Mediagazer: Kaz Hirai on Why Sony's Pay TV Bid Can Succeed Where Intel and Others Stumbled (Ina Fried/Re/code)

10:10 PM ET, January 7, 2014

Top News:

Rem Rieder / USA Today:

At CES, Yahoo shows its plans to compete as a media company — Yahoo doubles down with new tech, food sites — Executives say it's just the beginning, and more initiatives are in the offing. — Yahoo is doubling down on content as it launches ambitious websites covering technology and food.

Discussion: VentureBeat, Guardian, Gigaom, The Switch, Yahoo, ReadWrite and Digits

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, @drmattcarlson, Business Insider, @mikeisaac, ZDNet, @tapbot_paul, @jeffsonderman and Cult of Mac

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, @dannysullivan, @jason, 9to5Mac and @rafe

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, NYT Bits and @digitalshields

Steve Kovach / Business Insider:
David Pogue Slams Traditional Tech Blogs To Announce His New Site On Yahoo

Discussion: @stevekovach, @thestalwart, @gaberivera and Daring Fireball

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

Discussion: Yahoo, Variety, Gizmodo, GeekWire, @alecperkins, Re/code, @mikeisaac and WebProNews

New York Times:

Biography Casts Critical Light on Fox News Chief — Roger Ailes was so eager to influence national politics that in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, he told fellow Fox News executives point-blank: “I want to elect the next president.” — In the corporate thicket of News Corporation …

Discussion: @katherinemiller, @moorehn, @speechboy71, @blakehounshell, @joshsternberg, @johnjcook and @jbenton

New York Times:

Janice Min to be named co-president, chief creative officer for Hollywood Reporter, Billboard — New Leader at Billboard Sees Future in Visuals — Janice Min, who gave The Hollywood Reporter a renewed relevance by transforming the daily trade paper into a much-read weekly magazine and website …

Discussion: Hollywood Reporter, @janicebmin and @jmbooyah

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

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, Gigaom, @aoscott, @gabrielsnyder, @jeffjarvis, Daring Fireball, The Verge and PSFK

Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:

Aereo Raises $34 Million to Grow Online-Television Service — Aereo Inc., the controversial streaming-television service, has raised $34 million in funding as it looks to expand into additional cities. — Investors in the round include Himalaya Capital Management and Gordon Crawford …

Discussion: CNET, TechCrunch, Deadline.com, Gigaom, The Wrap, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, Digital Journal and Variety

Maggie McGrath / Forbes:

Amazon And Hulu Could Slow Netflix Growth In 2014, Morgan Stanley Says — Original series like House of Cards and Orange Is The New Black may have helped lift Netflix to new heights in 2013, but could the fever start to fade in 2014? According to a new report from Morgan Stanley …

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

Nicole Laporte / Fast Company:
Netflix: The Red Menace

Discussion: @scottorrance, @nicolelaporte1, @noahr, @felixsalmon and @fastcompany

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

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, @edmundlee, @felixsalmon, @antderosa and Capital New York

Ina Fried / Re/code:

Kaz Hirai on Why Sony's Pay TV Bid Can Succeed Where Intel and Others Stumbled — Sony's secret weapon to crack into the tight-knit pay-TV market? The 25 million PlayStation 3 devices already in U.S. homes. — “That's a compelling number and it reaches a demographic that may not sign …

Discussion: CNET, CNNMoney.com, Variety and The Verge

Michael Depp / NetNewsCheck Latest:

U-T San Diego Lays Off Video Personnel — U-T TV, U-T San Diego's online TV station, has laid off about 10 staffers, the paper confirmed on Tuesday. “As we start a new year, this was just looking at some of the programming that was working and wasn't working and focusing on what was working …

Discussion: Poynter

Chris Taylor / Mashable:

Newspaper to Put All Reporters Through Social Media Boot Camp — One of the country's oldest remaining big city newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, is set to announce a radical plan to arrest circulation decline and remain relevant in the digital age, Mashable has learned.

Discussion: @audreycoopersf