Mediagazer: Subdued Send-Off, but Jay Leno Is Exiting on Top (Bill Carter/New York Times)

5:00 PM ET, February 6, 2014

Top News:

Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:

Times Co. Reports Digital Subscriber Increase, but Continued Ad Declines — The New York Times Company said it added digital subscribers and slowed declines in print and digital advertising revenues during the fourth quarter of 2013, a year of transition for the newspaper publisher.

Discussion: Newsonomics, New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Capital New York, @romenesko, FishbowlNY and Mashable

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

New York Times digital subscriptions grew 19% in 2013 — The number of digital subscriptions to New York Times Company products grew from 640,000 at the end of 2012 to 760,000 at the end of 2013, a gain of nearly 19 percent. Revenue from circulation was up about 4 percent over the previous year …

Discussion: investors.nytco.com, AdAge, @mathewi, @edmundlee, @pkafka, The Huffington Post and @bgrueskin

Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:

Times chief lays out ‘a critical year’ for ad revenue — 2014 will be a “critical year in the story of advertising” at The New York Times Co., chief executive Mark Thompson said this morning. — On a conference call with Wall Street analysts following the release of the Times' fourth …

Discussion: @joshsternberg

Erik Wemple:
17 problems with the New York Observer's hit piece on the New York Times

Discussion: @bydanielvictor

John McDuling / Quartz: Can the New York Times's online readership offset its prolonged ad slump?

Sruthi Ramakrishnan / Reuters:

AOL revenue rises 13 percent as ad sales jump — (Reuters) - Digital media and entertainment company AOL Inc reported a better-than-expected 13 percent rise in quarterly revenue as its advertising revenue rose, especially from video. — The company's total revenue rose to $679 million …

Discussion: Capital New York, MediaPost, Wonkblog, NetNewsCheck Latest, Re/code, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Deadline.com, Forbes, @aoladvertising, FishbowlNY and CNET

Steven Jacobs / Street Fight:

AOL's Armstrong: 'We're Not Giving Up on Patch' — Aol's tenure as Patch's sole owner may be over, but the company's chief executive is not giving up on the hyperlocal network just yet. During an interview on CNBC Thursday morning, Tim Armstrong, who helped found the initiative and spearheaded …

Discussion: Capital New York and @vouchey

Leslie Kaufman / New York Times:
AOL Reports Solid Revenue, but Patch Tamped Down Profit

Discussion: CNBC, @joepompeo and Silicon Republic

Ryan Chittum / Columbia Journalism Review:

Gannett's print-focused paywalls flounder — The quality imperative and charging for news online — Gannett's fourth-quarter newspaper results, announced Tuesday, were basically miserable. — Revenue at its publishing segment dropped 4.6 percent in the fourth quarter from last year …

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest and Gannett Blog

Eric J. Smith / NetNewsCheck Latest:
Gannett: USA Today Inserts To Hit 35 Markets

Discussion: Reuters

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:
Newsquest increases circulation revenues as sales go down

Discussion: @greghadfield and National Union of Journalists

Emma Bazilian / Adweek:

Celebrity Weeklies, Fashion Magazines Continue to Struggle on Newsstand — Today, the Alliance for Audited Media released its consumer magazine circulation data for the second half of 2013, and once again, the narrative remains the same. Overall circulation remained relatively flat versus …

Discussion: Folio, AdAge, New York Times, Alliance for Audited Media, FishbowlNY and Talking Points Memo

Nicole Levy / Capital New York:

With newsstand decline, magazine circulation falls slightly — While newsstand sales continued to decrease, total average circulation for U.S. consumer magazines was relatively flat in the second half of 2013 compared to the same period a year earlier, according to data released by the Alliance for Audited Media this morning.

Discussion: NetNewsCheck Latest, Media & Entertainment and @mflamm_reporter

Cory Doctorow / Boing Boing:

Turks bid farewell to the Internet in the face of brutal censorship/surveillance law — Turkey's brutal new Internet law grants the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate the power to arbitrarily censor Web-pages to the individual URL level, much like the Great Firewall of China …

Discussion: Medium, Associated Press, @zeynep and Committee to Protect …

Today's Zaman:
Turkey orders deportation of Azerbaijani journalist after his tweets criticizing government

Discussion: @acarvin, @nervana_1, FOCUS Information Agency, BBC, USA Today, UPI, News24, World Bulletin, GlobalPost, Wall Street Journal and Al Jazeera English

Michael Wolff / USA Today:

Revenue prospects are dim for the recent flurry of new journalism start-ups — Revenue prospects are dim for the recent flurry of new journalism start-ups — The great foment in the news business involves journalists leaving established news organizations to strike out on their own …

Discussion: @jayrosen_nyu, @carr2n, @robenfarzad, @jamesbreiner, @myriamrobin, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic Online

Alex Barinka / Bloomberg:

Aereo Reopens New York Online-TV Service to New Subscribers — Aereo Inc., the online-television company that's battling broadcasters in the Supreme Court, reopened its service to New York subscribers after regaining enough capacity to handle demand. — People who were on a waiting list …

Discussion: TechCrunch, The Verge, @sai and @engadget, Thanks:@alexbarinka

Brent Lang / The Wrap: Fox Is ‘Cautiously Optimistic’ Supreme Court Will Stop Aereo

David S. Cohen / Variety:

Winter Olympics: How NBCUniversal's Army Of Techs Conquered Sochi — For viewers, the Winter Olympics are just 18 days of sports and entertainment. — But for NBCUniversal, they're part of vast exercise in planning and logistics that stretches back to the end of the 2012 summer games in London …

Discussion: The New Yorker Blog, Forbes, CNET, Latest News & Headlines, AdAge and Softpedia News

Paul Farhi / Washington Post:
For NBC, a challenge in covering the Sochi Winter Olympics objectively

Discussion: Mediaite, The Huffington Post, TIME, Forbes, @washingtonpost, @joesudbay, @brianstelter and ThinkProgress

American Press Institute:

American Press Institute announces major project to improve fact-checking journalism — ARLINGTON, VA—The American Press Institute ("API") announced today that it has received a grant of up to $400,000 over two years from the Democracy Fund. The grant will support research to improve political fact checking.

Discussion: @jessicaplautz, @ampress, @jcstearns and @cjr

Nick Summers / The Next Web:

Twitter transparency report shows government takedown and account info requests are on the rise — Twitter released its latest transparency report today, detailing a rise in the number of requests it received from government and copyright holders throughout the second half of 2013.

Discussion: Twitter Transparency Report, BetaNews, Business Insider, Twitter Transparency Report and Twitter Transparency Report

Amy Schatz / Re/code:
Twitter Hints at Legal Action to Release More Data on Government Requests

Discussion: The Twitter Blog, NYT Bits, Softpedia News, @marciahofmann, Digits and @mikeisaac

Rachel Bartlett / Journalism.co.uk:

Buzzfeed to appoint news editor to growing UK team — The new addition to the team will represent more than a five-fold increase on Buzzfeed UK's editorial staff since launch last March — Credit: Image by kaibara87 on Flickr. Some rights reserved — Buzzfeed UK is to add a news editor …

Discussion: @richjamesmetro

Matthew Kassel / The New York Observer:

Borowitz Lite: A Twitter King Scales Back His Online Presence — Before heading uptown to a book party at Andy Borowitz's spacious West End apartment last night, I checked his Twitter feed to see if he'd said anything interesting that day. The comedian's hilariously satirical Twitter presence …

Discussion: @stefanjbecket and @itsdgc

Brian Beutler / Salon:

Exclusive: Despite escalating government intimidation, Greenwald will “force the issue” and visit U.S. — Months after the first insinuations that he risks arrest if he visits the US, Greenwald is more concerned than ever — When big-name public figures and Edward Snowden critics …

Discussion: @buzzfeedben

Eric Athas / Nieman Journalism Lab:

What can make audio go viral? NPR experiments with building earworms for social media — Editor's note: Public radio produces a lot of audio — but it doesn't always get the attention on sharing platforms that it might deserve. Our friends at NPR Digital Services want to fix that, which led to a series of experiments.

Discussion: 10,000 Words, Radio Survivor and @charlesubaghs

Brian Solomon / Forbes:

News Corp Beats The Street Despite Advertising Sales Tumble — News Corp beat Wall Street earnings estimates for its 2014 second quarter on Thursday, sending the stock up in after hours trading — despite substantial declines in advertising revenue across the majority of the company's news business.

Discussion: @yahoofinance and Business Wire

Brian Morrissey / Digiday:

Scoreboard: Upworthy Combats Clickbait Critics With Attention Data — Upworthy has replaced BuzzFeed as the viral star of the moment, an object of both adoration and loathing for its meteoric rise on the back of clicktastic, heartwarming headlines that are shared in tremendous volume on Facebook.

Discussion: Upworthy Insider, Nieman Journalism Lab, 10,000 Words, Gigaom, Inc.com, Adweek, @michaelroston and @ampress

Bill Carter / New York Times:

Subdued Send-Off, but Jay Leno Is Exiting on Top — When Jack Paar left the “Tonight” show in 1962, he passed through a set of curtains and the camera zoomed in on a card that read: “No More to Come.” Three decades later, Johnny Carson had Bette Midler serenade him on his penultimate show …