Mediagazer: Before Facebook Deal, WhatsApp Was Helping BuzzFeed and Shazam Go Viral With New Platform Tools (Liz Gannes/Re/code)

5:45 PM ET, February 20, 2014

Top News:

BBC:

Brooks denies knowing of NoW hacker — Rebekah Brooks has said she never heard of a private investigator who has since been jailed for phone hacking while she was editor of the News of the World. — Mrs Brooks said that during her leadership of the paper, she never heard investigator Glenn Mulcaire's name mentioned.

Discussion: Press Association, @bbcbreaking and Kirk LaPointe's …

Herald Scotland:
Rebekah Brooks acquitted of one charge of misconduct in phone hacking trial

Lisa O'Carroll / Guardian:
Rebekah Brooks not on trial for having worked for Rupert Murdoch, court told

Discussion: New York Times and Deadline.com

Josh Halliday / Guardian:
Rebekah Brooks: NoW spent up to $250,000 on Divine Brown story

Discussion: @kamintone, Press Association and ITV

Gregg Carlstrom / Foreign Policy:

Why Egypt Hates Al Jazeera — The network's Cairo-based staff, who stand accused of running a terror cell from a luxury hotel, find themselves caught in the middle of a regional power struggle. Cairo — Last summer, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy was one of thousands of protesters who took to Tahrir Square …

Discussion: @maitelsadany and @daliaezzat_

Ahram Online:
Trial of Al Jazeera journalists adjourned until 5 March

Discussion: Poynter, Reuters, Al Jazeera Press Office and Al Jazeera America

Maggie Michael / Associated Press:
Trial of Al Jazeera reporters begins in Egypt as Human Rights Watch group denounces charges

Discussion: Guardian, @inigogilmore, Associated Press, Al Jazeera English, BBC, @leloveluck, Agence France Presse, Bloomberg, CNN, Los Angeles Times, @leloveluck, allAfrica.com, Sky News Australia and Guardian

ABC:
Peter Greste profile: Career of a foreign correspondent

Discussion: TheAustralian, @ivorytowerjourn, ABC Radio Australia, Brisbane Times, ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, NEWS.com.au, HeraldSun, @perryalexj and @sarahskynews

Om Malik / Gigaom:

Om Malik leaves day-to-day operations at GigaOm, becomes full partner at True Ventures, site raises $8M more — Now that Gigaom is all grown up, it's time for the next chapter — It's a new year (although it's well underway) and I'm excited to talk about the new phase at Gigaom.

Discussion: Om Malik, TechCrunch, @alexia, @timoreilly, @twittner, @kentgoldman, @caseynewton, @pkedrosky, @hblodget, @rafat, @msquinn, @thekenyeung, @mikeisaac, @carr2n, @laurengoode, @ashleymayer, @tonysphere, @satishd, @waltmossberg, @nitashatiku, @om, @tomkrazit and Pulse 2.0

Uri Friedman / The Atlantic Online:

Why Venezuela's Revolution Will Be Tweeted — The country's street protests are playing out dramatically on the social network. — We can't seem to agree about whether social media fuels, merely facilitates, or actually hinders protest movements. But in Venezuela, where five people …

Discussion: The Dish, @hemlockmartinis, @anupkaphle, CNN and NPR

Danny O'Brien / Electronic Frontier Foundation: Venezuela's Internet Crackdown Escalates into Regional Blackout

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:

FCC wants to improve quality of closed captioning — FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wants to improve closed captioning. — “Five wins and a very light power reese know” sounds more like gibberish than a weather forecast. — But that was the closed captioning on a WeatherNation report last month.

Discussion: TVWeek.com

Julian Hattem / The Hill:
FCC: ‘No intention’ of muzzling press

Discussion: Hit & Run, Hot Air, @sodagrrl and Mediaite

Baltimore Sun:

Baltimore Sun Media Group to buy City Paper — Staff reports — The Baltimore Sun Media Group said today it is buying the alternative weekly City Paper for an undisclosed price. The transaction is set to close in March, the company said. — The move brings together two of the Baltimore area's most well-known news organizations.

Discussion: Erik Wemple, JIMROMENESKO.COM, Poynter, @alexkoppelman, @suitsandsoot, @jfruh, @pinkgrammar, @carr2n and AAN

Liz Gannes / Re/code:

Before Facebook Deal, WhatsApp Was Helping BuzzFeed and Shazam Go Viral With New Platform Tools — Unlike mobile messaging competitors like Line and WeChat, WhatsApp has taken a resolute stance against becoming a platform that distributes games and other apps.

Discussion: Facebook, Nieman Journalism Lab, Sequoia Capital, DealBook, Fortune, CNNMoney.com, TechCrunch, The Verge, The New Yorker Blog, Gawker, Quartz, @nishachittal, The Verge, @buzzfeedben, @mattbuchanan, @ezraklein and @antderosa

Alex Weprin / Capital New York:

M.L.B., N.B.A., N.H.L. and others to launch joint digital sports channel with Time Inc. — Three of the “big four” U.S. sports leagues are teaming up to launch a new digital video channel, in conjunction with Time Inc. The channel, called 120 Sports, will launch later this spring …

Discussion: Folio, FishbowlNY, Variety, Business Insider, PR Newswire, Tubefilter, Adweek, @dylanbyers, @kevinmdraper and @capitalnewyork

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

LinkedIn's competitive advantage over other publishers: $1.5B in annual revenues — LinkedIn has the one thing other publishing platforms would kill for — We've been writing a lot lately about the increasingly blurry lines between platform and publisher, a world in which new-media entities …

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, blog.linkedin.com, Forbes, @emilybell, Re/code, Real Lawyers Have Blogs, Engadget and ZDNet

Bloomberg:

Sochi Olympics a ‘Tremendous Success’ for NBC, CEO Says — NBCUniversal, overcoming smaller prime-time TV audiences, views its Winter Olympics coverage in Sochi as a “tremendous success,” Chief Executive Officer Steve Burke said. — “In 2011 we made a major commitment of over $4 billion …

Discussion: CBS News and Forbes

Lucia Moses / Adweek:

New Report Says How Much Advertising Is Going to Piracy Sites $227 million in 2013 — In the longstanding fight to combat online piracy, there's been growing pressure on the advertisers whose ads appear on sites that steal copyrighted material. The Obama administration has called for private-sector actions to reduce piracy.

Discussion: Techie News, WorldScreen.com, @lamyj, copyrightalliance.org …, PR Newswire, @respectcreators and TorrentFreak

Jon Chesto / Boston Business Journal:

Patch's move to bring back laid-off editor is a sign that the firm is hiring journalists again — When Susan Petroni learned on Jan. 29 that she would lose her job as Framingham editor for the Patch network of news sites, the news didn't come as a big shock.

Thomas Erdbrink / New York Times:

Iran's Judiciary Closes a New Pro-Government Newspaper — TEHRAN — An Iranian newspaper aligned with the country's reform-minded new president was closed on Thursday by Iran's judiciary, only six days after its first issue, local news outlets reported. — It is unclear whether the closing …

Discussion: The Huffington Post

Arif Durrani / MediaWeek:

Guardian Labs looks beyond ads to engaging content — Anna Watkins is on a mission at The Guardian. Full of purpose and radiating energy, she is out to prove just what her favourite news brand is capable of when it comes to creating long-term, engaging commercial partnerships.

Sarah Kendzior / Politico:

What does our addiction to disaster porn say about us? — What does our addiction to disaster porn say about us? — Journalist Simon Shuster said it was “straight out of Hieronymus Bosch.” Writer Philip Gourevitch thought it was more like Bruegel. But the main word to describe …

Discussion: Mediaite, Erik Wemple, TIME, @chanders, @chanders, @jonathanliew, @yasmeen973, @mlcalderone, @buzzfeedben, @buzzfeedben and The Daily Caller

Rem Rieder / USA Today:

Awards underscore the value of important work and reinforce commitment to do it. — Among the long list of inexact sciences in the world, picking award-winners is right up there. And that's true whether the subject is movies, music or journalism. Let's start with movies.

Discussion: @nsncgroup