Top News:
Mark Sweney / Guardian:
Sky Media expected to pick up £330m-a-year deal, giving it more than 30% of the market — Sky Media expected to pick up £330m-a-year deal, giving it more than 30% of the market — BSkyB is set to become a TV ad sales giant, increasing its control of the £3.8bn UK market to over 30% …
Discussion:
Forbes, AdAge and @marksweney
RELATED:
Ben Sisario / New York Times:
Television Revenue Drives Viacom Profit
Television Revenue Drives Viacom Profit
Discussion:
Broadcasting & Cable and Deadline.com
Georg Szalai / Hollywood Reporter:
Viacom to Acquire U.K.'s Channel 5 for $760 Million
Viacom to Acquire U.K.'s Channel 5 for $760 Million
Discussion:
Guardian, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Variety, Los Angeles Times, MediaTel, ABC News, Gizmodo UK, London News, Bloomberg, broadcastnow.co.uk, Capital New York, Reuters and Telegraph
Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:
NYT's big circulation gains include copies of international edition — Average Monday-Friday circulation at The New York Times was 15 percent higher for the six months ending March 2014 than it was in the same period the year before, new figures from the Alliance for Audited Media say.
Discussion:
NetNewsCheck Latest, FishbowlNY, investors.nytco.com and @poynter
RELATED:
Leo Mirani / Quartz:
Why LinkedIn is morphing from a social network into an online newspaper — On May 5th, LinkedIn will be celebrate its 11th birthday. It announced last month that 300 million people had signed up for the professional social network. This evening, LinkedIn will report earnings for first quarter …
Susan B. Glasser / Politico:
“The New York Times Is Not Going to Turn into BuzzFeed” — A frank conversation with the former editors of the Post and the Times. — Between them, Bill Keller and Marcus Brauchli have edited all three great American newspapers—the New York Times for Keller, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for Brauchli.
Discussion:
Nieman Journalism Lab, @abeaujon, @sbg1, @brianstelter, @ethanklapper, @neil_irwin and Kirk LaPointe's …
Howard W. French / Columbia Journalism Review:
How the rise and fall of Bloomberg's China investigative unit harmed the news org's reputation — Bloomberg's folly — For foreign correspondents in China, breaking stories that the censored Chinese press can't touch has long been a core part of the mission.
Discussion:
stream.aljazeera.com and Talking Biz News
Jordan Crook / TechCrunch:
Vine improves desktop website, adds navigation and discovery features — Vine Launches A Six-Second YouTube — When Vine first launched on the web, all you could do was view your stream and check out profiles for individual users. The desktop version came with TV Mode, too …
Discussion:
The Next Web, The Verge, Mashable and The Week
Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:
TV execs want Netflix to be more like Hulu and Amazon — If TV executives had their way, then Netflix would look a whole lot more like its network-owned competitor Hulu or Amazon's streaming service. Executives from Nickelodeon, FX, Showtime and AMC explained that they would like Netflix …
Nicole Levy / Capital New York:
Time Inc. to build a standalone portal for video — Time Inc. is launching a platform for digital video content from all its magazine brands, the company announced at its inaugural presentation for the Digital Content Newfronts on Thursday morning at the Hudson Theater in midtown.
Discussion:
Folio, Adweek and Business Wire
Andrew Beaujon / Poynter:
Fuse lays off staff after sale — The music-oriented TV channel Fuse is laying off staffers Thursday, its ownership tells Poynter. “We announced in early April that we reached an agreement to sell Fuse to SiTV Media, and these changes are part of that transition,” the company says in a statement.
Discussion:
@poynter
Wall Street Journal:
AT&T considering acquisition of DirectTV, in deal likely worth at least $40B — AT&T Has Approached DirecTV About Possible Acquisition — AT&T has approached DirecTV about a possible acquisition of the satellite TV firm, say people familiar with the situation, the latest sign of a possible shakeup in the television industry.
Discussion:
Forbes, Deadline.com, Washington Post, Re/code, multichannel.com, Variety, Broadcasting & Cable, Los Angeles Times, BGR, App Advice, Consumerist, VatorNews, VentureBeat, @paulcheesbrough, Electronista, The Wrap, Rapid TV News, Mashable, Variety, Engadget, The Next Web, The Verge, Deadline.com and Business Insider
Alexandra Steigrad / WWD:
ASME Crowns Year's Best Cover, Talks Video — ASME CROWNS BEST COVER, TALKS VIDEO: Media types braved the rain Wednesday to attend the American Society of Magazine Editors luncheon in Manhattan, during which the organization crowned the best magazine cover of the year.
Discussion:
FishbowlNY and @alexsteigrad
Alex Weprin / Capital New York:
Twitter has bet the farm on television, but does TV care? — Twitter has bet the farm on television. In its stated goal to become “The Global Town Square,” the service has tied itself to TV networks and companies through its “Amplify” program, arguing that when people watch something on TV …
Discussion:
The Atlantic Online, Pocket-lint, Slate, TechPresident, Quartz, NPR and Talking Biz News
Oliver Knox / Yahoo! News:
Meet Jessica Allen, the aide scouring Twitter to act as liaison between press and White House — When the White House hates your tweet — For the Obama White House, tweets from reporters are a kind of early warning system. It's up to Jessica Allen, 24, to sound the alarm.
Bloomberg:
Sony cuts earnings forecast by 67.5% due to quickly shrinking Blu-ray sales, restructuring expenses — Sony Cuts Earnings a Third Time as Recovery Founders — Sony Corp. (6758), the maker of Xperia smartphones and PlayStation consoles, cut its earnings for the third time in a year …
Discussion:
New York Times, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Hollywood Reporter
Erik Wemple / Washington Post:
NBC seeks dismissal of Zimmerman suit over 911 tape edits — Lawyers for NBC News in March urged a Florida circuit court to dismiss the defamation suit filed in December 2012 by George Zimmerman, who was acquitted last July of second-degree murder in the Trayvon Martin case.
Paul Farhi / Washington Post:
For White House reporter Lesley Clark, so close and yet so far — Reporter Lesley Clark once got close enough to President Obama at an international summit to notice that he was chewing gum. “I think it was that nicotine stuff,” she recalls. — Okay, not exactly a major scoop.
Garrett Goodman / TheMediaBriefing:
A lesson in metrics: how Bleacher Report gamified journalism for 1.3 billion monthly pageviews — There's a peculiar dichotomy in the media at the moment: while digital editors debate the merits of metrics, and whether writers should be shown analytics about their own pieces …
Discussion:
@garrettgoodman
Janko Roettgers / Gigaom:
Online video could soon come to your cable box, with help from Frequency — Some cable providers may still not like the idea of having a Netflix app on their cable box, but everyone wants to have access to short-form online content, said Frequency CEO Blair Harrison during an interview at the Cable Show in Los Angeles Wednesday.
Andrew Bossone / Columbia Journalism Review:
Foreign journalists know they'd be lost, or even dead, without the locals they hire, but do they give them credit back home? — The thankless work of a ‘fixer’ — Foreign journalists know they'd be lost, or even dead, without the locals they hire, but do they give them credit back home?
Discussion:
@deepakadk, @_ms_r, @moealin and The Newspaper Guild
Ken Doctor / Politico:
Why Silicon Valley VCs suddenly love the media. Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/ story/2014/05/1-destroy-the-village-2- save-it-105923.html#ixzz30T2DCWHG — Are we living in the golden age of digital media? It certainly looks that way to Ken Lerer.
Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Journalism Lab:
Building an analytics culture in a newsroom: How NPR is trying to expand its digital thinking — Being a digital staffer at a traditional news organization means doing digital work, sure — but it often also means serving as an evangelist for the web. That can take a mixture of convincing, cajoling, and showing by example.
Discussion:
@j450nk, @mallarytenore and @nprdesign
Chris Smith / Guardian:
Data analysis tops publishers' priority for investment in 2014 — The AOP's annual member survey finds publishers plan to increase their investment in data-led technology and skills — For all of the hype surrounding data and its importance to the media and marketing industries …
Discussion:
@davehendricks
Mike Farrell / Multichannel News:
Networks look to major events to boost TV Everywhere amid slow adoption — Cable Show: Poor Marketing, Low Awareness Hinder TVE — But Nets Say Marketing Service Around Events Can Boost Adoption — Los Angeles - While lackluster marketing efforts and poor consumer awareness have slowed …