Mediagazer: Washington Post announces plans to hire bloggers, redesign site (Andrew Beaujon/Poynter)

4:00 PM ET, January 29, 2014

Top News:

Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:

CNN And Twitter Partner With Dataminr To Create News Tool For Journalists — CNN is hosting a press event today to announce a partnership with Twitter and social analytics company Dataminr to launch a new tool called Dataminr For News. — Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey said the goal is to …

Discussion: Dataminr, Poynter, Gawker, The Verge, CNET, Variety, Pocket-lint, Engadget, @digiphile, @jcstearns, @michaelsurtees, @willoremus and @jweb

Vivian Schiller / Twitter blog:

A faster, easier way for newsrooms to find breaking news on Twitter — Today, Twitter and CNN have announced a partnership with Dataminr to develop an alert system for journalists called Dataminr for News. — When news breaks, it can be minutes or even hours before newsrooms begin to report.

Discussion: Wired, Mashable, @edmundlee, @marksluckie, @joannauk, @ericaamerica, @cpen, @sladurantaye, @vivianschiller and CNET

Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Breaking News From Twitter: There's Breaking News on Twitter

Discussion: @margafret and @edmundlee

Jim Romenesko:

Report: Hundreds of Patch employees laid off — I'm told that hundreds — two tipsters claim two-thirds of the editorial staff — have been laid off by Patch's new owner, Hale Global. I have asked the company for confirmation. (It bought Patch from AOL on January 15.)

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Washington Post announces plans to hire bloggers, redesign site — A memo to staffers from Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron outlines some of the paper's plans for the next year. — The news organization plans to hire “writers to author ‘verticals’ on a wide array of subjects,” Baron writes.

Discussion: Adweek, The Huffington Post, Capital New York and FishbowlDC

Harry Jaffe / Washingtonian:

Katharine Weymouth Defends Decision Not to Fund Ezra Klein's New Venture — “It just didn't make sense for us,” the Post publisher says of Klein's proposed website. — Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has absorbed the responsibility—much of it critical—for not keeping Ezra Klein …

Discussion: JIMROMENESKO.COM, @raju, @mlcalderone, @harryjaffe and @sophiegg

David Carr / New York Times:

As I Was Saying About Web Journalism ... a Bubble, or a Lasting Business? — Last week, it occurred to me that the departure of Ezra Klein, the creator of The Washington Post's influential Wonkblog, to join the young company Vox Media was a bit of a moment — an inflection point in the emergence of a news economy online.

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog, @justinnxt, @carltonpurvis, @brandoncarte, @gregory, @digiphile, @viceukmedia, @carr2n, @suzykhimm, @dananorak, @dangillmor, @azi, @jonathanwald, @peterlattman and @cappiwill

Sarah Wheaton / New York Times:

Rep. Michael Grimm Threatens an NY1 Reporter — The Staten Island lawmaker can be heard telling Michael Scotto, a reporter for NY1, “I'll break you in half” in footage broadcast by the network.

Azi Paybarah / Capital New York:
Grimm offers a ‘friendly’ apology to NY1 reporter

Discussion: @mikescotto, New York Times, Latest News & Headlines and Talking Points Memo

Michael Hiltzik / Los Angeles Times:

The O.C. Register's supremely ghoulish financial strategy — The Orange County Register building in Santa Ana is shown. The company is seeking to buy life insurance on its employees, not to benefit the employees' families, but to benefit the company's pension plan. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Discussion: @jimmyorr, @froomkin, @bgrueskin and @romenesko

Jim Romenesko:
Orange County Register owner blasts Los Angeles Times' story on his ‘ghoulish strategy’

Discussion: The Newspaper Guild

Katerina Eva Matsa / Pew Research Center:

Local TV audiences bounce back — Bucking a long-range trend of declining viewership, the audience for local TV news grew in all three major time slots in 2013. Viewership climbed 6% in the morning (5 to 7 a.m.) and 3% in the early evening (5 to 7 p.m.) newscasts, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis.

Discussion: The Wrap, @tv_agent, @asmitch, @danharland, @pewjournalism, @halliejackson, Erik Wemple, Advancing the Story, TVSpy, Poynter and The Huffington Post

Chris Welch / The Verge:

NFL will block streaming video inside Super Bowl stadium — To ensure that Super Bowl attendees can smoothly post Facebook status updates, tweets, and send texts during the big game, the NFL plans to block streaming video from NFL.com inside MetLife Stadium on Sunday.

Discussion: Betabeat, @pkedrosky, GeekWire and Business Insider

Alexei Oreskovic / Reuters: Facebook teams up with Fox on Super Bowl

Zachary M. Seward / Quartz:

Refresh, refresh, refresh... Twitter is monetizing your compulsiveness — Every time you refresh your tweets, Twitter banks a tenth of a penny. — The company, which will issue its first quarterly earnings report next week, considers “timeline views” the best measure of how engaged its users are.

Discussion: @ninanjira, WebProNews, AppNewser and Electronista

Associated Press:

Egypt Refers 20 Al Jazeera Journalists To Trial On Terrorism Charges — CAIRO (AP) — Egypt's chief prosecutor has referred 20 journalists from the Al-Jazeera TV network, including four foreigners, to trial on charges of joining or assisting a terrorist group and spreading false news that endangers national security.

Discussion: Guardian, Mediaite and The Newspaper Guild

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:
Journalists express solidarity in calling for release of Al-Jazeera five

Discussion: @hazemsika, @hackneylad, BBC, @felicitybarrtv, @sokkari, Al Jazeera English and The Huffington Post

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:

News of the World phone hacker was refused full immunity by CPS, jury told — Prosecutors believed Dan Evans might be ‘vulnerable’ to allegations he was making up evidence, Old Bailey hears — The News of the World phone hacker Dan Evans was told he would be not getting full immunity …

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
News of the World hacker admits lying as part of ‘enormous conspiracy’

Discussion: Telegraph, The Independent, Bloomberg, Sky News, Reuters, BelfastTelegraph.co.uk, @jackofkent and BBC

Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke / The New York Observer:

HowAboutWe...Buy Nerve and Become a Media Company? — HowAboutWe, the dating site that published editorial content, is taking it to the next level. — The company bought Nerve.com and is becoming a full-fledged lifestyle media brand about modern love, complete with stand-alone verticals and advertising.

Discussion: Folio, Fortune, TechCrunch, Capital New York, @luxnightmare and @beejoli

Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:

Time Inc. to cut nearly 500 employees: sources — The imminent layoffs at Time Inc. are expected to cut close to 500 people, or about 6 percent of the work force, reliable sources tell Media Ink. — One source said the target date for an announcement is now Feb. 4 …

Discussion: @mathewi, FishbowlNY, Mediawire Daily and WWD

Kristen Hare / Poynter:

Andy Carvin joins the Tow Center for Digital Journalism as a fellow — Andy Carvin will join the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School as a fellow. — Tow published the news on Wednesday morning, then unpublished it, but not before Google picked it up and sent …

Discussion: Andy Carvin's Waste …

Stuart Dredge / Music Ally:

Last.fm gets on-demand streaming music with Spotify partnership — It's safe to say digital music service Last.fm is going through some big changes in 2014. We wrote about its switch to YouTube as the source for its personal radio service, but now it has a Spotify partnership for fully on-demand music too.

Discussion: Last.fm, VentureBeat, Telegraph, TechHive, Digital Music News, The Verge, CNET, The Next Web, Engadget and hypebot

Michael Malone / Broadcasting & Cable:

Meredith Station Revenue Down 6.5% — Core business is up, but stations up against tough comparisons with last year's political ads — Meredith Local Media reported fiscal second quarter revenues of $104.4 million, down 6.5% from the same quarter a year ago.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Radio & Television …, PR Newswire and TVSpy

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

Why the mobile-preview feature in BuzzFeed's CMS should matter to you — When Dao Nguyen wrote a post that looked terrible on a mobile device, she knew BuzzFeed had a problem. Nguyen is BuzzFeed's vice president of growth and data, and “obviously it's not my job to write a post,” she said by phone.

Choire Sicha / The Awl:

An Oral History Of Gawker, By Reddit — When the history of the web is written, the final word will obviously belong to Reddit. What else will be left? — And: what will we remember of a network of blogs called “Gawker Media”? Here is the collected wisdom on the topic of Gawker …

Discussion: @matthardigree, @silviakillings, @melanierenzulli, @daweiner and @rilaws

Eoin Reynolds / Guardian:

Warrant didn't allow search of Matthew Keys' computer files, lawyer argues — Federal agents accused of unwarranted search through journalist's computer — Attorney for journalist Matthew Keys, indicted for conspiring with hackers, contests the legality of investigators' tactics

Casey Newton / The Verge:

Twitter adds filters to let you search videos, photos, and news — Twitter today rolled out new search features on the web to help users sort through tweets more efficiently. After entering a query in the search bar that appears on Twitter.com, you can now filter results by people, photos, videos, and news.

Discussion: ZDNet and The Next Web

Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:

Flipboard Mimics Magazines Further With A Shift To Structured Content, Revamped “Cover Stories” — Social magazine Flipboard is rethinking how it organizes content for readers. Today the company is revamping “Cover Stories,” the section within Flipboard that highlights the best and most popular content from across your subscriptions.

Discussion: Gigaom, The Next Web and MarketingSherpa Blog

Todd Spangler / Variety:

TiVo to Buy Content-Recommendations Firm Digitalsmiths for $135 Million — TiVo plans to acquire Digitalsmiths, a provider of TV and movie content discovery and recommendation services, for $135 million in cash. — Digitalsmiths offers personalized video search, recommendations and browsing …

Discussion: MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal, Deadline.com and multichannel.com/rss

Brian Steinberg / Variety:

CBS, Nielsen In Pact To Measure Video-Watching Across Different Media — The nation's most-watched broadcast TV network wants to figure out how people watch its programs when they aren't using TV to do so. — CBS, home to such big-audience programs as “The Big Bang Theory” and “NCIS,” …

Discussion: Radio & Television …, TVbytheNumbers and Deadline.com

Joe Mullin / Ars Technica:

Court: Google infringed patents, must pay 1.36 percent of AdWords revenue — Holding company Vringo used old Lycos patents to wrest a win worth many millions. — Vringo is a tiny company that purchased some patents from Lycos, an old search engine, in 2011 and then used those patents to sue Google.

Discussion: VentureBeat, Wired, The Verge, The Switch, @arstechnica, @evanphx, Search Engine Land, Gigaom and BGR

Jack Marshall / Digiday:

Elite Daily: Inside One Publisher's Viral Eruption — Publishing used to be a long, hard slog. For most, it still is, even more so these days, but in the Facebook era there are the select few — think Upworthy, ViralNova, even History in Pictures — that record eye-popping traffic-growth numbers that beggar belief.

Discussion: @digiday, @richantoniello and @eringriffith, Thanks:@jackmarshall