Bloomberg
The New York Times Co. is "better positioned than ever" to become privately held, writes Bloomberg's Edmund Lee. Its stock price is low and it has built up a lot of cash through recent sales of its regional papers and the Red Sox; it may soon sell About.com.

Times Co. would have about $840 million in cash and short-term investments -- equal to 61 percent of its $1.37 billion market value -- if it succeeds in selling how-to website About.com. That would be more cash versus its market value than any U.S. publisher worth $200 million or more, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Dueling analysts:

• "Now would be a good time for the company to go private ... The Times and other print newspapers are at an all-time low in valuations. They have been ‘cleaning up’ the business by selling off orphan assets for some time now.” — Reed Phillips, managing partner and co-founder of investment bank DeSilva & Phillips
• “It’s a big stretch to go private,” Atorino said. “They still have a lot of debt and the business is going downhill -- who would finance it?” — Benchmark Co. media analyst Edward Atorino

(more...)

Los Angeles Times reporter Kate Linthicum has spent her share of time at Occupy protests, but she’s found social media to be essential in tracking the movement online.

“So much of the Occupy movement has played out online,” she said … Read more

NPR
Monique Hanson will start as NPR's chief development officer in October, filling the last position left vacant since a turbulent period in late 2010 and early 2011, when three of the nonprofit's top executives left.

Hanson will oversee "major and planned giving, and foundation grants, which taken together are NPR's third largest source of revenue," according to NPR. She'll work with the NPR Foundation, which holds most of Joan Kroc's $230 million endowment.

Hanson has spent the last several years raising money for the YMCA, which NPR notes is a $5 billion organization."She was specifically brought on board to dramatically enhance contributed revenue and reposition the national corporate and foundation profile," NPR says in a news release. (more...)

Merriam-Webster | Associated Press | The Atlantic Wire
Merriam-Webster has officially sanctioned a bunch of words by adding them to the dictionary, hereby removing most of the fun of saying things like "F-bomb" and "sexting." Merriam-Webster paints this as a way of keeping up with the changing nature of language, but of course we all know that it's a direct challenge to the AP Stylebook, which every cardiganed copy editor knows is the true arbiter of a journalist's vocabulary.

The inclusion of these words raises an interesting question: Which is more in tune with the English language: Merriam-Webster, which traces its origins to the early 1800s, or the AP's Stylebook, which only two years ago sanctioned "website"? (Related question: If AP Stylebook and Merriam-Webster are enjoying a drink at a bar and Urban Dictionary walks in, do they even give him a polite nod?)

Herewith, a list of some newly-added words, with the closest corresponding guidance from the AP. Much of this guidance comes from the AP's Ask the Editor, the Stylebook's hip, Williamsburg-dwelling, younger sibling.

aha moment: The AP agrees on the spelling: "Deferring to Webster's aha, interjection to express surprise, triumph, satisfaction, etc." (more...)

The Atlantic
After Fareed Zakaria apologized last week for plagiarizing a couple of passages from a New Yorker article, reporters reminded Jeffrey Goldberg of an incident in 2009 in which Zakaria had used quotations from two of Goldberg's stories without noting their source. Zakaria has now responded to Goldberg, arguing that what he did is common:

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview. Look through the New Yorker, the New York Times, or any other prestigious publication and you will see that most quotes from interviews do NOT mention the name of the interviewer. This is a subject close to my heart since I interview people every Sunday. On Monday, we get clips of the papers, magazines, and blogs that quote from these interviews. Most do not mention my name. Many do not even mention CNN. They simply say, "In an interview, "Mr. X said. . ."  I wish they did but they don't." (more...)

paidContent | The New York Times | The Times of London
Sixty percent of traffic to the official London2012.com website and apps came from mobile devices, according to Alex Balfour, the head of new media for the London Organizing Committee. That's partly due to the fact that the committee had several apps, reports paidContent's Robert Andrews. Balfour's statistics provide an interesting window into the shift to mobile. On Sunday, Aug. 5, desktop computer traffic peaked twice, around 3 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. Mobile traffic, however, was always higher than desktop, continuing to climb as desktop traffic dropped after 3 p.m. and shooting up around 7 p.m. In the evening, mobile traffic was often twice that of desktop. (See slide 21 below.) A sample of weekday traffic showed the same peaks for desktop Web traffic at 3 p.m. and 9 p.m., but mobile Web and apps (phone and tablet) again started to rise at 7 p.m. Phone app traffic spiked at 11 p.m. while tablet, mobile Web and desktop traffic dropped. (See slide 22.) (more...)

NPPA | The New York Times
Robert Stolarik's cameras were confiscated when he was arrested on Aug. 4 while photographing police on a public street. He has them back now, but he still hasn't received his press credentials. Stolarik met with NYPD's Internal Affairs unit on Monday to discuss his complaint against the officers who beat and arrested him.

In an interview with the Times, NPPA lawyer Mickey Osterreicher says "the war on terrorism has somehow morphed into an assault on photography," both by the press and the general public.

"Literally every day, someone is being arrested for doing nothing more than taking a photograph in a public place. It makes no sense to me. Photography is an expression of free speech," Osterreicher says.

NYPD has issued guidelines telling officers not to interfere with the press, but Osterreicher said the problem persists.

I believe that the problem is it’s ingrained in the police culture. The idea of serve and protect has somehow changed, for some officers, to include protecting the public from being photographed. (more...)