Corpse Sits Among Oblivious Video Gamers

A Taiwanese man who died while playing video games at an internet cafe appeared to have gone unnoticed by fellow gamers for up to nine hours, police said Friday.

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Local stations jump into social TV with ConnecTV

Last November, ten broadcast groups partnered with social TV startup ConnecTV in a major bet on the second screen. The partners make up a who’s-who list of broadcasters: Gannett, Hearst, Belo, Scripps, Cox, Media General, Meredith, Post-Newsweek, Raycom and Barrington — 201 stations in all. Several groups invested in ConnecTV, to boot. Like many second-screen apps, ConnecTV provides synchronized content and conversations around what you’re watching on TV. But ConnecTV’s approach is among the most aggressive efforts to achieve scale in the second-screen space. Unlike many specialized apps, it works across a huge swath of programming: 250 national channels, syndicated shows, live sports and local newscasts. Read more here

Nonprofit News Groups Considering a Merger

The Bay Citizen was launched in 2010 with grand ambitions, $5 million in seed money. The Bay Citizen is considering a potential merger, according to people involved in the discussions, a move that could see the publication absorbed by an older but similar nonprofit news organization in Berkeley, and raising questions about whether the founding patron’s vision for a revitalization of Bay Area news reporting can survive him. The unexpected death of Mr. Hellman left The Bay Citizen without its founder and benefactor. In September, the news organization’s founding editor-in-chief, Jonathan Weber, resigned abruptly. People involved with the discussions stressed this week that no merger agreement has been reached, and that the legal and financial logistics of combining two California nonprofit organizations, both of them regulated under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Service code, are daunting. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/business/media/nonprofit-news-groups-considering-a-merger.html?_r=1&ref=media

P&G To Lay Off 1,600 After Discovering It's Free To Advertise On Facebook

P&G said it would lay off 1,600 staffers, including marketers, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. More interestingly, CEO Robert McDonald told Wall Street analysts that he would have to "moderate" his ad budget because Facebook and Google can be "more efficient" than the traditional media that usually eats the lion's share of P&G's ad budget. Read more here

Outdoor Revenue Predicted To Top $10B By 2020

After years of stagnation, outdoor advertising exploded in the first decade of the 21st century, thanks to the advent of digital displays -- but its meteoric growth was cut short by the economic downturn from 2007-2009, according to a new study from SNL Kagan. SNL Kagan is forecasting a 5.9% cumulative annual growth rate over roughly the next decade. At this pace, total spending on outdoor advertising should reach about $10.55 billion by 2020. Read more here

Fashion Changes, and So Do the Magazines

If there really is a science to what sells, as editors generally believe, we can conclude that white backgrounds and red titles are an effective combination for moving magazines. Except that Glamour’s newsstand sales were down substantially last year, by 17 percent through June and (as submitted to the Audit Bureau of Circulation) 9.9 percent in the second half. Most women’s titles were down. Part of the problem, it would seem, is that by exploiting a winning formula, fashion magazines have made themselves indistinguishable.  This is why readers can expect to see some changes in the big March issues, most notably in Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar, each of which are unveiling major redesigns.

Read more at the New York Times

New iPad app aggregates only long-form journalism

The Longform iPad app aggregates editors’ picks of long-form journalism from Longform.org, as well as long stories from 25 sites known for such work, including The Atlantic, Slate, Mother Jones, and Esquire. For most sources, the cutoff is 2,000 words, Longform co-founder Max Linsky told me, though editors can exercise discretion to include a great 1,500-word story or cut out a 4,000-word item that doesn’t belong. The app, which costs $4.99, embraces some popular ideas. Readers can share stories to social networks and save them to another reading app like Instapaper. Read more here

Digital Magazines Popular, Men Hold Edge

While more than half of both male and female tablet owners are interested in reading digital magazines, the proportion is especially high among males, with 77% of male tablet owners saying they want to read digital magazines on their device, compared to 68% of female tablet owners. That’s according to the latest research from GfK MRI’s iPanel, a new survey group composed exclusively of tablet and e-reader owners. Read more here

10 Must-Haves For Your Mobile Reporting Kit

With today’s technology, it’s becoming abundantly clear that every reporter should have a mobile reporting kit stashed in his or her car or bag. But what do you put in it?

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When Facebook goes public, expect a massive increase in data mining to beat Google

It’s not for nothing that WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange called Facebook “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been created.” The only way that Facebook can grow is to more effectively gather user data to sell to advertisers. Facebook does not deny that this is their business model, so this is not hyperbole. And since Google announced last week that it was distilling the privacy policies of 60 of its services into a single policy—an information exchange to build detailed internet user profiles—Facebook will be forced to compete with its Silicon Valley rival. Read more here

Facebook Subscribe exposes journalists to spam, pornography, some users complain

When the Travel Channel's Nisha Chittal launched her public profile on Facebook Subscribe, she looked forward to connecting with a community that shared her wanderlust and passion for social media. Instead, she got sexually explicit messages, pornographic photos, and spammy, irrelevant messages from thousands of users around the world. "It was coming at such a high volume - I was seeing messages every few minutes from these random men," Chittal said. "For every one or two legitimate comments, I would get 20 from creepy men who would say weird or strange or sexual things." Chittal is just one of many journalists who has enabled Facebook's Subscribe feature only to be shocked, disturbed or disappointed by the results. Other than a one-sided way to share her material, "I don't get much out of it," Torres said. "I don't want to be wasting my time pruning what's on my wall."

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Amazon Kindle Fire Scorches Samsung Market Share

Amazon’s Kindle Fire has had a dramatic impact on the fledgling and struggling Android tablet market by challenging Samsung’s dominance of the market in just three months. According to app analytics firm Flurry, the Fire was responsible for 35.7% of all Android tablet app sessions in January 2012, up from only 3% in November when the tablet was launched mid- month. That sharp increase in share has pulled the Samsung Galaxy Tab from a 63% share in November to 35.6% in January. Read more here

CNN’s Digital Strength May Cause Problems For Fox

In the social networking universe, the 1 million fans on CNN’s Facebook page dwarf those for Fox News by a factor of eight. And with a combined total of 9.4 million followers, @CNN and the rest of the news brand’s Twitter handles have 1.8 million more followers than the closest news competitor, the New York Times. According to Brad Adgate, senior VP and director of research for ad-buying firm Horizon Media, the very programming attributes that seem to give Fox News an advantage over CNN on cable television also seem to have a converse effect online. Focused on what Adgate calls “infotainment” and leveraging the opinions of strong, ideologically minded personalities like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, Fox News’ programming is thematically different from that of CNN, which is rooted in breaking news. In short, CNN has more pure news product that can be easily converted into text and optimized for search.

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Twitter Censors Messages

Twitter Inc., the microblogging service, gave itself extra flexibility to censor information in parts of the world that impose restrictions on self-expression. Effective yesterday, Twitter added the ability to censor tweets on a country-by-country basis, rather than globally, the San Francisco-based company said in a blog post.
 

The shift would let Twitter comply with strictures in one country without having to pull offending tweets from its entire audience. Previously, Twitter banned offensive content on a global basis, rather than for a specific nation. Still, the decision drew criticism from some users because the service has been used as an agent of social change around the world, including the Middle East.

Some Twitter users are calling for a boycott of the service tomorrow in protest of the decision. They’re using “#TwitterBlackout” as a hash tag -- a label that lets people easily find tweets on the same topic.

Reporters Without Borders, an organization that seeks to defend freedom of information, also said it was disturbed by Twitter’s decision.

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