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Yahoo! in Talks to Acquire Tumblr: Deal Could Reach As High As $1 Billion (Adweek)
Is Marissa Mayer about to make a game-changing acquisition? It appears so. Yahoo! is in serious talks with Tumblr to acquire the social blogging site, according to multiple sources familiar with the talks. While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well-suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd — not currently a Yahoo! sweet spot. AllThingsD Earlier this week, Yahoo! CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JPMorgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo! needed to be “cool again.” The Verge Since taking control of Yahoo!, Mayer has pursued a string of acquisitions, including Summly, Astrid, Jybe and others. In addition to the failed Dailymotion acquisition, the company has also been rumored to be looking at Hulu, although Mayer has previously said that the company is shopping for smaller targets valued in the $100 million range.

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Criticized on Seizure of Records, White House Pushes News Media Shield Law (NYT)
Under fire over the Justice Department’s use of a broad subpoena to obtain calling records of Associated Press reporters in connection with a leak investigation, the Obama administration sought on Wednesday to revive legislation that would provide greater protections to reporters in keeping their sources and communications confidential. Capital New York The administration opposed an initial draft of the Free Flow of Information Act, but eventually supported a compromise version that would allow federal judges to protect reporters from subpoenas for information, if the judge determined that the news value of the reports exceeded the government’s interest in uncovering the sources of a leak. HuffPost / The Backstory New York Times reporter Charlie Savage asked Attorney General Eric Holder, who had just announced he’d recused himself from the AP leak investigation, “Are you also recused from the Stuxnet investigation out of Maryland?” The New York Times has reason to be concerned about whether investigators are using similar tactics on them. The Maryland case is believed to be focused on Times chief Washington correspondent David Sanger’s reporting on how the U.S. and Israel helped derail Iran’s nuclear program through cyberattacks. Sanger’s June scoop, along with the Times’ front-page article on Obama’s terrorist “kill list,” spurred Congressional calls to investigate the leaks of classified information. The Washington Post / Erik Wemple Media Matters for America, a group that monitors the country’s conservative media for distortions and inaccuracies, fell in for criticism Wednesday over the Justice Department’s secret subpoena of the Associated Press’s phone records. Evidence of this Media Matters-Obama administration mindmeld? This piece here, which says: “If the press compromised active counter-terror operations for a story that only tipped off the terrorists, that sounds like it should be investigated.” The Daily Beast / Politics Beast David Brock explained all in a statement. “Media Matters for America monitors, analyzes, and corrects conservative misinformation in the media and was not involved with the production of the document focusing on the DOJs investigation,” he said. “That document was issued by ‘Message Matters,’ a project of the Media Matters Action Network, which posts, through a different editorial process and to a different website, a wide range of potential messaging products for progressive talkers to win public debates with conservatives.”

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Justice Dept. Defends Seizure of AP Phone Records (NYT)
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Tuesday defended the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, describing the article by the AP that prompted a criminal investigation as among “the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen” in a 35-year career. “It put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole,” he said in an apparent reference to an article on May 7, 2012, that disclosed the foiling of a terrorist plot by Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen to bomb an airliner. The Washington Post / Opinions The usual reason for keeping a subpoena secret is that the target would otherwise try to destroy documents. In this case, the AP could not have done so even if it wanted to, since the relevant records were in the possession of its phone service providers. Without even giving AP a chance to weigh in, we don’t see how the department could intelligently weigh its prosecutorial needs against this broad subpoena’s chilling effect on reporters and their sources. HuffPost / The Backstory Associated Press Washington bureau chief Sally Buzbee was among the journalists targeted in the Justice Department’s sweeping seizure of phone records that has drawn widespread condemnation from members of the media and free speech advocates, an AP spokeswoman confirmed to The Huffington Post. FishbowlNY The Department of Justice is trying to brush off the secret accessing of AP editors’ and reporters’ phone records. The agency already sent one bland letter to the AP about the incident, and Tuesday, it sent another. According to AP CEO and president Gary Pruitt, both letters from the DOJ basically said “Meh,” and not much else about the scary over-extension of the government. B&C Society of Professional Journalists president Sonny Albarado has condemned the Justice Department’s alleged secret collection of AP reporter and editor phone records and said it highlights the need for a federal shield law. Politico / Dylan Byers on Media The Associated Press Media Editors Association has joined other journalists in condemning the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records, calling it part of the Obama administration’s “continuing witch hunt for leaks and whistleblowers.” TVNewser Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said this may be the least of President Obama’s worries. “I don’t think that’s going to amount to much,” O’Reilly said of the phone taps. “It looks like they went through the warrant process and they had authorization to look at these records — the Justice Department did. But President Obama, he’s got some problems now. He better start to get control of the situation because there’s a lot of stuff going on.”

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Gov’t Obtains Wide AP Phone Records in Probe (The Associated Press / The Big Story)
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. The Guardian The AP’s president and chief executive officer, Gary Pruitt, sent a letter of protest to the attorney-general, Eric Holder. “These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know,” Pruitt said. HuffPost / The Backstory Though the DOJ did not give the AP a specific reason for the seizure, the dates of the phone calls it targeted offered a clear tell. On May 7, 2012, AP reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, citing anonymous sources, reported that the CIA had thwarted a plot by an al-Qaeda affiliate to “destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a sophisticated new design around the one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden.” Politico Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren told Politico in an email that the DOJ’s seizure “sounds like a dragnet to intimidate the media,” not a criminal investigation. “What is stunning is the breadth of the seizure!” Van Susteren said. EFF While the government has not confirmed, the subpoenas appear to stem from an investigation into a government leak of information to the AP. This is not a sufficient excuse. Imagine if “Deep Throat,” the informant critical to Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation of the 1972 Watergate burglary, knew that his identity could be obtained through legal process. His career, and perhaps his life, would have been in serious jeopardy, and a cautious individual would have kept silent. TVNewser Former CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, now an intelligence and counterterrorism reporter for the AP, was one of the journalists who had their phone logs seized. Dozier was seriously injured in Iraq in 2006. She left CBS for the AP in 2010. FishbowlNY Sadly, the saying “If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention” never seems more relevant than now.

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Bloomberg Admits Terminal Snooping (NYT)
Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage, more than half a dozen former employees said. Bloomberg / Matthew Winkler Our reporters should not have access to any data considered proprietary. I am sorry they did. The error is inexcusable. Last month, we immediately changed our policy so that reporters now have no greater access to information than our customers have. Removing this access will have no effect on Bloomberg news-gathering. At no time did reporters have access to trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems. Nor did they have access to clients’ messages to one another. BuzzFeed Executives at Bloomberg have known about journalists using the company’s terminals to spy on clients at least since September 2011 — more than a year before the practice turned into a scandal that threatens the company’s relationships with its clients. That month, Erik Schatzker, an anchor at Bloomberg TV and host of Market Makers, was reprimanded for making on-air comments about using terminal data to track the activities of at least one story subject, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation. TVNewser CNBC talked with a former Bloomberg employee who says he accessed usage information of Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury secretary Tim Geithner. He said he did it “just for fun” and as a way “to show how powerful” the Bloomberg terminals were. CNBC In response to queries that Bloomberg journalists had access to officials data usage, a Bloomberg spokesman said, “What you are reporting is untrue” but declined to respond when asked what specifically was inaccurate. He also would not say whether the company had investigated journalists’ access to this information.

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Top Editors Abruptly Leave Village Voice Over Staff Cuts (NYT)
The tumult that has characterized The Village Voice in recent years resurfaced on Thursday when the top two editors said they were leaving the weekly newspaper. Will Bourne, who became editor last November, and Jessica Lustig, the deputy editor since January, met with the staff at 11 a.m. on Thursday to announce their departure. In a phone interview, Bourne said that Christine Brennan, executive editor of Voice Media Group, had told them to lay off, or drastically reduce the roles of, five employees on the 20-person staff. Rather than carry out the cuts, he and Lustig resigned and left immediately, in the middle of closing next week’s paper. Gawker We hear that Michael Musto, the Village Voice‘s longtime society columnist and the last remaining vestige of the “classic” Voice, is one of the five Voice staffers targeted for layoffs — the proposed layoffs that caused the Voice‘s editors to quit today. Musto’s column, La Dolce Musto — a quirky mix of nightlife gossip, party talk, gay issues, and whatever the hell else has been happening in his life in the past week — has been running in the Voice for almost 30 years. NY Observer The downtown alt-weekly has been floundering of late. Last August, they had a significant round of layoffs and switched some full-time positions to part-time. Former editor-in-chief Tony Ortega left in September to focus full-time on debunking Scientology, prompting rumors the he was pushed out. Shortly after that, the newspaper chain underwent a corporate restructuring that separated the company’s papers from Backpage.com, the controversial and highly profitable adult online classifieds site that was a key source of revenue. FishbowlNY Bourne succeeded Ortega as editor of the Voice in late November.

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Pink Slips For A Dozen-Plus Daily News Staffers (Capital New York)
The New York Daily News is now undergoing what employees of the tabloid have been fearing for weeks: Multiple insiders tell Capital that layoffs hit the newsroom Wednesday. FishbowlNY Two veterans of the paper — Albor Ruiz and Joanna Molloy — were among those let go. Ruiz had been with the Daily News for 19 years; Molloy for 15. Other names in the bunch include Christina Boyle and Robert Gearty, both reporters. NY Observer Rumors have been circulating for some time that a round of pink slips was imminent at the Daily News. Although this is the most significant number of layoffs since editor-in-chief Colin Myler took over in November 2011, there has been a slow trickle of departures over the past months. Features editor John Oswald left in March and features reporter Jacob Osterhout vented his rage in a goodbye email after he was let go earlier this spring.

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Discovery Reports Higher First-Quarter Earnings (B&C)
Discovery Communications reported higher first-quarter earnings as international growth offset a decline in digital distribution revenue. First-quarter net income rose 4 percent to $231 million, or 63 cents a share, from $221 million, or 57 cents a share. The Wrap / The Box Discovery also said it expects Oprah Winfrey’s OWN to meet its previously stated goal of breaking even in cash flow in the second half of this year, Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav said. OWN viewership was up 3 percent in its key women 25-54 demographic in the first quarter, even though the first quarter of 2012 included OWN’s highest-rated broadcast, Winfrey’s interview with Whitney Houston’s daughter. THR The latest figure was impacted by a range of factors in addition to what the company called “the strong underlying operating performance in the current year’s quarter.” Among the items affecting the latest profit were a $92 million gain from the consolidation of results for Discovery Japan and $46 million of improved equity earnings, but also higher equity-based compensation expenses and a $59 million loss from “hedging activities primarily associated with the acquisition of the SBS Nordic operations.”

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The Onion‘s Twitter Feed Hijacked by Pro-Syria Hackers (The Wrap / Media Alley)
The Onion, America’s finest fake news organization, was the latest victim of cyber hacking on Monday when the Syrian Electronic Army took over its Twitter account to tweet a slew of anti-Israel messages. NYT / Bits A member of the Syrian Electronic Army who goes by the hacker handle “Th3 Pr0″ told The New York Times that the group aimed at The Onion because of a recent Onion parody post, purportedly written by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, titled: “Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People.” “The Onion is a satire news organization and quite often is more trusted to reflect the news than the corporate media is known to,” Th3 Pr0 wrote in an email. The Onion Following Monday’s incident in which the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into the Onion‘s Twitter account, sources at America’s Finest News Source confirmed that its Twitter password has been changed to OnionMan77 in order to prevent any future cyber-attacks. “We have taken the necessary measures to ensure this kind of thing never happens again,” said Onion IT specialist Nick Abersold.

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Howard Kurtz Apologizes on CNN For Errors (Politico)
Howard Kurtz took to his Reliable Sources show on CNN on Sunday to apologize for his “inexcusable” erroneous report last week about NBA player Jason Collins and for a string of past mistakes that the media critic admitted he was sometimes too slow to correct. During Kurtz’s extraordinary 15-minute long confession of journalistic sins, he repeatedly said he’s learned a lesson and promised to double and triple-check all his facts in the future to win back the trust of readers and viewers. TVNewser NPR’s David Folkenflik and Politico‘s Dylan Byers grilled Kurtz about Collins as well as other mistakes from the past that Kurtz admitted he had sometimes waited too long to correct. It was riveting, powerful, and frequently uncomfortable to watch. The live interrogation on CNN was not Kurtz’ idea. HuffPost / The Backstory Kurtz claimed Sunday that Daily Download, a site founded by USA Today veteran Lauren Ashburn, has “always been a limited venture for me.” The Knight Foundation provided a $115,000 grant for the Daily Download project in December 2011, via Maryland Public Television, and provided a second $115,000 grant in November 2012. A Knight Foundation spokesman told HuffPost that Kurtz’s “involvement was a factor in our support for the Daily Download.” Daily Download / Lauren Ashburn In a regular Daily Download feature where Kurtz and I comment on the day’s media news, he made a mistake. And so did I. As founder and editor-in-chief, I am responsible for what goes on Daily Download. I am committed to being more vigilant to ensure our facts are correct and that we are more transparent if issues arise.

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