Mediagazer: Score one for AOL, winning online rights to ESPN clips (Joan E. Solsman/CNET)

7:30 PM ET, October 9, 2013

Top News:

All Is Fair in Love and Twitter — Right in the center of South Park, a large, grassy oval near San Francisco's financial district, there is a rinky-dink playground with slides, ladders and firefighter poles, all dented and dinged, connected by gritty brown pylons.

Jeff Bercovici / Forbes:

Al Gore Tried To Buy Twitter And Merge It With Current. What If He'd Succeeded? — Don't you just love all the stuff that comes out when a hot tech company declares it's going public? I'm thinking in particular about a tidbit from Nick Bilton's piece in the Times magazine about the intrigue and betrayals in Twitter's early years.

Discussion: Business Insider, Telegraph, @jeffbercovici, Mashable and GigaOM

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:

Financial Times to move to single global print edition — The Financial Times is to institute path-breaking changes to the production of its printed newspaper that appear to be the penultimate step towards becoming a digital-only publication. — A lengthy memo sent yesterday afternoon …

Discussion: New York Times, Talking Biz News, TheMediaBriefing.com, Strange Attractor, AdAge, @dicktofel, @b50, @blakehounshell and @yavuzbaydar

Rachel Bartlett / Journalism.co.uk:

Lionel Barber: FT.com to focus on ‘smart aggregation of content’ — In a memo to staff, published by the Financial Times today, editor Lionel Barber outlined ‘the next steps’ in its approach to digital-first' — The editor of the Financial Times has shared “the next steps” …

Discussion: Financial Times, USA Today, @vilpponen, Telegraph, @mirkolorenz and @mathewi

Guardian:

Press still plans self-regulation despite ministers' rejection, says Times editor — John Witherow's comments come as Lord Justice Leveson refuses to enter debate on press regulation reform — The editor of the Times yesterday gave the clearest indication yet that a group …

Discussion: Big News Network.com and bbc.co.uk

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:
UK press on collision course with Parliament over regulation plan which would ‘fatally undermine freedom of expression’

Discussion: @domponsford, BBC and The Huffington Post

Guardian:
Lord Justice Leveson faces standoff with MPs over press regulation

Discussion: Press Gazette, @joshhalliday and Big News Network.com

Peter Kafka / AllThingsD:

Twitter Gets Its Strongest TV Tie-Up So Far, With an Ambitious Comcast Deal — Twitter has been trying to buddy up with the TV industry for the past few years. Now it has its it biggest payoff yet: A far-reaching deal with Comcast that aims to turn the social network into a TV-watching service.

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

BuzzFeed president: ‘We feel strongly that traditional media have given up on young people’ — Jon Steinberg tells MIPCOM audience that his site is ‘bringing more hard news on a relative basis than a lot of the traditional television networks’ — News site BuzzFeed attracted 85m unique visitors in August …

Discussion: @nedregotten and Kirk LaPointe's …

Darren Boyle / Press Gazette:

Rusbridger defends Snowden leaks claiming ‘any terrorist who can tie his shoelaces’ is aware of surveillance — Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger dismissed criticism of his paper's Edward Snowden surveillance revelations claiming that any terrorist who can tie his shoe laces knows that the internet is being monitored.

Discussion: Hillicon Valley and Guardian

Nick Hopkins / Guardian:
MI5 chief's criticism of Snowden and the Guardian is hardly unexpected

Discussion: Telegraph, Press Gazette, @ggreenwald, The Week UK, UPI, ITV News, International Business Times, Sky News, Fox News, Channel 4, Daily Mail, The Independent, Techdirt, @arusbridger and BBC

Peter Sterne / Capital New York:

A young woman ‘languishing’ at CBS gets a quick career assist from Mika Brzezinski — On Tuesday night, “Morning Joe” cohost Mika Brzezinski—looking elegant in a ruffled black dress and a black coat with a ruffled fringe to match—stood in a pair of Louboutins before a long line of young women …

Discussion: The Wrap, @morningmika, @knsneath, @petersterne, @mikiebarb, @reidpillifant, @msfoundation, @nishachittal, @janestreet and The Huffington Post

Janko Roettgers / GigaOM:

Al Jazeera will launch a dedicated online channel, bring videos back to YouTube — Quatar-based TV news network Al Jazeera will launch a dedicated online video channel within the next few months. The channel was announced at the MIPCOM industry convention in Cannes this week …

Discussion: Hollywood Reporter and FierceOnlineVideo News

Caroline O'Donovan / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Journalists of the Jersey Shore: How a novice reporter built a news network from scratch — The first post went up sometime just before 2:34 p.m. on September 12. — Post by Jersey Shore Hurricane News. — Just a few minutes later, the first of 375 comments went up on the next post …

Discussion: paidContent, @rdmersey and @jbenton

Meg James / Los Angeles Times:

Univision, Time Warner Cable strike new distribution deal — Time Warner Cable will be among the first cable companies to offer Robert Rodriguez's El Rey Network. Above, Rodriguez at Univision's upfront presentation in New York in May. (Univision / May 14, 2013)

Katherine Rosman / Wall Street Journal:

In Digital Era, What Does ‘Watching TV’ Even Mean? — Study Suggests More Time Spent on Smartphones, Computers, Tablets Than Television — We spend a full five hours and 16 minutes a day in front of a screen, and that's without even turning on a television.

Discussion: Los Angeles Times