Mediagazer: Was Newspaper Decline Inevitable? Veterans Conclude That Yes, It Was (Sharon Waxman/The Wrap)

3:05 PM ET, July 25, 2013

Top News:

Josh Sternberg / Digiday:

Nick Denton Makes Peace With the Banner Ad — Excerpts: — What's your take on native ads: good, bad, or don't care? — Native ads are like any other ad: good when they're good, bad when they're bad, and usually indifferent. — Are social ads or native ads the future?

Discussion: Capital New York, @mathewi, @rbfishman, @jeffjohnroberts and @johnjcook

Adrienne LaFrance / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Gawker is letting readers rewrite headlines and reframe articles — Relegating online comments to the bottom of an article seems so old-school newspapery in retrospect, doesn't it? — Long the default for many news organizations online, the message is that reader comments are an afterthought …

Discussion: Jezebel

San Francisco Chronicle:

KTVU producers fired over Asiana pilots' fake names — KTVU-TV has dismissed at least three veteran producers over the on-air gaffe involving the fake names of those Asiana airline pilots that became an instant YouTube hit - and a major embarrassment to the station.

Discussion: richliebermanreport …, Poynter, Mediaite, TVWeek.com, Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, The Desk, WAVE-TV, NY Daily News, TVSpy, The Huffington Post, New York Magazine and LA Observed

Xeni Jardin / Boing Boing:

Journalists at Bradley Manning trial report hostile conditions for press — Journalists and bloggers covering closing arguments in Wikileaks source Bradley Manning's trial at Ft. Meade today, including @carwinb, @kgosztola, @nathanLfuller, and @wikileakstruck, are reporting a far …

Medina Roshan / Reuters:
Prosecutors describe U.S. WikiLeaks soldier as seeking notoriety

Discussion: New York Times, Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, CNN, RT, Washington Post, Washington Times, BBC, Courthouse News Service, GlobalPost and Al Jazeera English

Michael Estrin / Digiday:

Confessions of a Slideshow Writer — Michael Estrin is the author of “Murder and Other Distractions,” a novel set in a content farm where clicks matter way too much. — You've probably clicked on my work. I'm a journalist and a writer. I cover consumer finance, digital marketing …

Associated Press:

German publisher Axel Springer sells regional papers, magazines in $1.2 billion deal — BERLIN — Axel Springer AG, one of Germany's most prominent publishers, is selling two regional newspapers as well as its television and women's magazines in a 920 million-euro ($1.2 billion) deal that will allow it to focus on its main titles.

Discussion: Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Bloomberg

Jim Romenesko:

Advance Publications memo: ‘Our new companies are performing well’ — Randy Siegel, Advance Publications' president of local digital strategy, tells colleagues that “although we have reduced the frequency of home delivery [in New Orleans and other Advance newspaper markets] …

Sharon Waxman / The Wrap:

Was Newspaper Decline Inevitable? Veterans Conclude That Yes, It Was — Counter to conventional wisdom, they say advertising went away and there's nothing newspapers could have done about it — A broad study by a group of respected journalists into the disruption that the digital age …

Discussion: Poynter, GigaOM, JIMROMENESKO.COM, Fortune, Kirk LaPointe's … and Fortune

Laura Hazard Owen / GigaOM:

Amazon launches interview series on Kindle Singles; first up: President of Israel — Amazon on Thursday launched “The Kindle Singles Interview,” a series of “major long-form interviews with iconic figures and world leaders.” — First up is an interview with Israeli president Shimon Peres …

Discussion: Amazon.com, PublishersWeekly.com, GalleyCat, CNET and Engadget

Jay Caspian Kang / New York Times:

Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear? — On an overcast day in early May, I traveled to suburban Philadelphia to visit the family of Sunil Tripathi, the deceased 22-year-old Brown University student who, for about four hours on the morning of April 19, was mistakenly identified …

Discussion: Politico, The Verge and The Atlantic Wire

Ben Sisario / New York Times:

Sirius XM Reports Record Revenue, Aided by Auto Recovery — On Monday, Wall Street was closely focused on Netflix's second-quarter results of 28.6 million subscribers and revenue of roughly $1 billion. On Thursday, another fast-growing subscription media company was in the spotlight …

Discussion: Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Reuters

James Surowiecki / New Yorker:

It's not over for Barnes & Noble. — When Barnes & Noble announced, a couple of weeks ago, that its Nook division lost almost five hundred million dollars last year and that its C.E.O. was resigning, there was one obvious conclusion: the company was doomed. After all, the Nook was how B.

Discussion: Businessweek and bookforum.com

Dylan Byers / Politico:

Groundswell's ‘journalists’ — David Corn has landed a scoop on a new group of Washington conservatives — which includes several journalists — that are engaged in a coordinated campaign against not just Democrats but the GOP leadership and the Republican establishment (including Karl Rove).

Discussion: Mother Jones and @monikabauerlein

Deadline:

CBS, Time Warner Cable Extend Deadline In Distribution Dispute — The parties have set a new deadline of Monday at 5 PM Eastern to settle their dispute. CBS its stations would have go dark at 9 AM ET Thursday on Time Warner Cable systems in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas.