Mediagazer: Sundance Institute to Launch Lab for TV and Digital Series (Francesca Bacardi/Variety)

7:55 PM ET, March 19, 2014

Top News:

Justin B. Smith / Medium:

Bloomberg Media—A New Direction — Bloomberg L.P. has built a significant media business over the last 20 years. Our television, digital, magazine, radio and live event platforms span the globe. Our influence is considerable, but Bloomberg Media's greatest potential has yet to still be realized.

Discussion: @msquinn, @daweiner, Poynter, @brianstelter, @atossaaraxia and Talking Biz News

Brian Morrissey / Digiday:

Justin Smith's plan for where Bloomberg Media goes next — It has now been 100 days since former Atlantic Media CEO Justin Smith took over as CEO of Bloomberg Media. He has used that time to craft his vision for where Bloomberg goes next. — In Smith's eyes, Bloomberg Media's opportunity is immense.

Discussion: TVNewser, Mediawire Daily and Talking Biz News

Matt Turck:
Can the Bloomberg Terminal be “Toppled”?

Discussion: @rafat

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:
Watch out, business publishers — Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith says he is coming for you

Discussion: @brianstelter

Allison Schrager / Quartz:

The problem with data journalism — The recent boom in “data-driven” journalism projects is exciting. It can elevate our knowledge, enliven statistics, and make us all more numerate. But I worry that data give commentary a false sense of authority since data analysis is inherently prone to bias.

Discussion: @kleinmatic, @urbaninstitute, @sisiwei, @noahpinion, @glichfield, @moorehn, @dataeditor and @jenlucpiquant

The Atlantic Online:

David Frum Named Senior Editor at The Atlantic — Washington, D.C. (March 19, 2014)— The veteran political commentator and author David Frum is joining The Atlantic as a senior editor beginning March 31, James Bennet, editor in chief of The Atlantic, announced today.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, New York Times, Politico, Capital New York, Mediaite, @atrios, The Daily Caller, @mlcalderone, @shanedingman, @jaywattsiii, @over_rated and @gzornick

Leon Wieseltier / The New Republic:

Nate Silver could learn a lot from those op-ed columnists he maligns — Nate Silver could learn a lot from those op-ed columnists he maligns — I wish to say a word or two in defense of “bulls**t.” That is Nate Silver's meticulously chosen term—he does nothing imprecisely—for opinion journalism.

Mary Clare Fischer / American Journalism Review:

No Analytics for You: News Sites Grapple With Who Can See Data — Editor's Note: This is the second post in a series examining the influence of analytics on how news is produced. — When journalist Russell Brandom first came to The Verge, he was on the “weird” beat.

Discussion: @mathewi, @reckless, @utknightcenter and AJR.org

Ben Branstetter / Daily Dot:

Newsweek's Bitcoin facepalm got Internet culture wrong — When Newsweek ceased publishing their print edition at the end of 2012, ending an 80-year stint as a stalwart of the American news industry, it was largely seen as the first national casualty of the digital era, a titan felled …

Discussion: Computerworld, PandoDaily and The Huffington Post

Eugene Volokh / Washington Post:
Reverse defamation, the Newsweek Bitcoin story, and Satoshi Nakamoto

Discussion: @jerrybrito and @marshallyoum

Abigail Edge / Journalism.co.uk:

Why The Information chose to follow a paywall model — Jessica Lessin, founder and editor-in-chief of The Information, outlines the site's approach to paywalls, which she believes should be driven by high-quality content — Credit: Dreamer, via Wikimedia Commons

Michael Holden / Reuters:

News Corp executives pressured ex-reporter to take phone-hacking rap - court — (Reuters) - The former royal editor at Rupert Murdoch's now defunct News of the World told a London court on Wednesday senior figures at News Corp.'s British newspaper arm put pressure on him to take the flak for phone-hacking to protect others.

BBC: Phone-hacking trial: Andy Coulson ‘urged silence on hacking’

Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:

Rap Genius wants to annotate the news — For publishers today, context is king. The recent surge in interest in explanatory journalism is predicated on the idea that there's a lot of value — and hence money — in publishers explaining dense topics to readers in a way that they can understand and easily digest.

Discussion: @joshdlondon, @digiday, @mathewi and @ryansholin

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

How data from Financial Times readers lead to more readers and revenue — The Financial Times “broke the law of large numbers last year,” Ryan Chittum wrote in CJR: It added digital subscribers at a fast rate, seven years after it launched its paywall. It now has 652,000 paying subscribers …

Discussion: @raju and @poynter, Thanks:@ryanngastwirth

Erik Wemple:

Politico CEO declares ‘early success’ with Capital New York — Last December, Politico CEO Jim VandeHei engineered a re-launch of Capital New York, the news site that Politico's publisher had purchased in September. The re-boot involved hiring more staffers, going heavy on policy coverage …

Discussion: Politico and Capital New York

Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:

NAA's new chairman says newspaper biz should have collaborated sooner — At the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference Tuesday, Robert Dickey, the president of Gannett's U.S. Community Publishing division, said U.S. papers should have collaborated more before the meteor hit:

Discussion: Newspaper Association …, NetNewsCheck Latest, Financial Times, PandoDaily, Gigaom and Nieman Journalism Lab

Emerging Technology From the arXiv:

Data Mining Reveals How Conspiracy Theories Emerge on Facebook — Some people are more susceptible to conspiracy theories than others, say computational social scientists who have studied how false ideas jump the “credulity barrier” on Facebook. — During the Italian elections last year …

Discussion: @kissane, @kdnuggets and @dailygrail

David E. Frank / Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly:

Jury returns $563K libel verdict against Boston Herald — A Suffolk Superior Court jury has found that the Boston Herald committed actual malice in a story which falsely reported a woman had engaged in “sexual acts” with a Bridgewater inmate during a 2009 visit.

Discussion: Poynter, Media Nation, bizjournals, Boston Herald and The Boston Globe

Angela Haggerty / The Drum:

Edward Snowden wouldn't have come to us if a paywall had been in the way, says Guardian's deputy chief executive — US whistleblower Edward Snowden would not have given his material to the Guardian had the website sat behind a paywall, according to the Guardian's deputy chief executive, David Pemsel.

Marc Weisblott / Canada.com:

John Stackhouse is no longer the editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail — There will be a new editor-in-chief at the Globe and Mail next week. — David Walmsley, who was most recently the director of content at CBC News, will return to the national newspaper where he previously worked …

Discussion: @canadadotcom, @newsillustrator, @taylor_owen, @mathewi and @scroll

Ryan Chittum / Columbia Journalism Review:

Too good to check: study of robot journalism spawns coverage showing journalism's weaknesses — Automatic approval for weak study on robot journalism — Poor reporting accepts a flimsy report as gospel — “Could robots be the journalists of the future?” asks The Guardian.

Discussion: BBC, Motherboard and The Huffington Post