News

Here’s a look at what FishbowlNY stories made the most buzz this week.

1. New Yorker iPhone App is On its Way
2. Warren Buffett Won’t Stop Buying Newspapers Until He’s Dead
3. Ladies! Get Tips on Pitching Stories from Some Pros
4. Arthur Brisbane, New York Times Public Editor, to Leave Paper
5. Roger Ailes (Maybe) Sorry for Calling New York Times Reporters ‘Scum’

 

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Peter Daou and James Boyce, former advisers to John Kerry, have amended their lawsuit against Arianna Huffington that claims she stole the idea for The Huffington Post from them. Forbes reports that the original complaint was filed in 2010, but new emails allegedly show Huffington and her business partner Ken Lerer were asking others to work on the site, while leading Daou and Boyce on. A snippet from the new charge:

[A]t the same time as Huffington and Lerer were soliciting Boyce’s and Daou’s ideas and plans, telling them that they were building together what would become The Huffington Post, and shaking hands with Boyce and Daou in a manifestation of their business relationship, we now know that Huffington and Lerer were secretly sending Plaintiffs’ ideas to other individuals and developing their own business venture… while excluding them from ownership and control.

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Pardon us for tooting our own horn, but we wanted to point out that FishbowlNY’s very own Diane Clehane has a new column at Forbes. Titled “The Parent $$$ Trap,” each article will explore the good and the bad of the parenting business.

Her debut column is a piece on a question that you should never ask adoptive parents. The issue is near to Clehane’s heart because she is raising an adopted child.

Be sure to check it out and support her!

Get ready Silicon Valley, New York City is coming for you. According to The New York Times, the tech sector in New York City is growing faster than any other place in the nation. This proclamation is based on a study from the Center for an Urban Future, which found that 486 tech companies had been started in the city since 2007. That was enough to move us ahead of Boston, which previously held the number two spot.

The studies authors said one reason tech outfits are coming here is because there are already so many finance and advertising firms in the city, and they’re looking for ways to creatively use mobile app technology.

Whatever the reason is, we’ll take it. Now we have yet another way to make fun of Bostoners.

This morning the government released a trove of documents that were found at Osama bin Laden’s compound after he was killed, and among them were letters in which Bin Laden gave advice on how magazines should operate. As you might have guessed, Bin Laden would’ve been quite the stickler with his editors.

A few of his ideas:

It is important for you to focus a portion of your interest on the Mujahidin (This means “Those doing jihad,” or “strugglers”) publications; provide them with advice and guidance to avoid the mistakes that would impact either the reputation of the Mujahidin and the sympathy of the nation’s masses or that would impact the mind and the character of the youths — who rely mainly in their culture on the publications issued by the Mujahidin and their partisans.

A sound recommendation. Content should be less “We just killed a whole bunch of innocent people” and more “17 stylish ways to wear explosives.”

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New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) are suing Suffolk County for its treatment of Philip Datz, a video journalist who was arrested in July of 2011 while filming police activity. The lawsuit claims that Datz was well within his rights and he was unlawfully arrested and detained. The charges have since been dropped.

According to Robert Balin, the lead counsel on the case, the incident is common in Suffolk County. “Mr. Datz’s arrest was not an isolated event,” said Balin. “Suffolk County police officers have a pattern of unlawfully interfering with the recording of police activity conducted in plain view. As a journalist, Mr. Datz has a responsibility to cover police activity in public places. The Police Department has a constitutional obligation to respect his First Amendment right to perform this important public service.”

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Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s relatively new CEO, is cleaning house. The company is laying off a whopping 2,000 staffers in a move that is estimated to save the company about $375 million a year.

According to The Huffington Post, Thompson claimed that the massive layoff was an ”important next step,” toward making Yahoo “better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require.”

More, from Thompson:

We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose — putting our users and advertisers first — and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal.

The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) has announced that its New York chapter will host its 2013 national convention. The New York AAJA is the largest of 21 chapters, with 1,400 members. The last time the AAJA held their national convention here was in 2000.

“AAJA is sold on the concept of a convention where everything’s only a Metrocard away,” said AAJA National President Doris Truong in a press release. “New York is the city that never sleeps. What’s a better match for today’s 24/7 news culture?”

More details will be revealed in August at the Unity 2012 Journalism Convention in Vegas.

Simon Dumenco, a Media Reporter for Ad Age, has come up with something called the Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation (CEBA). The group, according to David Carr in The New York Times, was founded in the hopes of developing a proper way for bloggers and aggregaters to credit others’ writing. Dumenco told Carr that bloggers should not see the group as the enemy:

‘This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation,’ Mr. Dumenco told me. ‘We want some simple, common-sense rules. There should be some kind of variation of the Golden Rule here, which is that you should aggregate others as you would wish to be aggregated yourself.’

As aggregators ourselves, we completely agree that there should be some sort of standard. But there’s a couple problems with the CEBA. Maybe the most troubling thing is that for a group developing rules for bloggers, there aren’t many bloggers taking part. Here’s the rundown of who has signed up so far:

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The Columbia Graduate School of Journalism is renaming its Journalism building to “Pulitzer Hall,” in honor of its founder, Joseph Pulitzer. The update will formally take place on April 20, the school’s 100th anniversary.

“Among Joseph Pulitzer’s many contributions to journalism was his understanding that the profession must innovate and modernize to continue to meet its public responsibility,” explained University President Lee C.  Bollinger. “This renaming comes at a fitting time, as it allows us to celebrate the Journalism School’s proud heritage, while recognizing the pioneering scholarship and teaching that is occurring at Columbia during this moment of transformative change in the field.”

“Our school is very fortunate in having a compelling founder and a fascinating institutional history,” added Nicholas Lemann, Dean of Columbia’s Journalism School. “We are happy to have an opportunity to make the connection more plainly. The Pulitzer family has remained involved with the Journalism School, but is no longer in the newspaper business. The school and the Pulitzer Prizes are its legacy in journalism.”