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, The Wrap, Telegraph, CNNMoney.com, Telegraph, Hollywood Reporter, London Evening Standard, Reuters, Digital TV Europe, Sky News Australia, City A.M., Bloomberg, Irish Independent, @edmundlee, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, ABC News, The Drum, Hollywood Reporter, BBC, Bloomberg, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, Sky News, Variety, Fortune, Engadget, Wall Street Journal and New York Times
RELATED:
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, Guardian and @emilyjg
RELATED:
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
Washington Post:
Iran confirms arrest of Post correspondent — Iran confirmed Friday that The Washington Post's correspondent in Tehran has been arrested on unspecified charges. — Gholam-Hossein Esmaili, director general of the Tehran Province Justice Department, told reporters that the …
Discussion:
The Huffington Post, Poynter, Committee to Protect …, @postbaron, Guardian, Voice of America, Fox News, @modavari and @londonoe
RELATED:
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 …
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:
Politico, Our Bad Media, Our Bad Media, @bennyjohnson, @juddlegum, @hunterw, @jktrotter, BuzzFeed, Poynter, @davidfolkenflik, @samfbiddle, @scotteweinberg and @timothypmurphy
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:
Guardian, 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 …
John Plunkett / Guardian:
Newsnight's Evan Davis: 'It could all go wrong, but it'll at least be an adventure' — Davis replaces Paxman as lead anchor and faces the challenge of attracting a bigger audience to the BBC show — Evan Davis is the new star presenter of BBC2's Newsnight - but it almost didn't happen.
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
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
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, Guardian, CourierMail, Brisbane Times, Yahoo! News and Reuters
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
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 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 …
RELATED:
Brian Fung / Washington Post:
Behind Comcast's truthy ad campaign for net neutrality
Behind Comcast's truthy ad campaign for net neutrality
Discussion:
Techdirt
Alexa Olesen / Foreign Policy:
China's Pengpai mixes public service journalism and party objectives, pleases no one — The New Website That Has China Buzzing — “Pengpai” has tens of millions of dollars in funding, and everyone in journalism is talking about it. But no one seems pleased. — GOOGLE +
Discussion:
@tealeafnation, @yuxin_gao, @odilesong and @gadyepstein