Mediagazer: Weak Paramount slate contributes to Viacom's 18% drop in profit (Meg James/Los Angeles Times)

3:50 PM ET, May 1, 2013

Top News:

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Time Inc. Revenues, Subscription Dollars Down — Later this year Time Warner is supposed to jettison Time Inc., its iconic publishing arm. Today's earnings results illustrate why. And they also make it tough to imagine Time Inc.'s appeal to public investors.

Discussion: New York Times, Radio & Television … and FishbowlNY

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:
Time Warner CEO downplays idea of offering HBO Go as stand-alone

Discussion: AllThingsD

Robinson Meyer / The Atlantic Online:

The Company That's Buying Up All the Key Pieces of the Online News Ecosystem — Betaworks has its tentacles in nearly every part of how stories are made, read, and measured. — In the past couple years, an ecology of sorts has come into being among online news sites.

Discussion: Adweek, @lexilewtan, @axb21, @mededitor, @stilgherrian, @richgor, @berkowitzrtrs and Kirk LaPointe's …

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Former Times-Picayune editors will lead Baton Rouge Advocate, which has a new owner — Former New Orleans Times-Picayune managing editors Dan Shea and Peter Kovacs will serve as General Manager and Editor, respectively, of the Baton Rouge Advocate, which announced it had been purchased …

Discussion: WWL-TV, Blog of New Orleans, Gambit, Columbia Journalism Review and WWL

The Advocate: Georges buys The Advocate

Mathew Ingram / paidContent:

Newspapers need to stop lying to themselves — and to advertisers — about their circulation — A trade group says that newspapers like the New York Times have seen large increases in circulation, but that's partly because they are allowed to count their readers multiple times. The industry needs to do better.

Discussion: LA Biz Observed, @jackshafer, @jackshafer, @stevebuttry, Guardian, New York Times, The Dish, FishbowlNY, Gannett Blog and Bloomberg

Dan Kennedy / Media Nation:
In latest circulation numbers, the difference is digital

Discussion: The Next Web and Forbes

Justin Ellis / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Every page is your homepage: Reuters, untied to print metaphor, builds a modern river of news — Reuters, as a wire service, has the concept of a minute-by-minute stream of news deep in its DNA. So it's natural that its digital presence would echo that — a flowing river of information …

Brian Fung / The Atlantic Online:

Retwact: A Tool for Fixing Twitter's Misinformation Problem — Can an enterprising developer striking out on his own solve one of the social network's biggest flaws? — Even worse than the pornbots and trolls, one of Twitter's enduring drawbacks is that there's no reliable way to issue corrections with the service.

Discussion: eMedia Vitals and The Next Web

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke / The New York Observer:

Twitter Wants To Get More Journalists On Twitter — Although many journalists are on Twitter and use the social network on an almost obsessive basis, they want to take it official. To use the parlance of another social network, they want to go from “It's Complicated” to “In a Relationship.”

Discussion: @mlcalderone

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

The New York Times launched a revamped mobile site today — You can take check it out at mobile.nytimes.com. A few quick thoughts: — In typography and story layout, it's much closer to the Times' iPhone app, edging closer toward cross-platform parity.

Maureen Farrell / CNNMoney.com:

Peter Thiel: Twitter will outlast the New York Times — Tech visionaries Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen disagree on the promise of Twitter, but both see a relatively long lifespan for the social media firm. At least in Internet years. — In a debate with Andreessen …

Discussion: Betabeat

Erik Wemple:

Father of New York Post ‘Bag Man’ seeks legal counsel — El Houssein Barhoum is the father of one of the young men depicted on the April 18 cover of the New York Post. “Bag Men,” read the headline, with this explanation: “Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.”

Discussion: Yahoo! News, FishbowlNY, The Huffington Post, Gawker and New York Magazine

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

The Atlantic launches a new ebook division; will sell e-singles and curated collections — The Atlantic is launching an ebooks division that will publish e-singles and curated collections of content from the magazine's archives. The first e-single is only available through Amazon's Kindle Singles store …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Kim Masters / Hollywood Reporter:

China's Surprise Tax Prompts Hollywood Standoff — Fox refuses $23 million in “Life of Pi” money as the MPAA fights to enforce a trade deal. — As Iron Man 3 rolls outs in China, it's unclear whether Marvel will hurry to cash any checks from the country.

Carl Franzen / The Verge:

Rap Genius launches ‘News Genius’ to explain current events — Rap Genius, the popular site that lets users explain rap lyrics by annotating specific words and lines with their own descriptions and links to supporting facts, is looking to expand its reach to cover more current events and breaking news.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Betabeat, TechCrunch and Valleywag

Laura Hazard Owen / paidContent:

Following pilot, Hachette will make all of its ebooks available to libraries nationwide — Hachette announced Wednesday that it will make all of its ebooks, including new titles, available to libraries nationwide. New ebooks will be priced at three times the cost of the print version, but a library only has to buy a copy once.

Discussion: New York Times, Associated Press and Digital Book World