Mediagazer: New MIT Media Lab Tool Lets Anyone Visualize Unwieldy Government Data (Shaunacy Ferro/Co.Design)

12:00 AM ET, December 6, 2013

Top News:

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: Los Angeles Times, @vindugoel, Guardian, VatorNews, Jezebel, VentureBeat, Mashable and Business Insider

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

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

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

Hannah Karp / Wall Street Journal:

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: TechCrunch, @stuartkhall, The Next Web, App Advice, Pocket-lint, Engadget, SlashGear and The Verge

John McDermott / Digiday:

The Information founder Jessica Lessin discusses subscription models, ads, and aggregation — Why New Tech Site The Information Spurns Ads for Subscriptions — The Information, former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin's new tech news site, debuted today with a seemingly …

Discussion: Businessweek, @niemanlab, @vouchey, Talking Biz News, Business Insider and Silicon Valley Watcher

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom: Five things Jessica Lessin needs to keep in mind about paywalls as she launches The Information

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

Allan Sloan / Fortune:

More revelations about the Time Inc. spinoff — Allan Sloan takes a look at the recently released Time Inc. SEC filing — FORTUNE — There are some dishes, like homemade beef stew, that get increasingly flavorful the more times you cook them. Some documents are like that, too …

Discussion: @editorialiste, @edmundlee and @peacockc

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 and @malexjohnson, Thanks:@joshluger

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’

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.

Felix Gillette / Businessweek:

Politico's Capital New York Expansion in Hands of CEO Jim VandeHei — Since its launch in 2007, Politico, the D.C. upstart covering national politics in print and on the Web, has hosted presidential debates, won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, established a distinctive …

Discussion: Poynter, FishbowlNY, @rubycramer, @pwgavin, @jayrosen_nyu, @rafat, @bw and @mlcalderone

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

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.

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

Tim Wu / The New Republic:

Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture — Binge-viewing was just the beginning. Netflix has a plan to rewire our entire culture — Given all the faces you see glued to computers, tablets, and cell phones, you might think that people watch much less television than they used to.

Discussion: @jamesgleick, @columbialaw and Gigaom

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Layoffs at AOL: 20 slips, mostly on homepage side — Layoffs hit AOL yesterday, Capital has learned. — The majority of impacted employees worked on the editorial side of the AOL.com homepage, according to sources with knowledge of the cuts, who put the total number of pink slips around 20.

Discussion: FishbowlNY and Capital New York

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: @niemanlab

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

Evie Nagy / Fast Company:

Hearst's Troy Young Spills: This Is How You Make Money In Digital Media — The publishing industry in the digital age is a lawless frontier of fluctuating business models, content strategy experimentation, and conflict between time-tested practices and new expectations from consumers.

Discussion: @karlheiselman

Mark Landler / New York Times:

Biden Faults China on Foreign Press Crackdown — BEIJING — China appears ready to force nearly two dozen journalists from American news organizations to leave the country by the end of the year, a significant increase in pressure on foreign news media that has prompted the American government's …