Mediagazer: Outdoor ads that can count faces are useful for advertisers, terrifying for everyone else (James Robinson/PandoDaily)

8:00 AM ET, March 27, 2014

Top News:

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.

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, Los Angeles Times, The Verge, 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

Felix Salmon:

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 …

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

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

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

Stuart Elliott / New York Times:

Commercials to Go Live With Show Cast Members — IN another back-to-the-future moment on Madison Avenue, the season premieres on Wednesday of two series on TV Land will include, for the first time, live commercials delivered by cast members of the shows. — Live commercials were once …

Discussion: @wolfiesmom and Radio & Television …

Joshua Benton / Nieman Journalism Lab:

Columbia's Year Zero, aiming to give journalists literacy in data, is now called the Lede Program … Last fall, we told you about Year Zero, a new program out of Columbia's j-school aimed at providing a grounding in data concepts — coding, databases, algorithms, and the like — to journalists and other humanities-ish types.

Discussion: Tow Center for Digital …

Patrick Seitz / Investor's Business Daily:

Facebook The Front Page For Millennial News Readers — The go-to source of news for Americans has shifted from newspapers to broadcast television to websites with each successive generation. For millennials, those young consumers often called digital natives, their principal source of news …

Tom Dotan / The Information:

Maker Studios was losing $2-3M per month leading up to Disney sale — With Maker Acquisition, Disney Takes on a Tough Challenge — Walt Disney Co.'s $500 million buyout of Maker Studios has been described as many things: An endorsement of the YouTube economy, an admission by a media giant …

Discussion: @cityofthetown, @jessicalessin and @pkafka