Mediagazer: Yahoo Courts Mainstream Audiences With Vertical, Launches Yahoo Food And Yahoo Tech (Ingrid Lunden/TechCrunch)

6:55 PM ET, January 7, 2014

Top News:

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Yahoo's sleek News Digest app swims against the stream — Summly is reborn as a digital homage to the newspaper — When the news-summarizing startup Summly shut down last March, it was easy to imagine the company had simply been swallowed by the Yahoo machine.

Discussion: Betabeat, Cult of Mac, ZDNet and @tapbot_paul

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Launches News Digest, Its First App Based On Summly — Today at its CES keynote, Yahoo announced a new product, News Digest, to help people stay “quickly informed” on the day's big topics by sending out twice daily updates, or digests. — The content is a curated “blend” of information …

Discussion: Yahoo, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac and @dannysullivan

Mike Shields / Adweek:

Yahoo Reboots Ad Business in Attempt to Own Ad Tech — It's getting harder to accuse Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer of not caring much for the ad business. — In fact, Yahoo wants to place itself at the center of the online ad ecosystem—the same monster ambition held by Google, AOL and half a dozen other digital titans.

Discussion: Yahoo, AdAge, TechCrunch and @digitalshields

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Yahoo Courts Mainstream Audiences With Vertical, Launches Yahoo Food And Yahoo Tech

Discussion: Yahoo, USA Today, Gigaom, Variety, ReadWrite, @alecperkins, @mikeisaac, Re/code and WebProNews

John McDermott / Digiday:

Twitter Inches Closer to the Local Ad Market — Twitter has grand ambitions as an ad platform, and it appears poised to make a foray into the lucrative but fragmented world of local advertising. — Twitter recently rolled out a new map-based feature called Nearby to select users …

Discussion: @gavinmcgarry, @digiday, @dkiesow and Kirk LaPointe's …

Nicole Laporte / Fast Company:

Netflix: The Red Menace — Just when Hollywood thought it had Netflix figured out, that “red envelope” company flipped the script, creating a playbook for any business that aspires to upend an industry. It's about to do it again. — “It's the creatives, stupid.”

Discussion: @fastcompany, @felixsalmon and @noahr

Maggie McGrath / Forbes:
Amazon And Hulu Could Slow Netflix Growth In 2014, Morgan Stanley Says

Discussion: Deadline.com, Variety, TheStreet.com, USA Today, Fox Business and MoneyBeat

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

New rules at Time Inc require stories about company to be approved by Chief Content Officer — Norm Pearlstine lays down the law — Norm Pearlstine has laid down some ground rules for Time Inc.'s editors in a bid to govern what type of material should pass through him for pre-publication approval.

Discussion: @mlcalderone, @antderosa, @edmundlee, @felixsalmon and Capital New York

Felix Salmon:

Why movie studios happily violate journalists' copyright — The white-goods queen of Eighth Avenue asks my opinion on @aoscott agate. I take requests, over here, so: is it kosher for a movie producer to selectively quote from the Twitter feed of the NYT's movie reviewer, in a print ad …

Discussion: Gigaom, @jeffjarvis, @aoscott, @gabrielsnyder, The Verge, Daring Fireball, Boing Boing and @carr2n

Hadas Gold / Politico:

Navy mistakenly sends FOIA plans to reporter — The Unites States Navy inadvertently sent a memo to a local NBC News reporter this week detailing how it intended to try and deter requests he had filed under the Freedom Of Information Act. — Scott MacFarlane, a reporter for NBC 4 in Washington …

Discussion: Mediaite, Gawker, Hit & Run, @macfarlanenews and Business Insider

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

Vine Co-Founder Steps Down From Lead Role at Company — Dom Hofmann, co-founder of the social video-sharing service Vine, has stepped down from his lead general manager role at the company, according to three sources close to the situation. — Hofmann, who has led the company since …

Discussion: VatorNews, @mikeisaac, The Verge and @kenli729

Jay Rosen / Pressthink:

Bill Gannon joins First Look Media: My Q & A with him about intelligent aggregation in news — Today Pierre Omidyar announced a key hire: recently Bill was editor of Entertainment Weekly, before that boss of the Yahoo home page. — This is from the official press release:

Discussion: @jayrosen_nyu, @niemanlab and @mathewi

Ryan Lawler / TechCrunch:

TiVo Moves Storage Of TV Shows Into The Cloud With New Network DVR Service — DVR manufacturer TiVo has spent most of the last 15 years building hardware that would allow consumers to record their favorite TV shows and watch them later. Now the company is working toward building products …

Discussion: IP&TV News, Pocket-lint, Variety, Radio & Television …, Gizmodo, Multichannel.com, Engadget and The Next Web

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

NYT unveils redesign on Wednesday with Dell as charter native advertiser — With Redesign, NYTimes.com Unveils Native Ad Platform — The New York Times recently detailed plans to introduce a native advertising product to its website, and on Wednesday, readers will get to see its first appearance.

Discussion: New York Times, Capital New York and Refinery29

Nancy A. Youssef / McClatchy Washington Bureau:

Visit with jailed Al Jazeera correspondent finds him healthy, haggard — CAIRO — Donning a long overcoat to fend off the winter chill, the prison official led the way down some stairs, through an underground parking garage, then back up a short set of steps to the goal: a dingy …

Discussion: @reem_abdellatif, @tomlasseter, @claytonswisher, Toronto Star, @jeremyscahill, @patrickkingsley and @tamerelg

Steve Kovach / Business Insider:

David Pogue Slams Traditional Tech Blogs To Announce His New Site On Yahoo — David Pogue, Yahoo's new tech editor, announced the company's new tech site, Yahoo Tech today. — In the process, he bashed traditional tech blogs like Engadget, The Verge, Re/Code, and Gizmodo …

Discussion: @gaberivera, @stevekovach and @thestalwart

Kwame Opam / The Verge:

Samsung announces major 4K streaming partnership with Amazon, Netflix, and others — In addition to inking a deal with Technicolor's M-GO streaming service, Samsung today announced a major partnership with Netflix, Amazon, Comcast, and DirecTV to provide 4K streaming to consumers via their latest UHD TVs.

Discussion: Multichannel.com