Mediagazer: Bloomberg LP's VC fund, which financed Newsle, keeps a focus on finding useful information (Ricardo Bilton/Digiday)

7:05 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: @brandenhart, Melville House Books, @alisonajones, @david_annandale, @dblobaum and Bookseller news

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

Discussion: @hughhowey and @barryeisler

Committee to Protect Journalists:

Journalists missing, fixer kidnapped, press banned in eastern Ukraine — The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns a series of recent anti-press violations in Ukraine's eastern region of Donetsk. In the past two days, at least two journalists have gone missing, while pro-Russia separatists abducted …

Discussion: @simonostrovsky, @fredharrison, @ivancnn, @simonostrovsky, @grahamwp_uk, @geoffpyatt, OSCE and Guardian

RT:
RT stringer among 4 people taken hostage in besieged Ukraine's Donetsk - report

Discussion: Daily Mail, English pravda.ru, News24, kyivpost.com and @catherina_news

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Mail Onlines ad revenues soar by nearly 50% — Online growth offsets decline at Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, making £15m in revenues in three months to end of June — Mail Online made £15m in ad revenues in the three months to the end of June

Discussion: Press Gazette, Financial Times and Press Association

Natalie Mortimer / The Drum:

Express Newspapers to cut 30% of editorial jobs — Express Newspapers, the publisher of Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday is to cut around 200 of its editorial staff in its London, Broughton and Scottish offices. — Paul Ashford, group editorial director …

Discussion: National Union of Journalists and @pressgazette

Tim Cushing / Techdirt:

German Government Tries To Censor Publication Of Its List Of Censored Websites — A few weeks ago, an anonymous internet user was able to acquire and subsequently extract a website blacklist used by Germany's Federal Department of Media Harmful to Young Children (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien [BPjM]).

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: @percolate and @zimbalist

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

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: @raju, @govindethiraj and @niemanlab

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 …

Discussion: @digitalshields and @pkafka

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, @jonrussell and @trushar

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.

Discussion: @bloomberg and @dandoctoroff

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: @craigcalcaterra, @vosdscott, @mathewi, @dejan_kovacevic and @jayrosen_nyu