Mediagazer: Exclusive: Automattic seeking to raise more than $100 million (Erin Griffith/Fortune)

8:30 PM ET, April 15, 2014

Top News:

Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:

Former Pulitzer juror's opinion: the prizes stay relevant by providing benchmarks, inspiration — What's the Point of the Pulitzers? — Do the Pulitzer Prizes still matter? Do they stand for anything except journalistic self-congratulation? The question comes up every year around this time.

Discussion: @anoushasakoui, @mattzeitlin, Associated Press, The Week, Melville House Books, The Huffington Post, NPR, Realscreen and Boing Boing

Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEight:

Do Pulitzers Help Newspapers Keep Readers? — The 2014 Pulitzer Prizes were announced Monday afternoon. Congratulations to all the finalists and winners of the annual journalism awards. We're fans of high-quality journalism at FiveThirtyEight, and we're hoping to see the organizations …

Discussion: Poynter, DailyNewsGems, AJR.org, The Daily Caller, The New York Observer, @zeynep, @markcoddington, @pkafka, @jbenton, Publishers Weekly, Kirk LaPointe's …, New York Magazine, The Pulitzer Prizes, Guardian, Mediaite, The Center for Public …, Media Nation and BBC

Roy Greenslade / Guardian:
Pulitzer prize for The Guardian - silence from the UK's right-wing press

Discussion: Pressthink, The New Yorker Blog, The Awl, @paullewis, @stuartmillar159, Agence France-Presse, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, @giner, Times of India, The Times of Israel, @schmidtphi and Washington Post

Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed:

The originator of “Retweets are not endorsements” is NYT editor Patrick LaForge, in '07 or '08 — Meet The Man Behind Twitter's Most Infamous Phrase — “It makes me cringe now,” the creator says. — The internet is an unforgiving historian with endless primary sources …

Discussion: @alexmcdaniel, @cwarzel, @jimmycdii and @sewellchan, Thanks:@steverubel

Erin Griffith / Fortune:

Exclusive: Automattic seeking to raise more than $100 million — The round will value the company behind WordPress.com at north of $1 billion. — FORTUNE — Automattic, the company that runs blogging platforms WordPress.com and WordPress VIP, is out raising between $100 million and $150 million …

Discussion: VentureBeat, Wall Street Journal, Gigaom and Mashable

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:

Yahoo Beats Street For Q1 On Sales Of $1.09B, EPS Of $0.38 But Flat Display Sales Of $438M — Yahoo has just reported its Q1 earnings, with ex-TAC revenues of $1.087 billion and earnings per share of $0.38, and net income of $314 million. — That just about beat analysts' expectations on revenue …

Discussion: Forbes, AdAge, Guardian, Business Wire, Forbes, Globe and Mail, @lucas_shaw, Tech Trader Daily, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, ZDNet, CNET and Re/code

Brian Steinberg / Variety:

NBCUniversal To Launch Video Series Via Hulu, Web and VOD — With pitches slated in next few weeks from digital players like YouTube and AOL, NBCU makes a play to keep digital ad dollars from migrating to rivals — NBCUniversal is best known for the hundreds of TV shows it airs on its broadcast and cable outlets.

Discussion: Media & Entertainment, The Wrap, Home Media Magazine and @bristei

Orhan Coskun / Reuters:

Turkey says Twitter agrees to close some accounts, no tax deal yet — (Reuters) - Twitter will close some accounts in Turkey but will not for now set up an office there as the government wants, a senior Turkish official said late on Monday after talks over a dispute which saw the government ban the site for two weeks.

Discussion: @nipped, Today's Zaman …, @dangillmor, Wall Street Journal and Mashable

Nate Raymond / Reuters:

Apple cannot escape U.S. states' e-book antitrust cases: judge — (Reuters) - Apple Inc on Tuesday lost an attempt to dismiss lawsuits by state attorneys general accusing it of conspiring with five major publishers to fix e-book prices. — U.S. District Judge Denise Cote's ruling paves …

Discussion: Gigaom and Bloomberg

Tony Haile / American Journalism Review:

Give Journalists the Right Metrics, Not Pay-for-Performance — That there is even a debate about whether newsrooms should have access to metrics is in some ways surprising. Of all the professions, journalists are some of the most inquisitive, tenacious and focused upon the impact of their work.

Discussion: Gigaom, @carr2n, @jeffjarvis, @burtherman, @annaleighclark, @treybarrineau, @jonathanshainin and AJR.org

Journalism.co.uk:

English-language news network The Local plans to expand into eighth country in Europe — How The Local reaches 4 million people across Europe - Daily Post ‘handing over control to readers’ via Facebook - Q&A: Career advice for journalists #askajourno

Wall Street Journal:

Broadcasters weigh contingency plans in the event of losing Supreme Court battle with Aereo — Broadcasters Seek an Aereo ‘Plan B’ — The nation's largest television broadcasters are considering contingency plans in case they lose a high-stakes Supreme Court battle against online video startup Aereo Inc.

Discussion: TVNewser, TVSpy, @amolsharmawsj and Engadget

Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:

Why some publishers are killing their comment sections — The promise of the Internet, we are often told, is the opportunity to have a two-way dialogue. Anyone visiting a publisher's comment section, however, might wonder whether that's a promise or a threat. — Internet comments have long been a conundrum.

Discussion: Nieman Journalism Lab, @samkirkla and @digiday