(Photo: Digital Trends)

Rupert Murdoch's less than two-year-old foray into digital-only publishing has officially come to an end with the news that The Daily, News Corp.'s iPad-only magazine, will cease publication on December 15th. Some of The Daily's assets and 120 employees will transition over to other News Corp. entities; Jesse Angelo, its editor-in-chief, will serve as the new publisher of the New York Post.

Mr. Murdoch wrote in a press release:

From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.

The news comes on the heels of downsizing that took place at the iPad mag this past summer, when it went from 170 employees to 120.

News Corp.'s brazen bet on an iPad-only format raised eyebrows when it was announced two years ago, and it may have been the mag's inability to expand its audience within the cluttered app market that led to its demise. Likewise, the company's hacking scandal, which caused it to split News Corp assets like The Daily and The Post away from profit-filled pocketbooks like film and broadcast, may have prevented it from supporting money-losing ventures.

While many seem saddened by the news, new media evangelists on Twitter have already taken to gloating. "How well did that pay wall religion work at The Daily,@rupertmurdoch?" tweeted CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis.

(Screencap: Twitter)

Update: Our long national nightmare is over. Twitter has reinstated @NYTOnIt, under the condition that it gets a new logo or else face "permanent deletion." The NYTOnIt Facebook page is now having a design contest for a new logo.

Avid media watchers are well acquainted with the presence of @NYTOnIt, a longstanding Twitter account that gently mocks The New York Times by pointing out articles or trend stories that tread somewhere between indulgent and "duh." Each tweet always ends with "and The Times is ON IT" to drive home the point that the stories tweeted by @NYTOnIt are some of the Times’s less-than-thought-provoking fare. As the account's Twitter bio explains, "Because sometimes stories in newspapers are just *that* obvious."

But now, Twitter has suspended the beloved @NYTOnIt account, which according to a Google cache of the page boasted over 20,000 followers. The account is now inaccessible via Twitter.

Benjamin Kabak, author of the blog Second Avenue Sagas, outed himself on Twitter as the writer behind @NYTOnIT. "Considering how many NYTers know I run @NYTOnIt, it's pretty disappointing they couldn't contact me without going through Twitter's TOS," he tweeted. "Some Times lawyer got upset over my edited use of the T logo. I say it's fair use and they used Twitter's TOS to suspend account. So now I have to wait for Twitter to unsuspend the account before I can correct the *allegedly infringing* materials."

Mr. Kabak further explained what happened on the Times is On It Facebook page:

Twitter has suspended my account over a claim from The Times that my avatar violates a trademark. I say fair use. Right now, I'm waiting for Twitter to process my request to fix the problem so I can get the account reenabled. But feel free to spread the word over how the country's largest newspaper feels threatened by a small Twitter account right now.

@NYTOnIt does use an edited version of the "T" used to represent The New York Times Style Magazine. But Mr. Kabak was careful to differentiate the account from the actual New York Times, including the following line in @NYTOnIt's bio: "(This is a parody account clearly not associated with any newspaper.)"

Twitter does not comment on individual accounts, so can't offer any further clarification as to why the account was suspended. We've reached out to The New York Times for comment and will update when we hear back. The Times did confirm to Poynter that it had filed the complaint:

We did file a complaint with Twitter and it is our understanding that they have suspended this account for a violation of Twitter’s terms of service. We’re not seeking to disable the account however it is important to The Times that our copyright is protected and that it is clear to all users of Twitter that parody accounts or other unofficial Times accounts are not affiliated nor endorsed by The Times.

In the meantime, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis has taken it upon himself to pick up where @NYTOnIt left off.

(Screencap: YouTube)

Shooting off some borderline-rude half-baked review of a product or service is kind of a Twitter rite of passage; the platform would simply cease to exist if crochety tweets were suddenly outlawed. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports that your anti-iPhone 5 tweets are actually being used by competitors to mount compelling advertising campaigns. Hey, at least you're not just shouting into a void? (You're mostly shouting into a void.)

While this might be a good time to remind yourself that no matter how few followers you have, your tweets are indeed public, the off-hand remarks of dissatisfied customers are being harnessed to create ads that are actually pretty funny and realistic. Take Samsung's anti-iPhone ad, a Betabeat favorite, which includes classic iPhone hipster lines like "Yeah, yeah but they make the coolest adapters." The Journal reports that that ad was partly sourced from anti-iPhone tweets.

Of course, ad agencies are being careful not to reflect the opinions of a very vocal minority, also known as "people with Svbtle blogs."

The Web "is like a fun-house mirror in that it gives you some great real-time feedback, but it is skewed because not everyone speaks and those who do tend to speak a lot, so you do have to be careful in how you use it," one digital media agency exec told the Journal.

If ad agencies get too Twitter-heavy, we might end up with a bunch of whiny commercials that resemble SNL's "Tech Talk" sketch.

A newly news-centric MSN.com will roll out with the official launch of Windows 8 on October 26. The software giant's Bob Visse says things are amicable with the ex partner in reportage, but Microsoft really needed to do Microsoft:

"We still have a relationship with MSNBC, but we're going to have our own news product called MSN News," Bob Visse, general manager of product management at MSN, said in an interview with Mashable.

Coverage will be 24/7 and will come out of Microsoft's home base in Redmond, WA. Articles will be brief and combined with newswire reports. Mr. Visse also told Mashable that Microsoft's news staff will be as large as the staff that once ran MSNBC.com.

Considering the nearly half-billion visitors surfing MSN.com monthly, the new operation won't have trouble sustaining itself, which is great because it's like no one is really covering news anymore.

Shhhh.

Update: Contrary to a previous source, there’s at least one man behind this rally with an email address. The man in charge of the not quite non-existent but ever-elusive press-passes, Eytan Kobre, told Betabeat in an email that “to my knowledge, all available press passes are spoken for.” If only it hadn’t taken three weeks, six phone numbers and a call to another newspaper to find him. Mr. Kobre said he would "check further and try to get back" to us but that's the line we've been getting all along. Ichud HaKehillos may be online but organized, they are not.

Update: It turns out that the Five Towns Jewish Times will be at Citi Field on May 20th, at least. Now on our sixth phone number ("the mailbox is full. Goodbye") Betabeat's attendance looks more promising, if not yet a sure thing.

After three weeks of getting the run-around (“Uh, I don’t know, call this number”) it seems that the rally of “Jews against the Internet” at Citi Field on May 20 is looking to exclude reporters as well as women. We asked, not The Times? The Post? The Daily News? Nope.

In retrospect, we should have purchased tickets. The rally is organized by Ichud HaKehillos, an Orthodox Jewish organization aimed at educating the masses regarding responsible use of technology, and we realized gaining access would probably be a unique experience after the moratorium on vaginas.

But after taking our information down on three separate occasions and promising to get back to us, one of the organizers gave us a flat-out no. The last number we tried led us straight to a voicemail explaining that there are no more tickets available for buses to the event.

When we called asking for an email address, the man who answered said they didn’t have one because “we don’t have the Internet.”

Actually, Ichud HaKehillos does have the Internet, and a website:

Ichud HaKehillos is an organization that was founded with the purpose of educating the masses regarding responsible use of technology. Backed ... by Reb Matisyahu Salomon, shlita, and the Skulener Rebbe, shlita, after many years of trying to keep families disconnected from the rapid advancements of modern-day technology, this organization rose out of a realization that fighting technology is an exercise in futility and is doomed to failure.

Gawker reports that the sold-out event, where tickets were originally $10 dollars (wait, you have to pay to rally against something?) are now appearing marked up on eBay. Citi Field holds 45,000 people, and apparently some original ticket holders aren't against making a couple of bucks on the web, even if the Internet is inherently evil. The top bid for two tickets is $124.50. A single ticket has a top bid of $75, but if you want to lock it down for sure, buy it right now for $1,800.

Betabeat continues to call the two three four phone numbers that Ichud HaKehillos representatives gave us. They won't admit they have the Internet, but they seem pretty proud of all their phones.

Those little lights are the last shred of human dignity SOPA plans to extinguish. Metaphorically speaking.

You know that whole Stop Online Privacy Act that threatens to give our government control to basically turn off whatever part of the internet they want? It's really scary. And cable news networks don't really care about it enough to cover it. Or they're simply afraid to poke at their corporate overlords because of it. Or they're part of a vast conspiracy theory to help it pass.

Via Media Matters, as Michael Jackson once sang, they don't really care about us:

....Most major television news outlets -- MSNBC, Fox News, ABC, CBS, and NBC -- have ignored the bill during their evening broadcasts. One network, CNN, devoted a single evening segment to it. (The data on lack of coverage is based on a search of the Lexis-Nexis database since October 1, 2011. The Nexis database does not include comprehensive daytime coverage, and also does not include Shep Smith's 7pm nightly Fox News program, so both are excluded from the study.)

It doesn't help matters that Hollywood is fighting for SOPA with lots of money, to a factor of nearly four times as much as Silicon Valley's putting into the fight. What does this have to do with news networks not covering SOPA, you ask? Well, many of these news networks are owned by media conglomerates who have an interest in SOPA passing. For example:

• CNN is owned by Time-Warner, as in, Warner Bros.
• MSNBC, CNBC, and NBC News are owned by NBC-Universal, as in, NBC, Universal Pictures, and Universal Television.
• Fox News and Fox Business News are owned by News Corp, which owns Fox, the television station and film studio.
• ABC News is owned by Disney, as in, the Disney that owns production studios, television stations, etc.

 
And so on. These guys also own a decent chunk of the music business, too, but you probably already guessed that by this point. So if you're the conspiratorial type, well, you could probably get pretty conspiratorial here. If you're especially crazy, you could surmise that news networks are in a position to give negative coverage to politicians who don't support SOPA, but that's a little too slippery-slope, especially when all you need as evidence of any kind of collusion—latent or otherwise—is the simple, basic fact that SOPA is a frightening threat on our citizenry from our government's unchecked powers, and news networks aren't covering it. If that doesn't freak you out, we can't help you here.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Read this NOW.

Yesterday, content-saving service Read It Later—which, like Instapaper, allows you to save the web pages you want to read eventually but don't have time for quite right now—released a list of data about the most "Read It Later"-clicked authors on the entire whole big bad Internet, which goes hand-in-hand with their celebration of the surpassing of four million users.

But that wasn't the only list they released.   

Here's the first one, of those authors who got 'Read Me Later'd' the most:

Note:

• Lots of gadget readers!
• Lots of tech readers!
• And a whole bunch of efficiency strategy readers!

 
But why is that chart so much different from this one, which presents the writers whose writing was actually read later?

Note:

• Distinct Voices Win: Deadspin's crew populates this list more than any other. So do big names, like Bill Simmons, and scandal-driven short-reads that might be a little NSFW (see: Gawker's Maureen O'Connor). A lot of these writers have a cult of personality; the dedication to them shows.
• Essayists Dominate: Some things are just better read when you have nothing else to do if only for length.
• Breaking news writers lose readers: TechCrunch and BoingBoing lose prominence on lists like these if only because the things TechCrunch writes about often lose relevance in the news cycle after only a day, let alone a few hours. BoingBoing, which is usually an early-adopter of news-like memes—or memes that become news, for that matter—loses prominence because the content they start goes everywhere.

 
But really, there's one very obvious reason why the top of these lists are so different:

Look at the first one again.

Ever been to LifeHacker? There's a reason people are reading it. It's a site about making one's life more efficient.

• Either LifeHacker readers are doing a great, great job about making their lives more efficient, or
• Lifehacker readers are doing a terrible job making their lives more efficient. And need to read Lifehacker more.

 
That is all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

New York Times Co., bringing the hot new revenue fire, as ever.

“It’s working from a revenue perspective,” Ms. Robinson said of the paid online subscription model introduced back in March. By September, digital subscriptions were up to 324,00o. The Boston Globe, also owned by the Times Company, introduced paid subscriptions in October. With that money, the company has been paying down its debt. Coupled with reduced costs, they now have the finances to start buying growth. And what better place to look than the bubbling tech sector?

The company, whose stock has been down more than 20 percent this year, will likely be looking for acquisitions that can counteract sliding ad revenue, which was down 8.8 percent in the third quarter.

Now that About.com, another property owned by the Times, is trying to shed its spammy image for the world of premium online video, perhaps the New York Times might be in the market for another content farm?

Good Magazine.

Good help—pun unintended—is apparently really that hard to find.

It's pretty typical for companies to offer internal recruiting bonuses to anybody who can bring home a viable applicant that pans out. It wasn't until recently that media companies started offering up these kinds of bonuses (or at least at decent sizes) when they all started looking for engineers (one company this writer worked for offered up a $1,000 bonus for an iOS programmer to the entire company including editorial employees, which is more than any potential editorial bonus was worth).

But a media company taking the bounty to the public—and to Twitter—isn't something we've seen before...until now:

This probably isn't the first time this has ever happened, but it's one of the first instances we've seen of and/or heard of it from such a public, viable brand. For what it's worth, Good Magazine "partnered" with social networking service Jumo back in August; it was founded in 2006 by a then 26 year-old Ben Goldhirsh (entrepreneur Bernie Goldhirsh's son) and among their recruits including one Al Gore III, the son of America's Would-Be President. Despite criticism of their profit models, Good has not only managed to persist, but thrive due in no small part to angel funding and pivoting from being merely a media operation to an "integrated media platform" focused on social causes. They also produce a pretty quality product; between that and their deep pockets, this seems like a smart, crowdsourced version of spending money to make money. Upshot: Don't be surprised if larger, more prominent media brands follow suit in search of tech talent.

The Internet Committee's work space at Occupy Wall Street

This is a guest post from Melissa Gira Grant.

***

“Hi, everyone. I’m Drew. With the Internet.”

It’s midway through the General Assembly down at Occupy Wall Street. Radiohead failed to show up and overrun the revolution, but the park is still packed. Two rows of people behind me echo Drew’s words – “with the internet” – serving as a human mic, as cops have forbidden the protestors the use of amplified sound. Liberty Plaza is allowed a generator, which runs the laptop and webcam that’s livestreaming the Assembly.

Now that he’s been introduced, Drew continues for us and the cameras, pausing after each few words to give the human mic a chance to keep up: “Right now. Our website. Is having some problems. If you know how to fix those kinds of things. Come find me. After the GA.” The General Assembly crowd is thick, and as soon as he’s done speaking, Drew is lost within it. One night he gives his report back on the Internet Committee while wearing a hideous holiday-inspired sweater, so he’s easier for potential volunteers to spot.

For a protest movement born of the internet, Occupy Wall Street’s technical situation is at times precarious. There are always three or four people hunched over laptops at the center of the camp, circled by cables, hard drives, and on occasion, fresh netbook boxes. If the rain is pelting down, they’re still there working with umbrellas drawn over their faces and keyboards, posting meeting minutes, tending to blog comments, and archiving massive amounts of video. But for the first few days, Occupy Wall Street didn’t even have their own internet connection in the park. Anonymous reportedly hooked them up with a little wifi to tide them over until hotspots were deployed.

It was through Anonymous that Brian, one of the guys who’s now holding down the internal online communications, first found out about the occupation. Almost immediately, he started hitch-hiking here from Washington state, and a month later, he arrived at Liberty Plaza, where he’s been staying for the last eight days.

Brian served in the Marine Corps, he tells me, and he’s skilled in “security and strategic tactics.” On Sunday night, when we meet, he has an earpiece dangling from his neck and his plastic poncho covers a bulky backpack. He and Drew have convened an internet committee meeting just off-site at a friendly bar. They both sit at what ends up being the head of the table. Like others who speak up here, they don’t want to be seen as leaders, even if they hold the Wordpress login info.

Who controls the Occupy Wall Street web presence, at this point, probably doesn’t matter. Even if the official website, which is nycga.net, was hit by a denial of service attack, the protest still occupies enough hashtags, twitpics and YouTube videos to get the message out. The idea is, if you don’t rely on a single gatekeeper, you also don’t have one person bearing all the vulnerability -- which mostly works.

On Saturday, when news arrived at the park that hundreds of protestors faced imminent arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, a member of the media team asked any of us who held a phone with a video camera to install an app on the fly and head down to the bridge to bear witness by livestreaming it. The work of monitoring potential arrests was now shared among the few dozen of us who made our way to the bridge, tapping through unfamiliar and seemingly unending sign-up screens as we hustled towards a potentially volatile confrontation.

The next night, when I ended up at Brian and Drew’s internet meeting, the group is far more racially and gender diverse than your everyday New York internet event, but the white dudes still dominate the conversation. One guy’s suggestion that we promote a Twitter hashtag to ask for material donations to the camp is met with pushback from another guy who wants us to abandon “corporate tools” for a custom Drupal solution developed by the occupation’s Open Source team. It’s kind of charming: instead of the usual circular debate on the minutiae of different strands of anarchist thought, these guys are having it out over GPL licenses and RSS scraping. Meanwhile, online supporters across the country and the world just want to know how to send us socks and pizza.

Chris, who’s been at the park for five days, joined the internet committee after the mass arrests on Saturday, as he watched people on the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page – which is not officially administered by the occupiers – freak out when updates stopped coming. “They thought we’d been removed from the park,” he says. In reality, it was just a glitch with the official Occupy Wall Street site, which cross-posts to Facebook.

Late that night after the meeting, Julie, a 21 year old New York University student from Harlem, launches a Tumblr to aggregate firsthand stories from occupiers. She’s studying globalization, which took her to London last winter, just as the student occupation against budget cuts took hold. What she’d been studying in the classroom –the Egyptian and Syrian uprisings – was now playing out in the streets below. “So over the weekend,” she says, “when I saw there had been over 800 arrests, I knew I had to come down and try to help.”

Still, that we connected at all in the park is mostly an accident. “Yesterday I just came down to the media table and asked if I could get more involved,” says Julie. “The internet meeting was the one happening next.”

As we talk at the perimeter of the media table, we notice a guy next to us with a clapperboard and another guy holding a shotgun mic. One mentions an internship he had at Comedy Central.

“Who are you guys shooting with?” Chris asks them.

“For the website, I think,” the former intern says.

“You know, we’re working on that,” Chris replies. “We should exchange information.”