Mediagazer: The Pay-Per-Visit Debate: Is Chasing Traffic Hurting Journalism? (Mary Clare Fischer/AJR.org)

2:50 PM 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: @yurivictor, @bendwalsh, @zimbalist, @langealexandra, @jayrosen_nyu, @dylanlathrop, @feliciasonmez, @nycsouthpaw, @kgittleson, @benjrooney, @wblau, @matthewteller, @martinstabe and @johngasaway

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: The Twitter Blog, @ryanchittum, Associated Press, TechCrunch, NBC News, Digital Trends, @brokencool, @neilshahwsj, @maura, @wsjd, VentureBreak, VatorNews, Complete Music Update, The Next Web, hypebot and 9to5Mac

Ben Sisario / New York Times:

Tweets About Music to Get a Billboard Chart — Chatter about music is everywhere on Twitter. Soon there will be a Billboard chart to rank all of it. — On Thursday, the two companies will announce a deal to create the Billboard Twitter Real-Time Charts: continuously updated lists …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Billboard, TechCrunch, @liahaberman, TIME, Hollywood Reporter and The Next Web

Kara Swisher / Re/code:

NBCUniversal-Owned DailyCandy and Television Without Pity Will Be Shut Down — DailyCandy and Television Without Pity, two high-profile Internet content properties owned by NBCUniversal, are being shuttered, a move that management told staff this morning would be occurring next week.

Discussion: Mediaite, FishbowlNY, @felixsalmon, @pamelaribon, Mashable, @taraariano, Gawker, @doreeshafrir and Variety

Nate Raymond / Reuters:

Ex-MP3tunes chief hit with $41 million copyright verdict — (Reuters) - The former chief executive of defunct online music storage firm MP3tunes was ordered to pay an estimated $41 million on Wednesday after being found liable for infringing copyrights owned by record companies and music publishers once part of EMI Group Ltd.

Discussion: Gigaom, Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Music Week, TorrentFreak, hypebot, Complete Music Update, AllAccess.com and Techdirt

Hurriyet Daily News:

Turkey blocks access to YouTube after leaked recordings of key security meeting … Less than a week after a notorious ban on Twitter went into effect, the Turkish government blocked access to YouTube on March 27. The ban was ordered hours after leaked recordings of a key security meeting were published on the video sharing website.

Discussion: Los Angeles Times, Electronista, GlobalPost, BBC, @buzzfeednews, @hdner and @arikan

Hurriyet Daily News:
Turkish court rejects Twitter's petition

Discussion: Hurriyet Daily News, New York Times, The Switch and Guardian

Eriq Gardner / Hollywood Reporter:

Aereo Tells Supreme Court Not to Kill ‘Next Technological Step’ — The upstart TV streaming service makes its last written arguments before an oral hearing next month. — The countdown begins. With less than a month before TV broadcasters face off against Aereo in a high-stakes showdown …

Discussion: TVSpy, Salon and World TV PC Streaming Video …

Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Aereo Says A Win For Broadcasters Would Have “Chilling” Consequences To Cloud Computing

Discussion: FierceCable, Adweek, TheHill, Associated Press, @jonerlichman, Broadband TV News, @virginialamnyc, Advanced Television, multichannel.com/rss, Ars Technica, Deadline.com, The Wrap, ForexTV, Telecompaper and Capital New York

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: VentureBeat, TechCrunch, MarketWatch, Business Insider, Guardian, CNET, NewStuffHere.com and @matthewphillips

Lucia Moses / Digiday:

Entertainment Weekly goes the platform route — Some of the hottest new publishers often paint themselves as platforms, open to contributions from the “people formerly known as the audience,” as journalism professor Jay Rosen has put it. Old media wants in.

Discussion: FishbowlNY, The Wrap, The Week, @nprmonkeysee, @andygreenwald, @erik_hayden and Re/code, Thanks:@lmoses

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: The Huffington Post, Kirk LaPointe's …, @msentropy, @clarecurranmp, @jayrosen_nyu, RT, @free_snowden, @jilliancyork, @aral, The Voice of Russia, News, @malarkey, @dobroyeutro and The Newspaper Guild

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: Poynter, Street Fight, @jfdulac, @mallarytenore, @jzheel, @farhip, @pottsmark, The Newspaper Guild, 10,000 Words and TVSpy

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:

Viacom in fight with small distributors over fees for networks — Small cable operators may lose access to Viacom channels including Comedy Central, home to “South Park.” (Comedy Central / March 26, 2014) — Small cable operators think Viacom, parent of MTV, Comedy Central …

Discussion: Bolivar Commercial, Island Packet, Anniston Star, CBS News, Arizona Range News, Multichannel.com and Bloomberg

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

Edirin Oputu / Columbia Journalism Review:

The Online News Association is working on a crowdsourced ethics code project — The Online News Association is working on a crowdsourced ethics code project — The Online News Association is working on “Build Your Own Ethics Code,” a toolkit to help news outlets, bloggers …

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

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.

Gwynn Guilford / Quartz:

China needs Bloomberg way more than Bloomberg needs China — Earlier this week, a veteran Bloomberg News editor revealed that he resigned in early March, saying he did so because his company “unilaterally spiked” an investigative piece on China. (Backstory here.)

Discussion: Politico, Bloomberg and Talking Biz News

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: Nieman Journalism Lab and @niemanlab

Jordan Zakarin / The Wrap:

New Crowdfunding Site Hosts Big Names - Tom Hanks Film Among First Projects — Soon, wealthy movie fans will be able to get more than a digital download and a T shirt for investing in films online. — The new Junction — which is already raising money for films with Tom Hanks, among others …

Discussion: Forbes, Guardian, @thewrap, VCPOST and New York Times

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Amazon Launching Video Box Next Week — Amazon's entry into the set top box world, which has been delayed for months, is coming next week, according to people familiar with the company's plans. — The e-commerce giant has invited reporters to gather for an “update on our video business” in New York next Wednesday, April 2.

Discussion: TechCrunch, Gigaom, Business Insider, The Verge, AppleInsider, BuzzFeed, Daily Mail, Reuters, Electronista, Los Angeles Times, Mashable, BGR, @seanbesser, Engadget, 9to5Mac, @zseward and App Advice

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Twitter pressuring companies highlighting tweets for TV not to work with Facebook — Twitter Plays Hardball With Facebook Over TV — And TV Networks Gripe — TV networks love to work posts from Twitter, Facebook and other social networks into their programming.

Mary Clare Fischer / AJR.org:

The Pay-Per-Visit Debate: Is Chasing Traffic Hurting Journalism? — Editor's Note: This is the fourth post in a series examining the influence of analytics on how news is produced. — Trying to break into the news business? — Perhaps you should master writing a viral story first.

Cotton Delo / AdAge:

LinkedIn Launches Insights Tool to Help Brands Become Better Publishers — Company Will Assign Advertisers a Score For How Well Their Content Is Performing — Ad Age Digital Conference 2014 … For going on a year, LinkedIn has been repositioning its ad business around content marketing.