Mediagazer: FCC Unlikely to Bless a Comcast-TWC Deal: Regulator (Wall Street Journal)

8:15 AM ET, December 6, 2013

Top News:

Spotify to Introduce Free Mobile Music Service — Free Version of Streaming Service Was Previously Only Available on Desktop and Laptops — Spotify AB is planning a free, ad-supported version of its streaming-music service on mobile devices, according to people familiar with the matter …

Discussion: Business Insider, Guardian, SocialTimes, TechCrunch, VatorNews, Gizmodo, @stuartkhall, The Next Web, The Verge, The Drum, App Advice, SlashGear, Pocket-lint, Engadget and Gizmodo UK

Bill Carter / New York Times:

A Settlement Between Fox News and a Former Top Executive? Perhaps — The Fox News Channel has long been described as insular and buttoned up, a reputation that has been reaffirmed in recent days over the question of whether it has reached a settlement with Brian Lewis …

Discussion: @tomgara

Wall Street Journal:

FCC Unlikely to Bless a Comcast-TWC Deal: Regulator — Commissioner Says Current Administration Taking Tough Antitrust Stance … Any effort by Comcast Corp. to acquire Time Warner Cable Inc. would face significant hurdles in Washington, according to a Federal Communications Commission official …

Wall Street Journal:

Pursuit of Time Warner Cable Takes a Toll on Its Bonds — Bondholders Have Seen Prices Fall as Stock Has Risen … An old Wall Street adage states that what's good news for shareholders is often bad news for bondholders. It is a lesson that owners of Time Warner Cable Inc. 's bonds are learning the hard way.

Jason Karaian / Reuters:

Twitter's new board member isn't the only one who rarely tweets — When Twitter announced the appointment of Marjorie Scardino as a board member, it did it, naturally, with a tweet. — But when the millions of people who follow Twitter's corporate account clicked through to Scardino's account …

Discussion: Marketing Pilgrim, @vindugoel, Los Angeles Times, VatorNews, Guardian, Jezebel, VentureBeat, Business Insider, Mashable, WebProNews and Gigaom

John McDuling / Quartz:
Twitter's first female director is also the first “old media” executive on the board

Discussion: Quartz, NYT Bits, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, AllThingsD, @mathewi, Wired, Washington Post, @jmcduling, ReadWrite, Digits and @hamishmckenzie

Tom Grubisich / Street Fight:

Buttry Sees Progress for Digital First's ‘New Model’ for Community News — Steve Buttry, the digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, began his career in community newspapers more than 40 years ago in Columbus, Ohio - as a teenage carrier. In the years since, he's been a reporter …

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:

Former Times legal chief suspended by tribunal after paper deceived High Court to expose Nightjack police blogger — Former legal manager of The Times Alastair Brett has been suspended as a solicitor for six months over the paper's handling of the Nightjack case.

Upworthy Insider:

What Actually Makes Things Go Viral Will Blow Your Mind. (Hint: It's Not Headlines Like This.) — By now it's fairly well known that we care a lot about headlines here at Upworthy. We write at least 25 of them for each post. We test them rigorously. Sometimes, we even make up a word to catch your eye.

Discussion: PandoDaily, @newswhip, @clarajeffery, @malexjohnson and @davidbauer, Thanks:@joshluger

Michael Sebastian / AdAge:

Rolling Stone Plans a Standalone Website to Cover Country Music — Magazine is Opening an Office in Nashville — Rolling Stone plans to introduce a new website called Rolling Stone Country in the second quarter of 2014. — The new standalone site's aim is to cover the country music scene …

Thanks:@msebastian

Shaunacy Ferro / Co.Design:

New MIT Media Lab Tool Lets Anyone Visualize Unwieldy Government Data — In the four years since the U.S. government created data.gov, the first national repository for open data, more than 400,000 datasets have become available online from 175 agencies like the USDA, the Department of Energy and the EPA.

Michael Rondon / Folio:

Digital Ad Dollars Spike, But Still a Small Part of Total Revenue in B-to-B — B-to-b media revenue grew 4.4 percent through the first half of 2013. — B-to-b media continued its gradual recovery, posting revenue gains for the seventh-consecutive half-year period.

Joan E. Solsman / CNET:

Aereo to launch in Baltimore, still a dozen cities short of goal — Aereo, the online TV service that streams and records over-the-air shows in some parts of the US, said Thursday that it will launch in Baltimore on Dec. 16. — The company aimed to expand from its New York home base …

Discussion: Broadcasting & Cable and FierceCable

Joan E. Solsman / CNET:

How Intel TV failed — pay attention, Google and Apple — analysis Intel aspired to revolutionize cable and satellite with Web TV. Just because it failed doesn't mean Apple, Google, and the rest will too — but they're no closer to a happy ending. — Intel was set to revolutionize television.

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

Five things Jessica Lessin needs to keep in mind about paywalls as she launches The Information — The past year has seen the launch and growth of some fascinating new media entities — both platforms and services — including Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, Medium, the crowdfunded Matter project …

Discussion: Publishing Executive …, Businessweek and Digiday

Josh Feldman / Mediaite:

Jeremy Scahill: Obama WH Doesn't Want Journalists, It Wants Fawning ‘State Media’ Like MSNBC — Jeremy Scahill, a national security journalist joining a new independent media venture with Glenn Greenwald, talked about the British parliamentary hearing over the Guardian's NSA scoops on Democracy Now!

Discussion: Democracy Now and PublishersWeekly.com

Liz Bury / Guardian:

Quarter of Kindle ebook sales in US are for indie publishers — Figures from world's biggest bookseller trumpeted as sign of how self-publishing and smaller labels are changing the industry — As many as a quarter of the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com are from indie publishers …

Discussion: Daily Mail and Melville House Books

Arif Durrani / Media Week:

Financial Times ready for global transformation under Hughes — As the FT prepares to launch a single global edition, its deputy chief executive and global commercial chief tells Arif Durrani why the newspaper is as relevant as ever. — Hughes: ‘I am more enthusiastic now than I ever have been about the world of media’

Caroline O'Donovan / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Where in the world is BuzzFeed? Building foreign news around themes rather than geography — When BuzzFeed launched BuzzFeed World, an ambitious foreign news vertical, not everyone thought they were up to the task: … That link, which is broken, is supposed to take you to a story written by Max Seddon …

Discussion: @maxseddon and @niemanlab