Mediagazer: Dear Obama, spare us the press-freedom lecturing (Jack Shafer)

9:10 PM ET, January 31, 2014

Top News:

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: @kateaurthur, @bartongellman, @normative, @jimasher, @mathewi, @fmanjoo, @mlcalderone, @buzzfeedben and The Huffington Post

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

Erik Wemple:

Omidyar news venture: Where's the leadership? — In November, First Look Media, the startup general-interest news project bankrolled by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, announced it had hired former Rolling Stone Executive Editor Eric Bates. The announcement carried some trademark features of a job memo …

Discussion: @jayrosen_nyu, @nbj914, @janinegibson and @carloslozadawp

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, 10,000 Words, @mathewi, @bbginnovate, Gigaom, @vivianschiller and @mjenkins

Jack Shafer:

Dear Obama, spare us the press-freedom lecturing — Wearing his best straight face, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney lectured China on press freedom yesterday. In a redundant official statement, he accused Beijing of restricting “the ability of journalists to do their work” and “imped[ing] their ability to do their jobs.”

Discussion: Guardian and CNNMoney.com

Agence France-Presse: China hits back at US criticism over foreign journalists

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

David D. Kirkpatrick / New York Times:
Egypt Tries to Reassure Journalists From Abroad

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

Owen Bowcott / Guardian:

Secret hearings could allow police to seize journalists' notes if bill passes — Requests for notebooks and files must currently be made in open court - but clause in deregulation bill could change that — The seizure of journalists' notebooks, photographs and digital files could be conducted …

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

Lauren Kirchner / Columbia Journalism Review:

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 it for its graduation ceremonies, hundreds attended the panel discussion “Journalism After Snowden” on Thursday evening.

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

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 and @christinelu

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

Discussion: Tech in Asia and Telegraph

Rebecca J. Rosen / The Atlantic Online:

Forgotify: The Tool for Discovering Spotify's 4 Million Unheard Tracks — The idea first came to Lane Jordan when he heard an odd little fact: Around 20 percent of tracks on Spotify—some four million songs—had been played exactly zero times. — Four million songs! That got Jordan thinking.

Discussion: Guardian, Wired.co.uk, AppNewser and Fast Company

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

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

Who wants competition? Big cable tries outlawing municipal broadband in Kansas — Lobbyist for Comcast, Cox, TWC wrote bill to stifle rivals like Google Fiber. — Legislation introduced in the Kansas state legislature by a lobby for cable companies would make it almost impossible …

Discussion: WebProNews, DSLreports and Boing Boing

Gavin O'Malley / MediaPost:

Click-Fraud Costs Marketers $11B, IAB Issues Key Report — The Interactive Advertising Bureau on Thursday announced its latest attack on click fraud, which has never been a bigger threat to the industry. — Led by its Traffic of Good Intent Task Force, the IAB issued the final version of its click fraud best practices today.

Discussion: @chasnote

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, @delrey and Talking Biz News

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

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

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.

Bloomberg:

Disney Said to Be Close to Settling Dish Ad-Skipping Suit — Walt Disney Co. (DIS) is close to a programming agreement that would settle litigation over Dish Network Corp. (DISH)'s ad-skipping technology, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

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.