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The Media Oxpecker: ‘Reverse Ferret’ Edition

Every Friday we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy making fun of your governor.

Quick hits from the short week:

  • The 168-year-old British tabloid News of the World is being shut down in response to a major hacking scandal, prompting Felix Salmon to conclude that, “Rupert Murdoch is quite astonishingly inept at crisis management.”

    But Jack Shafer insists that Murdoch has pulled off the ultimate “Reverse Ferret”:

    Although the 2.66 million circulation News of the World will die after its last edition Sunday, the newspaper’s ferret is still very much alive and may soon have a new home. The Guardian, whose investigations under reporter Nick Davies uncovered the phone-hacking outrages, has already spotted the furry creature migrating to another Murdoch-owned London tabloid. The Guardian reports, “There are already industry rumours that the News of the World‘s stablemate the Sun could be turned into a seven-day operation.”

  • The AP warned its staff about expressing personal opinions on social networks. Disciplinary action awaits those who violate its guidelines.

  • Are you confused about Google+? No, you’re not.

  • Here’s everyone’s friend Tom Anderson on why Mark Zuckerberg’s public response to Google+ was the right one.

  • Google shut down its Realtime Search engine this week after its deal with Twitter to include tweets in its searches expired.

  • Does an eyebrow-raising topic coupled with a local venue qualify as “hyperlocal” content — and does it even matter, so long as the clicks are there? AOL’s Patch doesn’t seem to be bothered by the distinction.

  • The Business Insider has introduced a 24-hour “Penalty Box” for unruly commenters.

  • And finally, forty-nine percent of editors surveyed by the Reynolds Journalism Institute said they make news decisions based at least partially on web analytics reports.