Mediagazer: What an NSA charm offensive looks like (Jack Shafer)

10:00 PM ET, June 27, 2013

Top News:

What an NSA charm offensive looks like — Banged and bruised in the press over the NSA secrets liberated by Edward Snowden and serialized in the Guardian and the Washington Post, the national security establishment resorted to a little media offense earlier this week with a series of conversations with major news outlets.

Discussion: Mediaite, @ravisomaiya, @hbobrien and CNN

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

Anonymous Government Officials Use Media To Make Case Against Snowden — NEW YORK — In April 2011, the Associated Press reported that U.S. airstrikes in Yemen 15 months earlier had forced al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to reconsider how it communicates.

Discussion: Pressthink, FAIR Blog, Business Insider, @jayrosen_nyu, New York Times and Vanity Fair

Dan Mitchell / Fortune:

Media is ruining the NSA debate — The debate over how much privacy we should give up in return for how much protection is necessary, but complicated. It's too important leave it to Twitter and cable news. — FORTUNE — The revelation of the National Security Agency's collecting …

Discussion: Guardian and @ryanchittum

Phillip Molnar / Monterey County Herald:

Restricted web access to The Guardian is Army wide, officials say — The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday's Herald, but Army wide. — Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since …

Jessica Testa / BuzzFeed:
How Glenn Greenwald Became Glenn Greenwald

Discussion: Slate, PolicyMic, @tomgara, @tomgara, @tomgara, @katienotopoulos, Politico, The Dish, The Daily Caller, NY Daily News, Capital New York, Business Insider, Gawker and New York Magazine

Kevin Poulsen / Wired:

WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI — On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport.

Discussion: Techdirt, The Verge, The Week, Fast Company, Mashable, @dylanbyers, Talking Points Memo, Pressing Issues and @mlcalderone

Sean Parker / TechCrunch:

Weddings Used To Be Sacred And Other Lessons About Internet Journalism — OUR WEDDING My wife, Alexandra, and I met five years ago, fell in love, and almost immediately began fantasizing about our wedding day, which, we both agreed, should take place deep within an enchanted forest.

Edmund Lee / Bloomberg:

New York Times Set to Sell Globe for Fraction of Purchase — New York Times Co. (NYT), which is accepting bids for the Boston Globe today, is likely to fetch a price that's about a 10th of what it paid in 1993, a sign of the industry's deterioration over the past two decades.

Discussion: Tech Deals, FishbowlNY, Wall St. Cheat Sheet, 10,000 Words, The Huffington Post and New York Magazine

Jennifer Saba / Reuters:

New York Times receives multiple bids for Boston Globe -source — * New York Times paid $1.1 bln for the paper in 1993 — * Likely to receive less than 10 percent of that — The New York Times Co has received multiple bids for The Boston Globe, according to a source familiar with the auction of the daily newspaper.

Constanze Letsch / Guardian:

Turkish PM's treason claims against BBC reporter chills other journalists — Turkish journalists see Recep Tayyip Erdoan's attack on presenter for BBC's Turkish service as a warning to them all — Based in London, where she is a presenter for the BBC's Turkish service …

Discussion: @washingtonpoint, Big News Network.com and Today's Zaman …

BBC:
Twitter under pressure in Turkey

Discussion: @emilydparker, RT, Europe and Daily Dot

Ciara Byrne / Co.Labs:

Circa's Object-Oriented Approach To Building The News — Since newspapers first started to print, the basic unit of news has been the article, an unstructured blob of data. A news article contains standard elements like a headline, quotes, facts and photos. It has a clear beginning and an end.

Discussion: paidContent, @digidave and @deciara

Aaron Mesh / Willamette Week:

Black and White and Red All Over — Owners of the Oregonian gamble on the newspaper's digital future. — The death of The Oregonian as you know it came at 9:58 am on June 20. — That's when reporters, editors, photographers and designers who put out the 163-year-old daily newspaper were told to …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post, New Orleans Times-Picayune, TVSpy and JIMROMENESKO.COM

Bloomberg:

Zuckerberg Brings Silicon Valley Friends to Sun Valley — Facebook Inc. (FB), Google Inc. (GOOG) and Netflix Inc. (NFLX) are sending more executives to the annual Allen & Co. gathering of moguls in Sun Valley, Idaho, the latest sign of technology's growing role in entertainment.

Greg Gilman / The Wrap:

Nickelodeon's ‘Alien Dawn’ Slapped With Lawsuit by Former Intern — Plaintiff Kevin Hicks has filed suit against the production company and producers behind the Nicktoons program — Yet another lawsuit has been filed against a production company in Hollywood as interns continue to rise up and demand compensation for unpaid work.

Discussion: Variety

Joan E. Solsman / CNET:

Spotify to more than double its New York engineer workforce — The music-streaming service and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announce the expansion together, which will include a new headquarters and 130 new jobs. — Follow @@joan_e — NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg …

Discussion: Forbes, The Next Web, VentureBeat, PandoDaily, Mashable and Business Insider

Jim Romenesko:

Wikipedia founder's net worth is said to be just above $1 million — Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales' income “is a topic of constant fascination,” writes Amy Chozick, and he's well rehearsed in brushing off questions about it. … * Jimmy Wales is not an Internet billionaire (nytimes.com)

Discussion: New York Times

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Yahoo News Gets A Makeover, But The Bigger Improvements Are Under The Hood — A little over a month after Yahoo partnered with Twitter to beef up its homepage news feed with relevant tweets from news organizations, the company is today announcing a major makeover for one of its flagship properties, Yahoo News.

Discussion: Yahoo!, The Next Web, paidContent, FishbowlDC, Fast Company and Pocket-lint

Geoffrey A. Fowler / Digits:

Apple Spells Out iTunes Radio Terms — Ahead of its launch of an online radio service Apple circulated terms to independent record labels last week, many of them more generous to the music companies than what rival Pandora Media currently pays. — Apple intends to pay royalties to labels based …

Discussion: Wall St. Cheat Sheet, GigaOM, App Advice, PhoneArena, 9to5Mac, Business Insider, BGR, SlashGear, Gizmodo, Engadget, Electronista, CNET, MacRumors, AppleInsider and AllAccess.com

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

A proof of concept for a news site sending a push notification to a desktop computer — Earlier this month, I wrote about a feature of the upcoming version of Mac OS X ("Mavericks") that could be of interest to news sites: the ability to send push notifications to users on desktop and laptop computers.

Discussion: 9to5Mac

Matt Burns / TechCrunch:

Aereo To Launch Its Internet Streaming TV Service In Chicago On September 13 — Despite court battles, Aereo is on a roll. The startup just announced its streaming TV service will hit Chicagoland September 13. This comes just a month after the company announced its Atlanta launch details.