Mediagazer: Li Ruigang's CMC Buys Stake in Caixin Media (Patrick Frater/Variety)

9:45 AM ET, December 20, 2013

Top News:

Jim Kennedy / News Corp:

News Corp Acquires Social News Agency Storyful — Accelerating News Corp's digital transformation and video strategy, the company has acquired Storyful, the world's first social news agency. — Building on Storyful's skill in finding verified news amidst the noise of social media …

Discussion: AllThingsD, FishbowlNY, Gigaom, The Wrap, Poynter, RTÉ, The Next Web, @raju, National Updates and @maryfitzger

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

News Corp Pays $25M For Storyful, Which Digs Up And Verifies News From Social Sites Like Twitter And Instagram — News Corp is raising its game in digital news again: the company has just announced that it is acquiring Storyful, a Ireland-based “village square” for social media news …

Matthew Lynley / BuzzFeed:
WSJ's revamped tech section to be called “WSJD”, launches in January

Discussion: @jessicalessin, Talking Biz News, @ryanlawler and @lexnfx

Margaret Sullivan / The Public Editor's Journal:

Pledging Clarity, The Times Plunges Into Native Advertising — After months of preparation and scrutiny, “native advertising” is about to arrive at The Times. That practice, much discussed in media circles, has been the subject of a recent Federal Trade Commission public workshop under the appropriate name, “Blurred Lines.”

Discussion: Capital New York, @jswatz, @peter_tl, @heathat, @counternotions, @edmundlee and counternotions.com

Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:
Publisher's Letter Explains Limits on Branded Content at The Times

Discussion: AdExchanger, FishbowlNY, Digiday, Poynter, @carrollbogert and @romenesko

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:
Buyouts as Times sales chief charts her course

Discussion: Capital New York and @joepompeo

Michael Sebastian / AdAge: The New York Times Is Going to Label the Hell Out of its Native Ads

Alan Rusbridger / Guardian:

Guardian editor contrasts the U.S. public debate after NSA leaks with Britain's apathy — Obama's NSA review gives the lie to Britain's timid platitudes: a debate is possible — In the US, the official response to Snowden's revelations celebrates journalism and calls for real change.

Discussion: Press Gazette, @ggreenwald, @robobr7, @antloewenstein, @juliansimpson1, @glynmoody, @jeffjarvis, The Daily Caller, Wired and Crikey

Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:

Maxim magazine sale to Darden Media reportedly collapses — Darden not Alpha enough to nail Maxim mag — Negotiations by Darden Media to buy Maxim and its parent, Alpha Media, have collapsed, sources tell Media Ink. — Cerberus Capital Management, Alpha's majority owner …

Discussion: FishbowlNY

Leo Mirani / Quartz:

Between a quarter and a third of everything on the web is copied from somewhere else — There's a lot of junk on the web. There is also a lot of good stuff on the web. And then there is the stuff that's been lifted from the good and dropped amid the dross—the aggregation, the block-quotes, the straight-off copy-paste jobs.

Discussion: @lmirani and @kathrynschulz

Khoi Vinh / Medium:

What streaming music lacks: the metadata of analog days and the personalization of now — What Streaming Music Can Be — Getting past the breadth of Spotify's catalog to more meaningful connections with the music — One gift that I won't be giving to loved ones this holiday season is music, sadly.

Discussion: Subtraction.com and MacStories

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Lee Rigby video: BBC, ITV and Sky News cleared over graphic footage — Ofcom ruling follows nearly 700 complaints over film of Michael Adebolajo with blood on his hands aired before 9pm watershed — Broadcasters including the BBC, ITV and Sky News are understood to have been cleared …

Michael Rondon / Folio:

How Local Magazines Figured Out What Patch Never Could — City & regional magazines cater to service journalism and local advertisers. — Look at the list of winners for the annual City and Regional Magazine Association awards. This year's three general excellence magazines—Washingtonian …

Discussion: @merrillwilliams and @mariekshan

Tom Shevlin / Street Fight: Could Patch Find New Life as a SaaS Platform for Local Publishers?

Ernesto / TorrentFreak:

Amazon Pulls Access to Purchased Christmas Videos During Christmas — One of the best ways to deal with online piracy is to make content available legally. — This is common knowledge by now, but copyright holders still believe that exclusivity can earn them more in the long run, even when it hurts legitimate customers.

Ann Marie Gardner / Modern Farmer:

Magazine Eats World: The Ever-Expanding Edible Empire — If you have lived or traveled in the United States or Canada in the last 10 years and have any interest in local food, there's a good chance you've come across a copy of an Edible magazine. The magazine franchise has grown like kudzu.

Patrick Frater / Variety:

Li Ruigang's CMC Buys Stake in Caixin Media — HONG KONG - China Media Capital, a RMB5 billion ($833 million) venture capital fund with connections to Rupert Murdoch, Time Warner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, has bought a stake in Caixin Media, one of China's leading independent news organizations.

Discussion: South China Morning Post, China Money Network and VCPOST

Norman Solomon / Common Dreams:

Under Amazon's CIA Cloud: The Washington Post — News media should illuminate conflicts of interest, not embody them. But the owner of the Washington Post is now doing big business with the Central Intelligence Agency, while readers of the newspaper's CIA coverage are left in the dark.

Discussion: thenation.com/blogs/180

Cory Haik / Nieman Journalism Lab:

News that anticipates the reader's needs — The year 2014 is going to be all about you. And me. And him and her. It's going to be all about all of us — and what we are doing on all our devices. The job in news is to be exactly there for people, no matter what they're doing or where they're doing it …

Discussion: @mims and @sclary

Alexis Sobel Fitts / Columbia Journalism Review:

Prime-time's global warming omission — A study shows that newscasters don't mention climate change when covering the weather, but whether they should is a larger question — Climate change is rarely covered in the mainstream press, but getting a hard number on just how often …

Discussion: Softpedia News

Jay Rosen / Pressthink:

A First Look at NewCo's structure — Today Pierre Omidyar announced some details about how his new venture in news will be organized. My summary and explanation... First, the official release: … As I previously explained to readers of PressThink, I am an adviser to Omidyar's company …

Discussion: Media Nation, Omidyar Group, Gigaom, Nieman Journalism Lab, Forbes, Capital New York, Poynter, FishbowlNY, The Huffington Post, Guardian, Mediaite, The Verge, @raju, @mathewi, @_alastair, @agolis, @jayrosen_nyu, @bbhorne, @jaredbkeller and @zseward

Nicole Levy / Capital New York: Greenwald hints at future of Omidyar enterprise

Patrick Frater / Variety:

Ricky Wong Hits Back With 5 Channel Launch — HONG KONG - Ricky Wong, the Hong Kong businessman whose Hong Kong Television Network, was surprisingly denied a free-to-air TV license in October says he will launch five new channels via the internet. — At a press conference on Friday afternoon …

Discussion: The Standard

Martin Langeveld / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Understanding the billionaire media gambles — Our journalism business never ceases to provide surprises and fodder for speculation — that's what makes this year-end round of prediction posts so much fun and, often, so far off base. For example, none of the Lab's prognosticators …

Discussion: @martinlangeveld

Andrea Peterson / Washington Post:

How one publisher is stopping academics from sharing their research — One of the world's largest academic publishers has launched a wide-ranging takedown spree, demanding that several different universities take down their own scholars' research. — Elsevier is a commercial firm …

Discussion: The Switch, TechCrunch, @thirugeneva, @alignedleft and @rmounce