Mediagazer: Comcast and Time Warner Cable execs grilled by lawmakers (Joe Flint/Los Angeles Times)

6:05 PM ET, April 9, 2014

Top News:

Peter Lauria / BuzzFeed:

CBS, Viacom, Disney and other media that count on Comcast for income stay silent on merger — The Absent Voices In The Room — Why CBS, Time Warner, Viacom, 21st Century Fox, Disney, Discovery and other big media companies weren't at Comcast's Senate panel hearing Wednesday. — AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Discussion: @buzzfeedben, @ceciliakang, @brianstelter and @jackshafer

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

Joe Flint / Los Angeles Times:
Comcast and Time Warner Cable execs grilled by lawmakers

Discussion: The Wrap, Capital New York, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, @erk248 and The Huffington Post

Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
Comcast: Without Time Warner Cable, we can't compete against Google, Netflix

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

Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:

NYT should have acknowledged WSJ's persistent legal fight to open up Medicare data — Times Should Have Nodded to Wall Street Journal in Medicare Story — The New York Times led its print edition today with an extensive treatment of an important story: that a small fraction of doctors …

Discussion: USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Mediaite, NPR, @jackshafer, @erikwemple, The Week, The Verge and Associated Press

Brad Stone / Businessweek:

Automattic, Steward of Wordpress, Snaps up Longreads — In the desert of short news bites and unsatisfying blog posts, the website and weekly email Longreads is a refreshing anomaly. Since 2009, the small Oakland-based company has been linking to stories of over 1,500 words …

Discussion: WordPress.com News, LongreadsLongreads, TechCrunch, Re/code, @brewpr, The Verge and The Next Web

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: Columbia Journalism Review, Mediaite, 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, Reuters, @mathewi, @yoavlurie, Forbes and TechCrunch

Ryan Chittum / Columbia Journalism Review:

Frothy media reporting about tech companies could signal another financial bubble — The press and the tech bubble — How the groundwork might be laid for another Big One — Here's a headline you don't like to see if you're worried about a possible social-media/tech bubble:

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 and Erik Wemple

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.

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 …

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

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: TheGazette, KCRG-TV and The Times Herald

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 …

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

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