Mediagazer: More on the Plane That Didn't Crash, and ‘Truthiness’ (Margaret Sullivan/The Public Editor's …)

6:40 PM ET, June 18, 2013

Top News:

Google challenges U.S. gag order, citing First Amendment — Google is preparing to ask the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government.

Discussion: Forbes, TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, AllThingsD, Salon, CNNMoney.com, Hillicon Valley, Reuters, ReadWrite, RT, Mercury News, Wired, Guardian, Techdirt, Quartz, @rajunarisetti, Mashable, CNET, The Daily Beast, The Next Web, ZDNet, The Verge, Digits, Engadget, @samgustin, @trevortimm and @eff

Salvador Rodriguez / Los Angeles Times:
Yahoo discloses how much government data requests it gets

Discussion: Yahoo, Valleywag, BBC, Christian Science Monitor, TechRadar.com, Bloomberg, The Register, The Independent, CNN, Reuters, ZDNet, VatorNews, CNNMoney.com and Guardian

Isaac Chotiner / New Republic:

“What Part of ‘Politico’ Do You Not Understand?” — A conversation about the dark art of driving the conversation — The dominant mode of Washington journalism tends to both reflect and entrench the values of its era. The eminent writers and editors of the immediate postwar age …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, Mediaite, Gawker, The Huffington Post, @bcappelbaum, FishbowlDC, Poynter and @jayrosen_nyu

Tom Kludt / Talking Points Memo:

Nate Silver: Politico Co-Founders Lack ‘Curiosity For The World Outside Of The Bubble’ — Nate Silver has some thoughts about Politico. Plenty of them. — In an email sent Tuesday to TPM (posted below), Silver — who nailed the 2012 presidential election by correctly forecasting the outcome …

Discussion: @evgenymorozov and The Huffington Post

Jeff John Roberts / paidContent:

Photographer sues BuzzFeed for $3.6M over viral sharing model — A photographer says BuzzFeed should pay copyright damages not only for an unauthorized photo that appeared on its site — but for the dozens of other sites on which the photo appeared. — An Idaho photographer, Kai Eiselein …

Discussion: The Awl, Guardian, Poynter, WebProNews and FishbowlNY

Margaret Sullivan / The Public Editor's Journal:

More on the Plane That Didn't Crash, and ‘Truthiness’ — A few weeks ago, I wrote about the plane that didn't crash - that is, about a Lives piece in The Times Magazine that has drawn significant criticism from aviation experts including Patrick ("Ask the Pilot") Smith and from James Fallows …

Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:

AOL's Patch Limps Toward Profitability — After more than five years of reporting on school-board meetings and community bake sales, AOL Inc. (AOL)'s Patch is now at the center of another story: whether the company's bet on local news can be profitable. — Patch, with more than 900 sites …

Discussion: Street Fight

Sam Biddle / Valleywag:

Tumblr's Media Director Quits — Tumblr brought Mark Coatney aboard from Newsweek to bolster the site's editorial side—"to show how [Tumblr] can be key to connecting journalists and readers." Three years (and a Yahoo acquisition) later, and another early employee is gone. That's two in only a few weeks.

Discussion: CNET, Still Not Going To Do …, Business Insider, SlashGear and Betabeat

Kara Swisher / AllThingsD:

Next: Yahoo Also Eyeing Automated Video App Maker Qwiki in $50 Million Deal — According to sources close to the company, Yahoo is considering paying up to $50 million for Qwiki, the New York startup that makes an Apple iPhone app that allow users to turn photos, music and videos into short movies automatically.

Discussion: Forbes, Business Insider, CNET, memeburn, App Advice, Mashable and WebProNews

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Gallup: Only 23% of Americans trust newspapers, TV news — The bad news: Just 23 percent of Americans told Gallup they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, the same percentage who said they trust TV news. The good news: Both are still more popular than big business, organized labor, HMOs and Congress.

Discussion: MediaPost, Kirk LaPointe's …, Gallup and 24/7 Wall St.

Chris Ariens / FishbowlLA:

FishbowlLA Going on Hiatus — Mediabistro's FishbowlLA is taking five. In the meantime, FBLA co-editor Richard Horgan has moved over to FishbowlNY to cover the Hollywood trades, awards season and a broad range of national media stories. — Launched in 2005, the site has seen its fair share …

Discussion: FishbowlNY, 10,000 Words and LA Observed

Brett Logiurato / Business Insider:

Fox Business Terminates Contract With Contributor Who Was Paid $50,000 To Boost A Stock — Fox Business Network has terminated the contract of contributor Tobin Smith, who was paid $50,000 to tout the stock of Petrosonic Energy, a network spokesperson told Business Insider.

Discussion: MarketWatch and TVNewser

Alastair Reid / Journalism.co.uk:

Study: Facebook third most popular news source in Arab world — Broadcasters Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya named top outlets for accessing news across the region, followed by Facebook — Copyright: Image by owenwbrown on Flickr. Some rights reserved — Facebook is the third most popular outlet …

Discussion: Yahoo! News

Brian Stelter / New York Times:

Future of 3-D TV Murky as ESPN Ends Channel — A few years ago, 3-D was hailed as the next big thing in television, the logical successor to high definition. But viewers in the United States did not buy the hype, and now the eye-popping format is seen as an expensive flop.

Discussion: Change of Subject, PSFK and Subtraction.com

Allan Sloan / Fortune:

Zell's legacy lives on: IRS goes after Tribune — By the time the final papers are shuffled, the IRS and local tax authorities are likely seek more than half a billion dollars from Tribune in regard to the sales of the Chicago Cubs and Newsday under former CEO Sam Zell.

Discussion: Poynter and DealBook