Mediagazer: Why Movie Streaming Services Are Unsatisfying — and Will Stay So (Farhad Manjoo/New York Times)

9:05 AM ET, March 27, 2014

Top News:

Grand, immersive designs, increasingly common in journalism, vastly oversell smaller stories — Against beautiful journalism — Have you seen that site's gorgeous new redesign? Every article has a nice big headline, huge photos, loads of white space, intuitive and immersive scrolling …

Discussion: @benjrooney, @feliciasonmez, @kgittleson, @nycsouthpaw, @wblau, @martinstabe, @matthewteller and @dylanlathrop

Paul Farhi / Washington Post:

Charting the years-long decline of local news reporting — The Manassas News & Messenger survived Reconstruction, multiple recessions and depressions, assorted wars and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws throughout Virginia and the South. But the Internet was another matter.

Discussion: Street Fight, 10,000 Words, @jzheel, @farhip, @pottsmark, CNN Money, USA Today, TVSpy and AllAccess.com

Marie K. Shanahan / Columbia Journalism Review:
Hyperlocal news experiments swamp Connecticut's affluent Fairfield County

Discussion: Street Fight

Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEightDataLab:

Silver fires back at critic Krugman by quantifying his columns mentioning FiveThirtyEight — For Columnist, a Change of Tone — A New York Times columnist has expressed substantially more negative sentiments about FiveThirtyEight since it left The New York Times, according to a FiveThirtyEight analysis.

Wall Street Journal:

Twitter rolling out new music strategy centered on music conversations and content this week — Twitter to Relaunch Music Strategy — Move Comes Shortly After It Pulled #Music App from iTunes — Twitter Inc. is trying out a new tune. The short-messaging service is preparing to roll …

Discussion: @maura

Ronan McGreevy / The Irish Times:

‘Guardian’ threatened with closure over Snowden leaks, conference told — Deputy editor details extent to which intelligence agencies tried to stop newspaper's disclosures — The Guardian newspaper was threatened with closure by the British government over the Edward Snowden spying affair …

Discussion: @jilliancyork, The Voice of Russia, News and RT

Alex Sherman / Bloomberg:

Dish's Ergen Said to Approach DirecTV CEO White About Merger — Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charlie Ergen recently contacted DirecTV Chief Executive Officer Mike White to discuss a merger of the two satellite television companies, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

Discussion: Businessweek, The Switch, @sdkstl, The Verge, Los Angeles Times, Broadcasting & Cable, Radio & Television …, @pkafka, Business Insider and CNNMoney.com

Emerging Technology From the arXiv:

The Curious Nature of Sharing Cascades on Facebook — Most content on Facebook is shared a few times but some can be shared millions of times. Now computer scientists are beginning to understand the difference. — One of the defining features of social content is the way pictures, video and text is shared among many users.

Discussion: @niemanlab

Angela Washeck / 10,000 Words:

What NYT Now Means For the Times and Mobile Journalism — The New York Times has been a bit slow getting with the program, as mobile offerings go. NYT Now, an $8 app billed monthly, will offer top stories as curated by Times editors on mobile phones (it's not clear yet when an iPad version is coming) starting April 2.

Discussion: Poynter, TechCrunch and FishbowlNY

Mark DeCambre / Quartz:

Spotify is planning an IPO for this fall — Spotify could take itself public some time in the fall of 2014. — The popular music-streaming company has participated in informal chats with some of the investment banks likely to fight for a role in a potential IPO, sources familiar with the process said.

Discussion: USA Today and The Daily Caller

César Puerta / The Twitter Blog:

Twitter rolls out photo tagging, ability to share up to four photos in a tweet — Photos just got more social — We're rolling out two new mobile features that make photos on Twitter more social. One is photo tagging, which lets you tag the people in your photo; the other is the ability to include up to four photos in a Tweet.

Sophie Warnes / Mirror:

Blocking the publication of Prince Charles' letters has cost taxpayers £274,000 and counting — The cost of preventing the publication of Prince Charles' letters has cost taxpayers £274,481 since the government started fighting to block their publication

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Mail Online ad revenue up 51% but misses overall target — Website falls short of £5m a month rate set by Daily Mail & General Trust to meet financial year goal of £60m — Mail Online made an average of £4.6m a month in revenue in the five months to the end of the financial year, missing its £5m target.

Discussion: Press Gazette

Capital New York:

The 60-second interview: Neetzan Zimmerman, Whisper editor in chief — CAPITAL: Whisper allows its users to share their secrets anonymously as macro-image overlays. There's been a spate of privacy- and secret-concerned applications coming to market lately. Is this a sign of the NSA-watching times?

Discussion: @mathewi and @capitalnewyork

Juliette Garside / Guardian:

Broadcasters slash YouView funding leaving BT and TalkTalk to plug gap — BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Channel 5 fear platform has been hijacked by telecoms companies as a pay-lite vehicle — The BBC and other broadcasters are poised to drop their annual contribution to the YouView set top box venture by 85%.

Discussion: seenit.co.uk

Abigail Edge / Journalism.co.uk:

With paywall, UK's Times Newspapers cut losses from £72 million in 2009 to £6 million in 2013 — The Times ‘moving towards profit’ since paywall launch — According to Alan Hunter, head of digital at The Times and Sunday Times, Times Newspapers has moved from a £72 million loss …

Discussion: mUmBRELLA

Robert Andrews / Beet.TV:

New York Times CEO Mark Thompson: Finding an Upside with Custom Ad Solutions & New Paid Services — LONDON — The New York Times must halt its digital advertising decline as a priority, says CEO Mark Thompson in this interview with Beet.TV — Advertising, which historically …

Discussion: ComPost, The Huffington Post and 9to5Mac, Thanks:@beet_tv

Henry Taylor / TheMediaBriefing:
NYT CEO: 'We'll continue to have a newspaper 7 days a week for many years to come'

Discussion: @murdochdavis and New York Times, Thanks:@rorybrown

James Robinson / PandoDaily:

Outdoor ads that can count faces are useful for advertisers, terrifying for everyone else — There's no genre of advertising at more of a disadvantage than outdoor ("out of home") ads. — Online advertisers know how many people saw an ad, how many clicked, when they engaged …

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:

Aereo Says A Win For Broadcasters Would Have “Chilling” Consequences To Cloud Computing — Aereo has today filed its response brief with the Supreme Court in a case that will make or break the streaming TV startup. So far, we're in the preliminary stages of this particular case …

Discussion: FierceCable, Ars Technica, The Wrap, Deadline.com, Variety, @jonerlichman, ForexTV, Telecompaper, TheHill and Capital New York

Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:

Why Movie Streaming Services Are Unsatisfying — and Will Stay So — A team of web designers recently released an astonishingly innovative app for streaming movies online. The program, Popcorn Time, worked a bit like Netflix, except it had one unusual, killer feature. It was full of movies you'd want to watch.

Discussion: @jtoeman and @davewiner

Alexander Howard / Tow Center for Digital Journalism:

Debugging the backlash to data journalism — While the craft and context that underlies “data journalism” is well-known to anyone who knows the history of computer-assisted reporting (CAR), the term itself is a much more recent creation. — This past week, data journalism broke …

Discussion: @niemanlab, @chasedavis and @chanders

Kristen Hare / Poynter:

Willow Bay to lead journalism school at USC Annenberg — Annenberg school for Communications and Journalism — Willow Bay will be the new director of the School of Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the school announced in a press release Wednesday.

Discussion: USC Annenberg School …, @markkatches, @latimesrainey, Bloomberg, Reuters, @jeffjarvis, Variety, LA Observed, Los Angeles Times and Deadline.com

TechCrunch:

TubeMogul Files For $75M IPO, With $57M In Revenue And A $7M Net Loss For 2013 — Video ad platform TubeMogul has filed its S-1, declaring its plans to go public with an offering of up to $75 million. And it's doing so with what appears to be pretty healthy gross margins, though with an overall net loss.

Discussion: @kcw3rd, @beepartners, Bloomberg, VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, Gigaom and AdExchanger

Peter Lauria / BuzzFeed:

Order Is Restored To The House Of Murdoch — Lachan, Rupert, and James Murdoch (from left to right) — The house of Murdoch is back in order. — For the small price of dividing his media empire into two separate companies — one consisting of its high-growth cable networks …

Discussion: Capital New York, Hollywood Reporter, @anildash, @mlcalderone, Business Insider Australia and @peterlauria3