Mediagazer: Amazon Makes Plea to Authors to Quiet Down (Judith Rosen/Publishers Weekly)

12:40 AM ET, July 24, 2014

Top News:

Amazon Makes Plea to Authors to Quiet Down — Since Douglas Preston began circulating a letter to other marquee and midlist authors late last month in an effort to remove writers from the Amazon-Hachette dispute, he has captured nearly 1,000 author-signatures.

Discussion: Melville House Books, @alisonajones, @dblobaum, @david_annandale, @brandenhart and Bookseller news

The Authors Guild:
Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors

Discussion: @barryeisler and @hughhowey

Nick Summers / The Next Web:

Reddit Live is now official, lets anyone create their own breaking news live blog — Today, Reddit officially launched its own live-blogging platform. The company calls it Reddit Live and the feature has actually been in “semi-open beta” for a few months now - you may have stumbled across …

Discussion: VentureBeat, The Inquisitr News, Daily Dot, Mashable and @mattnavarrauk

Nicole Levy / Capital New York:

Tom Wallace and John Bellando out in big Condé Nast executive shuffle — Condé Nast chief operating and financial officer John Bellando and editorial director Thomas Wallace are exiting the company, C.E.O. Chuck Townsend told staff this morning in a memo obtained by Capital.

Discussion: Folio, AdAge, Media & Entertainment, MediaWire Daily, Poynter, Digiday, New York Magazine, WWD Media Headlines and FishbowlNY

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Twitter's New User Pitch Means a New Advertising Pitch, Too — Twitter is trying to tell Wall Street that it doesn't have a user problem. Just a counting problem. — In recent months, the company has been telling investors not just to focus on the number of people who use the service once a month …

Trushar Barot / BBC College of Journalism:

How BBC News covered Indian elections on WhatsApp and WeChat — Earlier this year I blogged about the first editorial experiments that BBC News was about to conduct using instant-messaging platforms. Since then it's been a busy few months in which we have developed and run pilots on WhatsApp …

Discussion: @kevglobal and @jonrussell

Rolfe Winkler / Wall Street Journal:

YouTube Music's Head Quits, a Setback to Paid Service — The head of YouTube's effort to launch a music subscription service is leaving, marking yet another hurdle for the long-delayed project. — Chris LaRosa, YouTube's product manager in charge of music, will be leaving Google this Friday to join a startup.

Discussion: 9to5Google, Re/code, Variety, Billboard, Daily Dot, Tubefilter, AndroidHeadlines.com, hypebot, @jherskowitz, @wsjd, Mashable, Android Police and SocialTimes

Associated Press:

DEATH SENTENCE GIVEN IN AP PHOTOGRAPHER'S KILLING — KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A Kabul court announced Wednesday that the Afghan police officer charged with killing Associated Press photographer Anja Niedringhaus and wounding veteran AP correspondent Kathy Gannon has been convicted and sentenced to death.

Discussion: Poynter

Priya Rajasekar / Global Investigative …:

India's Media — Missing the Data Journalism Revolution? — The Mumbai-based IndiaSpend, India's first nonprofit data journalism center. — How can media make sense of a country that has over 1.2 billion people (about 17 percent of the global population), close to 800 languages …

Discussion: @govindethiraj and @raju

Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:

Bloomberg LP's VC fund, which financed Newsle, keeps a focus on finding useful information — Bloomberg Beta's first year as a VC — Bloomberg LP started as a financial terminal business, then it extended into the media world. Now, it's trying its hand at venture capital.

Tim Schooley / Pittsburgh Business Times:

Pittsburgh sports columnist leaves newspaper to start his own reader-supported site — Trib columnist Kovacevic to launch his own sports website — Dejan Kovacevic quit as sports columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in order to launch his own website, DKonPittsburghsports.com.

Discussion: @mathewi, @craigcalcaterra, @vosdscott, @dejan_kovacevic, @jayrosen_nyu, Pittsburgh City Paper and JIMROMENESKO.COM

Jason Lynch / Quartz:

Charts: How we watch TV now — LOS ANGELES—Americans are watching more television than ever. They're just doing it on their own schedule. — That was the big takeaway as research gurus from CBS, FX, Fox, and Showtime spoke to reporters at the Television Critics Association's summer press tour …

Discussion: @zimbalist

Alexia Tsotsis / TechCrunch:

Kumo Is Raising $50 Million To Break The TV Bundle — Despite Aereo's trouble in the Supreme Court, the hope of disrupting the TV industry is still alive in the tech world. — A new startup led by Aol and Dish veteran Neil Davis is in the process of raising $50 million to fill that void.

Discussion: @efeng

Áine Kerr / Storyful Blog:

Mandy Jenkins joins Storyful as Editor of the Open Newsroom — We are proud to announce that Mandy Jenkins is joining Storyful as Editor of the Open Newsroom. — Jenkins, formerly of Digital First Media's Project Thunderdome and the Huffington Post, will help to oversee the highest standards …

Discussion: Zombie Journalism, @craigsilverman and @jeffjarvis