Top News:
Juliette Garside / Guardian:
BSkyB to buy Sky Italia and Sky Deutschland for £4.9bn cash — Broadcaster to buy Fox's 57.4% interest in German firm, while Italian purchase to use cash and National Geographic sale — BSkyB is to become a pan-European broadcasting company after agreeing to buy Sky Italia …
Discussion:
Broadcasting & Cable, CNNMoney.com, The Wrap, Telegraph, Reuters, Associated Press, City A.M., Bloomberg, Irish Independent, Wall Street Journal, @edmundlee, Reuters, ABC News, Hollywood Reporter, BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Sky News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Variety, Fortune and Engadget
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Kamal Ahmed / BBC:
BSkyB - James Murdoch's master plan comes closer to fruition — Today's announcement that BSkyB has made a £4.9bn bid to buy Sky Deutschland and Sky Italia from 21st Century Fox is, on the surface, a straightforward play by a British pay-tv business to become a European giant.
Discussion:
USA Today
Peter Lauria / BuzzFeed:
Why Harry Potter And The Simpsons Are Key To A Fox-Time Warner Deal
Why Harry Potter And The Simpsons Are Key To A Fox-Time Warner Deal
Discussion:
@buzzfeedben and @peterlauria3
Financial Times:
Financial Times says digital subscriptions up 33%, making up 2/3 of paying audience; overall circulation up 13%, year-on-year — Financial Times - 2014 interim statement — The FT's total circulation is at an all time high - up 13 per cent year on year to more than 677,000 across print and online.
Discussion:
Press Gazette and @emilyjg
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Simon Zekaria / Wall Street Journal:
Financial Times publisher Pearson posts first-half net profit of £227M, sales fell 6.5% to £2.05B — Pearson Swings to Profit Despite Fall in Sales — Financial Times Publisher Confirms Full-Year Guidance — LONDON—U.K. publisher Pearson PLC on Friday swung to a first-half profit …
Discussion:
Pearson, MarketWatch, Life Style Extra, Reuters and EducationInvestor magazine
Bloomberg:
Pearson Cutting 4,000 Jobs as First-Half Sales Decline — Pearson Plc (PSON), the publisher of the Financial Times, said today it will have cut a total of about 4,000 jobs in the two years through 2014 and reported a sales decline of 6.5 percent for the first half.
Discussion:
Wall Street Journal
Ernesto Londoño / Washington Post:
Post reporter, other journalists appear to have been detained in Iran — Three American citizens, including The Washington Post's correspondent in Iran, appear to have been detained this week in Tehran, U.S. officials and the newspaper said Thursday. — Washington Post foreign editor Douglas Jehl …
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:
Google's $1B purchase of Twitch confirmed — joins YouTube for new video empire — Google has reached a deal to buy game livestreaming firm Twitch for $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the matter. — Citing unnamed sources, Variety said back in May that Google had made an all-cash offer …
Discussion:
ITProPortal, Softpedia News, Electronista, @dannerdcubed, @lucas_gonze, Deadline.com, TechCrunch, Pocket-lint, Mashable, Gizmodo, Polygon, Variety, BGR, The Wrap, 9to5Google, App Advice, Android Police, Broadcasting & Cable and Eurogamer.net
John Plunkett / Guardian:
London Live applies to Ofcom to slash local programming — Four months after launch, TV station wants to cut primetime local content from three to just one hour a day — London Live's local evening programming includes Not the One Show, a reference to BBC1's The One Show.
Discussion:
The Drum, @jake_kanter, @jimwaterson, broadcastnow.co.uk and Broadband TV News
Press Gazette:
Four security guards accused of helping to destroy Rebekah Brooks evidence have case against them dropped — Four security guards accused of helping to hide or destroy evidence around the time of Rebekah Brooks's arrest will not face trial, a court was told today.
Amy Schatz / Re/code:
Major League Baseball Cries Foul on Net Neutrality Proposal — Count Major League Baseball among those who aren't wildly excited by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's proposal to allow broadband providers to offer fast-lane Internet access to content companies. — Last week, the sports league's …
Dara Kerr / CNET:
Judge takes issue with Apple's $450M e-books settlement offer — After the tech giant agrees to pay millions in the e-book price-fixing lawsuit, the presiding judge says, “I'm concerned about the terms of the settlement.” — Apple — Skirting an upcoming trial, Apple agreed to pay $450 million …
Discussion:
Re/code, The Register and 9to5Mac
Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:
Google Granting Around Half Europe's Search De-Index Requests — But Won't Show Its Workings — Following a meeting between European regulators and search engines yesterday, to discuss the latter group's implementation of a recent European Court of Justice privacy ruling …
Discussion:
Reuters and Washington Post
Samantha Smith / The Australian:
Peter Greste to appeal against conviction and jail term in Egypt … JAILED Australian journalist Peter Greste's family will appeal against his seven-year sentence in Egypt in an effort to “exhaust” all legal channels until a political solution can arise. — Greste's parents are already …
Discussion:
Press Gazette, CourierMail, Brisbane Times, Yahoo! News, Reuters, Firstpost and Guardian
Alex Ben Block / Hollywood Reporter:
Time Warner Cable Signs on for ESPN's New SEC Net — ESPN closed the deal, which also includes Bright House Networks, to bring carriage of the newest college conference network to about 60 million U.S. TV homes. — The college football conference that has been a big winner on the gridiron in recent years …
Discussion:
SI.com and Los Angeles Times
Michael Sebastian / AdAge:
Conde Nast's Golf World Magazine Goes Digital-Only — Fewer Than 10 People Laid Off — Creativity Top 5 — The 67-year-old Golf World magazine is closing its print edition and shifting entirely to digital media, where it will be part of the Golf Digest website, the magazine said Wednesday.
Discussion:
Associated Press and Folio, Thanks:@msebastian
J.K. Trotter / Gawker:
BuzzFeed Editor Caught Lifting Text From Yahoo! Answers — Yahoo! Answers, one of the great artifacts of Internet history, is intently studied at viral news website BuzzFeed, where its trove of half-literate questions (and even less literate answers) has supplied material for at least fifty different posts and listicles.
Discussion:
Our Bad Media, Our Bad Media, Politico, @bennyjohnson, @juddlegum, @hunterw, @jktrotter, BuzzFeed, Poynter, @davidfolkenflik, @samfbiddle, @scotteweinberg and @timothypmurphy
Alex Weprin / Capital New York:
Time Warner Cable C.E.O.: F.C.C. workload may delay Comcast merger — In a memo sent to Time Warner Cable employees Thursday, C.E.O. Rob Marcus said that a strained F.C.C. could delay approval for the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. — In the letter, Marcus cited …
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Jacob Silverman / Politico:
The State Department's Twitter Jihad — Can a bureaucracy out-tweet the terrorists? — The skirmish began like so many others: with a tweet. On June 26, a Twitter user with the handle @AboudouAbdallah, who identifies himself as living in Morocco and supporting the terrorist group Islamic State …
Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Amazon Drops 5% After Missing In Q2 With In-Line Sales Of $19.34B, Larger Than Expected Loss Of $0.27 — Following the bell today, Amazon reported its second quarter financial performance including a $0.27 per share loss on revenue of $19.34 billion. Analysts had expected Amazon to lose $0.15 on revenue of $19.34 billion.
Discussion:
New York Times, Business Wire, Talking Biz News, TIME, Bloomberg, @chris_ciaccia, @kylezink, @forbes, Forbes, Publishers Weekly, Gigaom, TechCrunch, Hollywood Reporter, The Wrap, AdAge and ZDNet
Abby Phillip / Washington Post:
Wikipedia blocks anonymous edits (and trolling) from a congressional IP address — A Wikipedia administrator has blocked anonymous edits from a congressional IP address for 10 days because of “disruptive” edits being made by someone located in the House of Representatives, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation confirmed.
Discussion:
Mediaite, The Wire, The Hill, @insidejobscast, @jeffbearer, @saladinahmed, @jimmackaywnew, @postbaron, @mcclure111, @absodeviation, @jeresig, @wikisignpost and PandoDaily