News aggregator

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.

In a blog post at her eponymous website, Arianna Huffington has provided some numbers that describe the growth of the news network over the past year -- a year that coincided with its acquisition by AOL for $315 million -- and more than a few of them are eye-popping. At a time when some newspaper websites are happy to get page views in the tens of millions in a month, The Huffington Post racked up more than a billion page views in December.

A report released last week by Free Press contending television broadcasters will reap nearly $3 billion in revenue from political advertising this year without fully disclosing to the public where that money comes from has drawn a sharp rebuke from the NAB.

Today marks a milestone for Facebook. Originally launched in 2004 as a site for Harvard students to connect online, the social networking giant is now celebrating its eighth anniversary, just weeks after launching its new 'timeline' interface, the feature referred to by countless journalists as a social media 'gamechanger.'

Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires.

Last fall, while television news outlets were largely ignoring the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act during their evening news and opinion programming, their parent companies were busy paying an army of lobbyists to influence Congress on the then-pending legislation.

In a rather troubling move, it appears that the leadership of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment had a documentary filmmaker arrested on Congressional property for daring to try to film a hearing that was taking place on the subject of "fracking" -- an issue for which this filmmaker, Josh Fox, is well known for covering in his documentary Gasland.

A new report takes a deep look into the way journalists deal with copyright issues, which can affect not only their own careers, but journalism as a whole. The report draws conclusions from interviews with 80 journalists who have been working in the field for at least five years.

A coalition of high tech companies including Google and Alcatel-Lucent are warning South Carolina legislators they are playing with future high tech jobs and will stifle the state's digital economy if they grant the request of large phone and cable companies to make it difficult, if not impossible for community-owned broadband to compete.

Unsolicited spam emails from petition website change.org forced Arizona State University to block access as well as outbound emails to the site, university officials said.

Last Week, a group of ASU students started the petition entitled "Arizona State University: Reduce the Costs of Education for Arizona State University Students" at the Change.org petition site. This petition requested signatures to support the reduction in the cost of education for ASU students. Arizona State University has now blocked all access to Change.org for all of it's over 50,000 students and over 5,000 faculty and employees.

A Tumblr blog calling for Arizona State University to unblock the petition website Change.org began circulating the Internet, causing many students to become concerned that their First Amendment rights had been violated. ASU removed access to the site through any University server or email network. The petition was asking for signatures to support lowering the cost of tuition at ASU.

The media circus over Donald Trump's endorsement in the Republican presidential contest is just off the charts wacky. It's a vivid reminder, as if we needed another one, about how skewed our news priorities have become. Forget jumping the shark. This was jumping the whale.

According to Google, the author of this article isn't Karen Weise, 30-year-old woman and Bloomberg Businessweek reporter. Instead it sees a 55-to-64-year-old man interested in credit cards, finance, Los Angeles, politics, and "table games," whatever those are. That's the information provided by a Google tool that's been available since 2009 but which few people know about. It lets users see what the search giant has inferred about them based on the websites they visit.

It is vital that we have news organizations working together to watchdog relations between the police and press, and apply pressure when needed. But we need to go beyond that. We need people to support and defend the First Amendment, to stand with journalists and insist that their cities do better.

The recent dust-up between the Hollywood studios and Internet companies reveals how out of touch Hollywood has become with its own customers. The idea of punishing consumers for ignoring Hollywood's business model is a futile strategy, as the music companies have learned over the past decade.

Political headwinds are building against a marketing alliance between Verizon Wireless, the nation's largest wireless operator, and cable giant Comcast, amid worries that cooperation between the two rivals could blunt competition in the telecom market and lead to higher prices.

Antitrust Subcommittee chair Sen. Herb Kohl says plans are "well underway" on a hearing about Verizon's deal to buy spectrum from cable operators, a spokesperson for the senator confirms.

A FCC effort to bring digital textbooks to U.S. students faces resistance from schools with limited budgets for buying devices such as Apple's iPad.

A bill that would have given California voters more insight into the funding of political advertisements in the post-Citizens United era of unlimited spending by shadowy independent groups has failed to pass the state Assembly due to nearly unanimous opposition from GOP legislators.