Mediagazer: Why CNN Is Launching A News Show Built For Twitter (Mike Shields/Wall Street Journal)

4:00 PM ET, April 9, 2014

Top News:

Edward Wyatt / New York Times:

Senate Committee Begins Its Review of Comcast Deal — WASHINGTON — Comcast took its case for acquiring Time Warner Cable to Capitol Hill on Wednesday, arguing at a Senate hearing that its proposed $45 billion takeover would benefit consumers by generating greater investment …

Discussion: Talking Biz News

Palmer Gibbs / Sunlight Foundation Blog:

Comcast and Time Warner Cable give big to some senators reviewing merger — Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., is a vocal critic of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Franken is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which holds a hearing about the merger on Wednesday.

Discussion: Forbes, The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, @emilysteel, The Huffington Post, @sunfoundation, CNNMoney.com, Engadget and The Verge

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:

Comcast: Without Time Warner Cable, we can't compete against Google, Netflix — Comcast says it has “one arm tied behind our back” on eve of Senate hearing. — Comcast today filed a 175-page “public interest statement” with the Federal Communications Commission to explain …

Free Press Blog:
More Than 50 Public Interest Groups Oppose the Comcast-Time Warner Cable Merger

Discussion: The Switch, The Huffington Post, @katyonthehill and The Switch

Mike Shields / Wall Street Journal:

Why CNN Is Launching A News Show Built For Twitter — As every media company from Yahoo to Microsoft to Crackle looks to up the amount of original Web video it produces, here comes CNN. — The television news network has been in the middle of major overhaul undertaken …

Discussion: Mediaite, Columbia Journalism Review, Lost Remote, @jcstearns, @jennifersaba and @mdornic

Harrison Weber / VentureBeat:

Q&A site Quora raises $80M to build the next Wikipedia — Quora believes it has built the best question and answer service on the Internet. Now, it's looking to Wikipedia for inspiration. — With a fresh $80 million in the bank, Quora's head of business operations, Marc Bodnick …

Discussion: Gigaom, Re/code, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, TechCrunch, Reuters, @mathewi, @yoavlurie and Forbes

Jim Bach / American Journalism Review:

A New Code: SPJ Struggles to Define Rules of Online Journalism — The Society of Professional Journalists, after leaving its code of ethics untouched for nearly 18 years, has released a revised draft that includes, for the first time, updated guidance on how journalists should behave in the rapidly changing field of digital news.

Discussion: @rogerswrites

Joel Achenbach / Achenblog:

Journalism is aggregation — While reporting a story last week I had a sudden revelation: I'm an aggregator. I'm one of them. I'm the person that I've been kvetching about for years now. “They think information wants to be stolen.” You know the rant.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab

Carrie Battan / The New Republic:

Podcasts: The Last Refuge of the C-List Celebrity (and Bret Easton Ellis) — oday we're going to talk about goddamn camera phones, and everybody wanting to take a picture of every goddamn thing," the rapper-turned “Law and Order: SVU” star Ice T said recently. “ This is not gangster. This is not fly.

Keith J. Kelly / New York Post:

Hibu lays off nearly 200 journalists — Chalk up another flop to another plan to turn a profit with digital hyper-local media. — Hyper-local was the all the rage a few years ago, but there are few success stories in 2014. — Hibu, which was the former Yellow Pages, had an aggressive plan …

Discussion: The Times Herald, TheGazette and KCRG-TV

Stuart Elliott / New York Times:

Oxygen Shifts Focus to Millennial Viewers — In another sign of the growing influence of the millennial generation on Madison Avenue, the Oxygen cable channel will be revamped to appeal to a modern young woman, offering several new series with a multicultural focus.

Discussion: @sulinnichols

Edirin Oputu / Columbia Journalism Review:

WNYC is beefing up its data journalism — New York's public radio station is expanding its data reporting — WNYC's data team has tracked a lot over the years: cicadas, flood zones, and even wireless internet access on the subway. Now the station's newest project, a community data experiment called …

Helienne Lindvall / Guardian:

Muso a friendly way to fight piracy — Finding your music on infringing sites feels like being burgled, but a producer and songwriter has come up with a solution — Imagine if you downloaded a file from an illegal filesharing site or cyberlocker and, when you tried to open it …

Craig Silverman / Poynter:

Publications aim to make debunking as popular as fake images — Adrienne LaFrance and Matt Novak live in different cities and write for different sites in the Gawker Media network. LaFrance is a freelancer who contributes to several other publications. Novak works full-time on his blog, Paleofuture, which is part of Gizmodo.

Discussion: @thatbebulls**t, @poynter, @history1800s and @caitlindewey

John Glenday / The Drum:

Time borrows $1.4bn to buy British sister company — US publishing giant Time has announced its intention to raise $1.4bn of debt in order to purchase the UK operations of the media brand which are currently owned by Time Warner. — Time the publishing arm of Time Warner …

Discussion: International Business Times, Telegraph and Bloomberg

Randall Chase / Associated Press:

Guild can intervene in fight for Philly newspapers — WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — A Delaware judge says the union representing hundreds of workers for Philadelphia's two largest newspapers can participate in the dissolution of their ownership group. — The judge this week granted a request …

Mike Isaac / Re/code:

Reddit Execs Ellen Pao and Jena Donlin Get Serious About the Site's Business (Q&A) — Reddit is one of the biggest sites on the Web. Now it just needs to start making it rain. — Since 2005, the online community message board and link-sharing site has risen from an esoteric bulletin board service …

Discussion: @pkafka, @laurahazardowen, @niemanlab and The Switch

Paul Sandle / Reuters:

Vice Media targets more mainstream TV deals after Fremantle tie-up — (Reuters) - Vice Media, the New York-based group whose edgy reportage has proved a hit with young people, plans to sell more content to mainstream TV groups after signing such a deal with “American Idol” producer Fremantle Media, it said on Wednesday.

Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:

Marty Baron is partly right about the Washington Post and Ezra Klein — but mostly wrong — It's hard enough being the editor of a newspaper like the Washington Post at the best of times — and these are clearly not the best of times — but it has to be even harder to try and defend your decision …

Discussion: Felix Salmon and @dankennedy_nu, Thanks:@mathewi