Mediagazer: The Midsize Newspaper Is Toast (Justin Fox/Bloomberg View)

1:30 PM ET, July 29, 2015

Top News:

Lucia Moses / Digiday:

CNN, Daily Mail, and National Geographic have staffers dedicated to creating Snapchat stories — Publishers are hiring Snapchat specialists — Snapchat's real benefits to publishers remain unproven, but some have seen enough potential upsides to hire teams of specialists to figure out content strategies on the platform.

Discussion: Media Wire Daily and @sarahmarshall

Sage Lazzaro / The New York Observer:

NY Mag Lost Over 500,000 Page Views on Cosby Cover Story During DDoS Attack — The magazine did, however, find some positives in resorting to their social media safety net — The anonymous hacker behind the cyber attack that brought down New York magazine's website for nearly 12 hours …

Discussion: Poynter, Guardian and Rolling Stone

Claire Atkinson / New York Post:

Music group blasts CBS for promoting illegal download sites — A music group is ripping mad at CBS chief Les Moonves for helping the rip-off artists. — Apple and Google are working to disable illegal download sites, but CBS' CNET tech site is promoting them, according to an industry-wide music coalition.

Discussion: @eriqgardner

Justin Fox / Bloomberg View:

The Midsize Newspaper Is Toast — Everybody who's been paying attention knows that it's been a tough decade for American newspapers. But every once in a while it's worth checking in on just how bad it's been. The release of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' annual newsroom census …

Discussion: @jontalton and @herbgreenberg

Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
ASNE newspaper census 2014: 10.4% drop in jobs YoY, 21.58% drop for papers with 100K-250K circulation, minority journalists make up 12.76% of newsrooms

Discussion: Poynter, ASNE, Guardian, Chicago Tribune, The Root, Newsmax, News at FIU, News & Tech, E&, @yinkawrites, Talking New Media, @niemanlab and @mccarthyryanj

Dominic Ponsford / Press Gazette:

Meirion Jones: ‘Everyone on right side of the Savile argument has been forced out of the BBC’ — Three days after finishing work on Panorama documentary The Fake Sheikh Exposed, producer Meirion Jones was told his services were no longer required by the programme.

Discussion: Guardian and Daily Mail

Justin Ellis / Nieman Lab:

The Financial Times built a handy dashboard that gives you a snapshot of the U.K. economy — Should you find yourself wondering the status of industrial production in the U.K., or the status of the housing market, or, for that matter, unemployment rate, the Financial Times has just the tool for you.

Kevin Roderick / LA Observed:

Ted Rall dropped by LA Times over blog post about LAPD — Nicholas Goldberg, the LA Times' Editor of the Editorial Pages, has posted a note atop a May 11 blog post by opinion cartoonist Ted Rall citing “inconsistencies” and concluding that “Rall's future work will not appear in The Times.”

Discussion: Mediaite, Los Angeles Times, aNewDomain, Los Angeles Times and NewsBusters

Jasper Jackson / Guardian:

BBC Trust has cut expenses bill by almost two-thirds since 2007 — Members of the corporation's governing body claimed just over £50,000 in a year, with chair Rona Fairhead spending nearly £1,000 on taxis — The BBC Trust has cut its expenses bill by almost two-thirds since …

Discussion: Prolific North

Kurt Wagner / Re/code:

Twitter added just 2M MAUs in Q2, excluding “SMS Fast Followers” — Twitter Asks for More Time to Fix Things — And Freaks Out Wall Street — Twitter added just two million new core users last quarter, and while it also beat Wall Street revenue estimates, investors still aren't buying the Twitter story.

Discussion: VentureBeat, Fortune, VentureBeat, Adweek, BuzzFeed, Mashable, Financial Times, Stratechery, @jguynn, NetNewsCheck Latest, MediaNama, @jguynn, @benthompson, @pkafka, @twitterir, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Ad Age, Hollywood Reporter, The Verge, Engadget, Variety, VentureBeat, SocialTimes, Reuters, Forbes and ZDNet

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
Twitter reports better-than-expected Q2 revenue of $502M with just 316M MAUs, a number that includes “SMS Fast Followers”

Discussion: The Wrap, Fortune and TechCrunch

Tim Healy / Independent.ie:

Judge clears use of ‘The Times Irish Edition’ by UK paper — The ‘Irish Times’ has failed to get injunctions restraining the London ‘Times’ using the words “The Times Irish Edition” in promoting a new digital Irish edition of the UK newspaper. — Google

Discussion: RTÉ, Press Gazette and Guardian

New York Times:

Behind the Iranian trial of Washington Post reporter, Jason Rezaian, and how his ability to cultivate sources may have aroused suspicion and led to detention — Iran's Trial of Jason Rezaian Illustrates Perils Faced by Reporters — TEHRAN — For Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter …

Discussion: @nytimesworld, @ahmed, @ellenbarrynyt, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal

Tara George / MediaShift:

Operating with fewer resources, news startups are blurring the lines between business and editorial — Should a Local News Startup Have Reporters Write Press Releases? — At a conference of local news entrepreneurs in Philadelphia recently, speakers were sharing tips on innovative ways …

Discussion: @msidealab

Jonathan Soble / New York Times:

Japan's Nikkei vies for global clout with the $1.3B purchase of The Financial Times — Nikkei Vies for Global Clout With Splurge on The Financial Times — TOKYO — Not long after he took over as president of Japan's dominant business newspaper in April, Naotoshi Okada delivered a message to his 1,300 reporters and editors.

Discussion: Talking Biz News