Mediagazer: ScrollMotion VP: tablet magazines were flawed; pubs should build in utility, customization (Ricardo Bilton/Digiday)

8:15 AM ET, August 25, 2014

Top News:

Its Edge Intact, Vice Is Chasing Hard News — In early 2010, I wrote a column about Vice in which Shane Smith, one of the founders, suggested that he and his band of insurgents were building “the next MTV.” And then there was a promise to become “the next CNN” — outrageous claims at the time …

Discussion: @ellenbarrynyt

Mark Sweney / Guardian:

Vice News sparks debate on engaging younger viewers — Traditional broadcasters such as BBC and Channel 4 examine how to attract generation focused on YouTube and social media — Vice News report on The Islamic State has attracted more than 2.5m views on YouTube

Discussion: @eelcoromeijn

Rukmini Callimachi / New York Times:

Peter Theo Curtis, Abducted by Nusra Front in 2012, Is Released — An American journalist held captive for nearly two years by Al Qaeda's official branch in Syria has been freed, according to a representative of the journalist's family and a report on Sunday by the Al Jazeera network.

Fox News:

US, UK eye rapper as British-born militant who beheaded journalist James Foley — American and British intelligence officials are eyeing a British-born rapper as the militant who beheaded journalist James Foley. — A senior Western intelligence official told Fox News that 23-year-old …

Discussion: The Sunday Times, CNN, New York Times, Guardian, Softpedia News, CNN, UK - The Huffington Post, NY Daily News, Washington Post, Telegraph, India & World, Middle East, Sky News, BBC and The Independent

Christopher Massie / Columbia Journalism Review:

To publish or not: James Foley video spotlights media's tough call — Remnick, Baquet and other editors discuss their decisions about when to publish disturbing images — The obvious implication of The New York Times' famous motto that its pages contain “All the News That's Fit to Print” is that not all news is fit to print.

Discussion: The Atlantic Online, Latest News & Headlines, Business Insider, @cjr, @storyful, BetaNews, USA Today and The Intercept

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Following layoffs memo, Jeff Zucker tells CNN employees they need to “do less....with less” — CNN chief: News operation will do less with less — CNN chief Jeff Zucker recently shared not so encouraging words with some of the news operation's employees, many of whom have been bracing for potential jobs cuts.

Discussion: TVNewser and Inside Cable News

Gabriel Sherman / New York Magazine:

Time Inc. Faces a Looming Existential Magazine Deadline — What should a magazine company be now? The most storied one in America has to come up with an answer fast. — In the 92 years since Henry Luce co-founded Time Inc., there have been just seven journalists to hold the title of editor-in-chief.

Discussion: @raju, @gabrielsherman, @mattbuchanan, @harrymccracken, @sarahw, @pkafka and FishbowlNY

Rick Edmonds / Poynter:

Erosion of newspaper coverage in Ferguson and similar places reduces civic engagement; solutions are digital — Was Ferguson a ‘news desert’ until two weeks ago? — Coming late to the Ferguson story, I have a modest thought to add to the ongoing discussion of why the police shooting …

Discussion: Latest News & Headlines, Mashable, @abeaujon, @kellymcb, @aspiegelnpr and @libbyanelson

Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
The Guardian and St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial pages are teaming up for Ferguson coverage

Discussion: Gawker, Latest News & Headlines, KSDK-TV, Washington Post, @tonymess, @mccanner, American Journalism Review, @losowsky and St. Louis Public Radio

Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
HuffPost's Ferguson Fellow: ‘This is huge for me’

Discussion: @mattdpearce, @sujatamitradc, @benmullin, @ryanjreilly and The Huffington Post

Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:

ScrollMotion VP: tablet magazines were flawed; pubs should build in utility, customization — “The tablet magazine has been flawed from the start” — Magazine publishers have a tablet problem. According to one designer, they always have. Four years after Apple introduced the iPad, tablet apps are stagnating.

Zachary M. Seward / Quartz:

Quartz has a new look—and for the first time, a homepage — We just shipped version 3.0 of Quartz, which you are looking at right now. It's our second major redesign in as many years, a rapid pace of reinvention that makes good on our promise to continually evolve and improve on what a purely digital news organization can be.

Discussion: @zseward, @chiaraalbanese, @danieldrepper, @davidbauer, MediaWire Daily and Talking Biz News

Peter Kafka / Re/code:

Upworthy's Traffic Goes Lower, but Revenue Is Climbing — The last time we checked in on Upworthy, the viral Web-sharing startup, we found that its traffic was sagging. Not a big deal, said CEO Eli Pariser: The company was training more people to find stuff to share, so it hadn't spent as much time sharing stuff.

Source:

Why journalists from NYT and BuzzFeed published raw data from Ferguson reporting on GitHub — Thoughts on recent dataset postings from BuzzFeed and the New York Times — Thoughts on recent dataset postings from BuzzFeed and the New York Times — Last Friday, the New York Times published …