevier Has Bought Mendeley For $69M-$100M To Expand Its Open, Social Education Data Efforts — Educational publisher Elsevier is diving deeper into the world of open and social educational data: it has bought Mendeley, the London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics …

Discussion: Financial Times, paidContent, Elsevier Connect, Joho the Blog, Guardian, Businesses for sale, VentureVillage, ZDNet, The Drum, EdSurge and Bloomberg

Mathew Ingram / paidContent: The Empire acquires the rebel alliance: Mendeley users revolt against Elsevier takeover

Margalit Fox / New York Times:

McCandlish Phillips, Longtime Times Reporter With Flair, Dies at 85 — McCandlish Phillips, a reporter considered one of the finest stylists on The New York Times, who wrote one of the most famous articles in the newspaper's history — exposing the Orthodox Jewish background …

Discussion: The Wrap and Christianity Today

David Streitfeld / New York Times:

CourseSmart E-Textbooks Track Students' Progress for Teachers — SAN ANTONIO — Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks. — They know when students are skipping pages …

Discussion: Gawker, Betabeat and Ars Technica

Kira Witkin / Editors Weblog:

Author-specific paywalls let publications cash in on journalists' personal brands — News is no longer anonymous — and readers don't want it to be. In an era where a Google search can instantly connect you to hundreds of articles on the same topic, all reeling off the same facts …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab

Sean Ludwig / VentureBeat:

Doubling its U.S. member base in 2 years, Pandora hits 200M registered users — Streaming radio service Pandora has crossed the 200-million-registered-user mark, a major milestone for the company coming just a month after CEO Joe Kennedy resigned. — Pandora's impressive reach stems …

Discussion: PR Newswire, Radio & Television …, Pocket-lint, AllAccess.com, MarketWatch, The Next Web, WebProNews, TechCrunch and RouteNote Blog

Parmy Olson / Forbes:

This Simple App Could Put E-Books On Millions Of Phones In The Third World — It sounds counterintuitive, but in certain developing nations it's easier to get hold of a cell phone than a good book. — More than one in three adults cannot read in sub-Saharan Africa, yet almost every home …

Discussion: VentureBeat, paidContent and BWW Books Stories

Ted Greenwald / Adweek:

How Wired Magazine Changed the Way We Talk About Technology — Imagine a time before smartphones. Before laptops. Before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even the mighty Google. A world without Web browsers, when the Internet belonged to universities and going online meant logging onto a local electronic bulletin board.

Thanks:@max8378

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Big Media Loves Promoted Trends, Twitter's Big-Dollar Digital Billboards — Twitter has been building up its ad business for three years, but early on it figured out that it had a hit with “Promoted Trends.” That's the ad unit that lets a brand occupy the top spot on Twitter's “Trends” …

Discussion: Betabeat

Alastair Reid / @AlastairReid3:

AOP census predicts 15% rise in digital revenue this year — Research by the Association of Online Publishers reveals optimism in sector but diversification in revenue streams — Copyright: Image by Images_of_Money on Flickr. Some rights reserved — Digital revenue growth among online publishers …

Discussion: Association …, NetNewsCheck Latest, Media Week, The Drum and Warc News

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Boxee rebrands new device as Cloud DVR, tones down cord cutting rhetoric — Okay, I didn't see this coming: Boxee has rebranded its new consumer electronics device just five months after it first became available. The $100 device, which combines live TV and cloud DVR functionality with apps like Netflix …