Mediagazer: BSkyB in talks to acquire 21st Century Fox's Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia for estimated €10B (Reuters)

10:35 AM ET, July 18, 2014

Top News:

Forbes Media Agrees To Sell Majority Stake To A Group Of International Investors To Accelerate The Company's Global Growth — Forbes Family Welcomes Significant Investment by Investor Group — Investors Are Committed to Forbes' Brand, Strategy, Values and Management …

Discussion: Forbes, AdAge, Poynter, @jboorstin, New York Times, Business Insider, Fox Business, @danprimack, @pkafka, @jackmarshall, @edmundlee and Talking Biz News

Seth Fiegerman / Mashable:

Forbes Sells Majority Stake to International Investors For $475 Million — Forbes, an iconic American financial media brand, will soon be largely owned by investors in Hong Kong. — Forbes Media announced Friday that it has agreed to sell a majority stake to a group of international investors led …

Discussion: Folio and Re/code

William Turvill / Press Gazette:

Russia Today London correspondent resigns in protest at ‘disrespect for facts’ over Malaysian plane crash — A Russia Today reporter based in London has resigned with immediate effect in protest at the station's coverage of yesterday's plane crash in Ukraine.

Discussion: Guardian, @leonidragozin, The Huffington Post, @paulxharris, @johnprescott and The Week

Michael Calderone / The Huffington Post:

CNN Removes Reporter Diana Magnay From Israel-Gaza After ‘Scum’ Tweet — NEW YORK — CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”

Discussion: Mediaite, Talking Points Memo, Pressing Issues and BuzzFeed

Glenn Greenwald / The Intercept:
NBC News Pulls Veteran Reporter from Gaza After Witnessing Israeli Attack on Children

Jack Shafer / Reuters:

Streaming media services such as Netflix make a Fox-Time Warner deal as bad a bet as '90s newspaper buys — Dear Mr. Murdoch: Save yourself 80 billion bucks — The first time Rupert Murdoch tried to acquire Warner, Ronald Reagan was completing his first term as president …

Discussion: @mccarthyryanj

New York Times:
Fox Challenges ESPN with Pursuit of Time Warner

Discussion: New York Post and Wall Street Journal

Yoree Koh / Wall Street Journal:

Twitter expected to unveil new metrics that count people who see tweets in embeds and on TV — Under Pressure, Twitter Tries to Resize Itself — Company Is Expected to Unveil New Metrics That Will Show Breadth of Its Audience — After a troubling start as a public company …

Discussion: @pkafka and Business Insider

Amazon.com:

Introducing Kindle Unlimited: Unlimited Reading and Listening on Any Device—Just $9.99 a Month — Read freely from over 600,000 books—available on Kindle devices, as well as free Kindle reading apps for iOS, Android and more — Listen to thousands of audiobooks from Audible …

Discussion: TechCrunch, ABC News, Gigaom, Wall Street Journal, PC Pro, @willentrekin, Re/code, @laurahazardowen, @laurahazardowen, NBC News, The Next Web, Engadget and TechCrunch

Stuart Dredge / Guardian:

Microsoft plans to spin-off Nokia MixRadio as a standalone music streaming service, iOS and Android versions now a possibility — Nokia MixRadio spins out of Microsoft as standalone streaming music service — Personal radio app will still be preloaded on Windows Phones, but now has scope to launch on iOS and Android too

Discussion: RAIN News, Music Ally, SlashGear, Music Week, The Next Web, WinBeta, TIME and hypebot

Reuters:

BSkyB in talks to acquire 21st Century Fox's Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia for estimated €10B — BSkyB prepares to roll the dice again with European expansion — * BSkyB in talks to buy Fox's German and Italian units — * Italian business hit by macro economic pressure

Alexis C. Madrigal / The Atlantic Online:

How to Teach Google What a Story Is — Google wanted to solve a problem we can all understand. People take so, so many photographs and yet they actually do very little with them. A chosen few are posted to Instagram. Most sit in vast wastelands of thumbnails on phones or in iPhoto never …

Agence France-Presse:

Ethiopian bloggers, journalists charged with ‘terrorism’ — Addis Ababa (AFP) - A group of Ethiopian bloggers and journalists detained for nearly three months have been charged with terrorism for having links to an outlawed group and for planning attacks, a judge said Friday.

Discussion: @markc_anderson, ABC News, Committee to Protect … and The Raw Story

Mike Shields / Wall Street Journal:

After Shutting Down Xbox Studios, Microsoft Faces Trust Issues With Advertisers — Microsoft 's decision to shutter the Xbox Entertainment Studios division, as part of 18,000 layoffs announced on Thursday, has shocked and angered several top ad buyers, causing some to once again question the company's commitment to advertising.

Discussion: The Next Web, VideoNuze Analysis and Forbes