Mediagazer: Mail Online ad revenue up 51% but misses overall target (Mark Sweney/Guardian)

9:30 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: @yurivictor, @jayrosen_nyu, @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, @jfdulac, 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.

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

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: TechCrunch, VentureBreak, Digital Trends, @wsjd, @maura, The Next Web and VatorNews

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: @jayrosen_nyu, @dobroyeutro, @msentropy, @jilliancyork, The Voice of Russia, News and RT

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

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, Digital Trends, Business Insider, The Verge, @sdkstl, Los Angeles Times, Broadcasting & Cable, Radio & Television …, @pkafka and CNNMoney.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

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

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.

Gabriele Steinhauser / Wall Street Journal:

Top EU court says ISPs may have to block copyright infringing websites — Top EU Court Backs Internet Bootlegging Ruling — Decision Could Raise Costs for Internet Service Providers — BRUSSELS—The European Union's highest court said on Thursday that Internet service providers …

Discussion: Bloomberg

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

Discussion: @julesmattsson

Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:

German TV giant ProSiebenSat.1 buys 20 percent of YouTube network The Collective — Germany's ProSiebenSat.1 has acquired a 20 percent stake in the YouTube multi-channel network Collective Digital Studio, also known under the much simpler moniker The Collective.

Discussion: Bloomberg and Hollywood Reporter

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.

Thanks:@lmoses

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: @tdobson and seenit.co.uk

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

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 …

Discussion: @pandodaily

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

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

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: Wall Street Journal, @wolfiesmom and Radio & Television …

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

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.