Mediagazer: Financial Times publisher Pearson posts first-half net profit of £227M, sales fell 6.5% to £2.05B (Simon Zekaria/Wall Street Journal)

7:55 AM ET, July 25, 2014

Top News:

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: Financial Times, MarketWatch, Life Style Extra, Reuters, Pearson 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 …

Discussion: New York Times, Poynter, Guardian, Committee to Protect …, @modavari, @londonoe, @benweinthal, Fox News, The Huffington Post, @lrozen, BuzzFeed, @thekarami, @max_fisher, @doranimated, Mediaite, FishbowlDC, Politico and New York Magazine

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, 9to5Google, Android Police, The Wrap, App Advice, Broadcasting & Cable and Eurogamer.net

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: The Wrap, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, ABC News, Bloomberg, BBC, Reuters, Hollywood Reporter, Agence France-Presse, Sky News, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Variety, Fortune and Engadget

Peter Lauria / BuzzFeed:

Why Harry Potter And The Simpsons Are Key To A Fox-Time Warner Deal — Uniting the Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox production studios would give Rupert Murdoch control over the two largest film and television catalogs ever assembled, creating a highly lucrative annuity and allowing …

Discussion: @buzzfeedben and @peterlauria3

Reuters:
Carey pressured from both sides of Fox Time Warner deal to stay in job

Discussion: Los Angeles Times

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 …

Discussion: The Verge and Gigaom

Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:

Joshua Topolsky, editor in chief of The Verge, joins Bloomberg as editor of a series of new online ventures, will be replaced by Nilay Patel — Josh Topolsky of The Verge Is Joining Bloomberg — Josh Topolsky, the co-founder of the technology website The Verge, will join Bloomberg …

Discussion: The Verge, @joshuatopolsky, @piercedavid, @justin_b_smith, Poynter, FishbowlNY, @jbenton, @tyrangiel, The New York Observer, Talking Biz News, Capital New York and Business Insider

Dean Starkman / Columbia Journalism Review:
Bloomberg struggles to break out of the box

Discussion: @abeaujon, Talking Biz News, MediaWire Daily and BuzzFeed

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: CourierMail, Brisbane Times, Yahoo! News, Reuters, Firstpost and Guardian

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

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 …

Brian Fung / Washington Post:
Behind Comcast's truthy ad campaign for net neutrality

Discussion: @b_fung and @timkarr

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, Politico, @bennyjohnson, @hunterw, @juddlegum, @jktrotter, BuzzFeed, @davidfolkenflik, Poynter, @samfbiddle, @scotteweinberg and @timothypmurphy

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: Amazon.com, New York Times, Bloomberg, @chris_ciaccia, @kylezink, @forbes, TIME, 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, PandoDaily, @mcclure111, @absodeviation, @jeresig and @wikisignpost

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