Top News:


Limited resources and paywalls limit some publishers experiments with AMP while others go all in — Diving all in or dipping a toe? How publishers are approaching Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative — “Mobile web performance is bad — I challenge you find someone who disagrees with that …
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WordPress.com sites now automatically support Google's AMP to speed up mobile page loading; self-hosted WordPress sites can enable AMP with a plugin — WordPress Sites Now Support Google's AMP To Make Mobile Pages Load Much Faster — Google has some big plans when it comes to making the web faster on your mobile phone.


Google AMP Is Less About Beating Facebook at News, More About Gobbling Up the Mobile Web — When Google looks at the mobile Web, it sees so many things it does not like. — Websites aren't built for mobile. Too much code hobbles pages. And everything, oh man, everything is too slow.


Yahoo stops signing up new publishers to its ad network Yahoo Recommends as company faces uncertain future — Yahoo is pulling back on its Outbrain/Taboola competitor — The content recommendation wars have claimed another casualty: Yahoo Recommends, Yahoo's two-year-old widget …
Discussion:
WebProNews, dmwmedia.com, AdNews and @lmoses


Warner Bros. Acquires DramaFever from SoftBank — Warner Bros. has bought DramaFever, a streaming-video subscription service specializing in Korean TV shows and film dramas, and is eyeing the deal as paving the way to launch new over-the-top services. — WB is acquiring DramaFever …


Google launches Project Shield, a free DDOS mitigation service, to all non-state news sites — Google Wants to Save News Sites From Cyberattacks—For Free — Mehdi Yahyanejad thought that after Iranians voted on June 12, 2009, he would finally get some rest.
Discussion:
Engadget, The Next Web, blog.wan-ifra.org, The Next Web and 9to5Google


Amazon Studios Paid Staggering $15M for Woody Allen's Next Film — EMAIL ME — The untitled movie, starring Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively and Kristen Stewart, was acquired sight unseen — and at three times what Sony Pictures Classics paid for Allen's previous film.
Discussion:
@julia_greenberg, @camcgrady, Business Insider and Fortune


Publishers need to use predictive and conversational bots to add a service on top of their content if they want to survive — News Publishers Need To Jump Into Bots (1/2) — The survival of the news industry depends, for a large part, on its ability to create services on top of their contents streams.
Discussion:
Nieman Lab, @twadhwa, @structstories and Motherboard


After nine years without ads, Pocket experiments with sponsored content in Recommended feed; Premium subscribers will remain ad-free — Pocket Wants You To Read Ads Later Too — People love Pocket. Its 22 million registered users have saved over 2 billion articles.
Discussion:
@mathewi, Pocket Blog, Life Hacker, Digital Trends, @cjc, @viticci, VentureBeat, Android Police, The Verge, The Next Web and Engadget


New report surveys over 30 newsrooms on how they use analytics to make editorial decisions — The next step: Moving from generic analytics to editorial analytics — Big screens with real-time traffic data have become ubiquitous in newsrooms. They illustrate how news organizations …
Discussion:
@janebsinger, @risj_oxford, On First Thought, Journalism.co.uk and Reuters Institute …


How journalist Gary Harki's reports of police with disciplinary issues may have prompted a bill in Virginia to make names of police unavailable under FOIA — Here's the backstory to a bill allowing Virginia police to keep officers' names secret — Photo credit: Rama, Wikimedia; Treatment by CJR


Iran ‘releases former BBC Persian journalist on bail’ — A former BBC Persian journalist detained in Iran has been released from prison on bail, his friends say. — Bahman Daroshafaei, who has dual British and Iranian citizenship, was arrested at his home in Tehran on 3 February on unspecified charges.
Discussion:
Reuters