Mediagazer: UK government tackles wrongly-blocked websites (Mark Ward/BBC)

4:10 PM ET, January 31, 2014

Top News:

Luke Harding / Guardian:

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives — GCHQ technicians watched as journalists took angle grinders and drills to computers after weeks of tense negotiations. New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used …

Discussion: Guardian, RT, Hit & Run, @kemcke, @libertygirl8, @aral, @seb_ly, @emptywheel, @mlcalderone, The Verge, Poynter, Lawfare, @petersterne, @guardianus, The Huffington Post, @radleybalko, @paul__johnson, @tomgara, @timkarr and Mashable

Sam Kirkland / Poynter:

How Digital First Media hopes to transform workflow, culture of ‘newspaper factories’ — Digital First Media has unveiled plans to transform its newsrooms and put its money where its name is. “Project Unbolt” aims to address the problem of digital efforts at the mercy of existing newspaper infrastructure.

Discussion: Digital First Media, The Buttry Diary, The Buttry Diary, Gigaom, 10,000 Words, @bbginnovate and @mjenkins

Margaret Sullivan / The Public Editor's Journal:

Giving Credit: A Work in Progress at The Times — Curtis Tate, a reporter for McClatchy News's Washington bureau, spent a recent weekend generating spreadsheets from a data base on hazardous materials for his story on the increasing amount of crude oil spilled in rail accidents.

Discussion: @mlcalderone, @buzzfeedben, @fmanjoo and @mathewi

David D. Kirkpatrick / New York Times:

Egypt Tries to Reassure Journalists From Abroad — CAIRO — The government on Thursday tried to reassure foreign correspondents that they are free to report in Egypt after prosecutors filed criminal charges accusing 20 journalists for Al Jazeera television of conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Discussion: @kenroth, @sherryamin13, @williamsjon, @mlcalderone and Prof Chris Daly's Blog

Al Jazeera America:

Egypt's ‘severe clampdown’ on journalists condemned by UN … The United Nations has expressed concern about the “increasingly severe clampdown and physical attacks” on journalists in Egypt, singling out three Al Jazeera reporters held for more than a month.

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Lauren Kirchner / Columbia Journalism Review:

After Snowden: editors discuss digital and legal challenges and being called “co-conspirators” — Reporting in the post-Snowden era — A panel at Columbia discussed challenges and triumphs — In an auditorium so large that Columbia's Journalism School typically only uses …

Discussion: Politico, The Wrap, The Huffington Post, Mediaite, Capital New York, The Wrap and Tow Center for Digital …

Bloomberg:

Time Inc. Said to Weigh Leaving NYC Time & Life Building — Time Inc., the magazine unit soon to be spun off from Time Warner Inc. (TWX), is considering leaving the Time & Life Building on New York's Avenue of the Americas and moving its offices to lower Manhattan, three people with knowledge of the company's plans said.

Discussion: Mediawire Daily

Malcolm Moore / Telegraph:

China kills off discussion on Weibo after internet crackdown — Exclusive: An aggressive crackdown on Sina Weibo has seen numbers of postings on the Twitter-like microblogging site plummet according to research commissioned by the Telegraph — China has succeeded in neutering the country's …

Discussion: Tech in Asia, @telegraph, @marshallmanson, Tech in Asia and @christinelu

Jon Russell / The Next Web:
Sina Weibo users set new messaging record, but is engagement on 'China's Twitter' falling?

Discussion: Telegraph

Dave McNary / Variety:

Writers Guild of America: Companies Seeking $60 Million in Rollbacks (EXCLUSIVE) — Negotiations starting Monday — Setting the stage for contentious bargaining, leaders of the Writers Guild of America have told members that production companies are proposing $60 million in rollbacks at upcoming negotiations.

Discussion: The Wrap

Erich Schwartzel / Wall Street Journal:
Cable TV is likely to star in contract talks set to begin Monday between Hollywood and the Writers Guild

Discussion: Deadline.com

Kevin Loker / American Press Institute:

Correction strategies: 6 good questions with Regret the Error's Craig Silverman — Craig Silverman is the quotable, go-to source for your publication's stories on media errors. Outside his job as director of content at Spundge, he writes the popular Regret the Error column at Poynter …

Discussion: Fast Company and The FJP

Mark Ward / BBC:

UK government tackles wrongly-blocked websites — Net filters that are supposed to prevent children from inappropriate material have blocked access to educational and charity sites — The government is drawing up a list of sites inadvertently blocked by the filters it asked internet service providers (ISPs) to implement.

Discussion: Businessweek, Electronista, VentureBeat, CNET, @computersandlaw, UK News and Opinion, Wired.co.uk, @adrianshort, The Independent, DailyTech, Softpedia News and The Next Web

Marc Graser / Variety:

Super Bowl Ads Score Before Big Game With Massive Viewership — Scarlett Johansson's banned spot for SodaStream is the most viewed ad so far — Many of the marketers who spent $4 million for a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl have already scored with their commercials.

Discussion: Forbes, Lost Remote, AdAge, FishbowlNY, Gawker, Gigaom, The New Yorker Blog and CNET

Matthew Lynch / Capital New York:

Cathy Horyn to leave New York Times — Cathy Horyn, The New York Times chief fashion critic, is resigning from the paper effective immediately. — Times executive editor Jill Abramson and Styles section editor Stuart Emmrich made the announcement in a memo to staff Friday morning.

Discussion: Poynter, Fashionista, Columbia Journalism Review, New York Times, FishbowlNY, The New York Observer, Capital New York, New York Magazine, Hollywood Reporter, New York Magazine, Refinery29 and @sartoriallyinc

Henry Blodget / Business Insider:

Business Insider CEO touts audience and revenue growth — Business Insider Is Now Bigger Than The Wall Street Journal! — A couple of years ago, I revealed some internal information about Business Insider. Then, last year, I did it again. — Both times, I said that, if nothing horrible happened, I might continue to do it.

Discussion: Capital New York and Talking Biz News

Tim Peterson / AdAge:

Armed With Facebook Retargeting, Shazam Plans to Survive the Social TV Shake-Out — Shazam, which became one of the smartphone's first must-have apps when it was introduced in 2002 and became a dogged survivor of social-TV attrition, remains unprofitable as it invests, according to executives, in its long-term success.

Josh Stearns / Groundswell:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bite-Sized News — Last week the BBC launched Instafax, a short-form video newswire designed for Instagram where videos are limited to 15 seconds. For now, the BBC is describing their project as an experiment, but the move is part of a much larger trend that, at one point, I scoffed at.

Discussion: @jcstearns

Karl Bode / DSLreports:

Aereo Is Out of Capacity in New York City — Last night I started tinkering with a new Roku 3 and Plex, a combination that's delivering a lot of surprisingly impressive (to me, anyway) functionality promised but not delivered by more expensive devices like Microsoft's Xbox One.

Discussion: @ckanojia, TechCrunch, Fast Company, Engadget, Electronista, Business Insider, The Verge, BGR and The Loop

Jeremy Barr / Poynter:

Journalists await new drone regulations. And wait, and wait... Across the U.S., journalists are sitting, watching, and waiting on the sidelines while the Federal Aviation Administration develops rules for the safe operation of small drones. — A few journalists have experimented with drone technology …

Discussion: @trnels, @athertonkd and @poynter

Jason Abbruzzese / Mashable:

Facebook Steps Onto Twitter's TV Data Turf — What's This? — Twitter's firehose of data is about to meet a tsunami from Facebook. — After announcing its news reader app, Paper, on Thursday, Facebook has also announced that it will begin to publish anonymized data …

Discussion: Facebook, AdNews, NASDAQ.com, B&T, thedrum.com and The Next Web

Agence France-Presse:

China hits back at US criticism over foreign journalists — China on Friday hit back at Washington's condemnation of its treatment of foreign journalists, as tensions rise over a New York Times reporter who left Beijing after not receiving a visa. — PHOTOS

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

Let's face it: social TV is dead — Okay, video startups, it's time to get real: That social TV thing you've been trying for the last couple years? It's not working. — The evidence is all around us: A few days ago, Yahoo announced that it was shutting down Intonow, the social TV service it had acquired three years ago.

Discussion: @jenali and @sashaboersma

BBC:

BT revenues up on demand for broadband and sports TV — BT's sales and profits have risen, driven by record broadband demand and its new sports television service. — The company reported pre-tax profits of £617m for the last three months of 2013, on revenues of £4.6bn.

Discussion: London News, RTTNews, This is Money, BelfastTelegraph.co.uk, Guardian and Telegraph

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Daily News touts new ranking: No. 2 U.S. newspaper site — On Wednesday, Daily News employees got one of those all-staff messages that seems like its becoming more of a rarity at newspapers these days: the Good News memo. — This time, it was editor Colin Myler and president Bill Holiber announcing …

Discussion: @tedbyoung

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

The secret to having a successful paywall around your news is simple — it's about community — Everyone likes to point to the New York Times as the model for a news outlet with a successful paywall or online-subscription model, but as the authors of Columbia University's report on …

Discussion: @marklittlenews