Morning Media Newsfeed: Gov't Shuts Down | Hillary Projects Canned

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Shutdown Begins: Stalemate Forces First U.S. Government Closure in 17 Years (The Washington Post)
The U.S. government began to shut down for the first time in 17 years early Tuesday, after a Congress bitterly divided over President Obama’s signature health care initiative failed to reach agreement to fund federal agencies. Hours before a midnight deadline, the Republican House passed its third proposal in two weeks to fund the government for a matter of weeks. Like the previous plans, the new one sought to undermine the Affordable Care Act, this time by delaying enforcement of the “individual mandate,” a cornerstone of the law that requires all Americans to obtain health insurance. TVNewser President Obama gave a brief statement Monday afternoon as the threat of a government shutdown loomed over Washington. He began by listing off what agencies would continue to operate and which would not. “I think it is important for everyone to understand that the federal government is the country’s largest employer,” Obama said. “A shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away.” HuffPost With the government hurtling toward a shutdown, the media dug in for some round-the-clock coverage on Monday. From the competing countdown clocks to the continuing stream of elected representatives appearing on camera, cable news was in its element: circling around and around the same few pieces of news, getting hosts and guests to argue with each other, speculating, postulating and predicting over and over again. Reuters The U.S. Agriculture Department’s public face, the usda.gov website, will “go dark” and be linked to an informational page in the event of a shutdown, allowing no access to USDA data banks, a spokeswoman said on Monday. WSJ / Washington Wire Washingtonians have remained stoic, even dismissive of news that a government shutdown could halt garbage pickup, street cleaning, and pothole-repair come Tuesday. But when the National Zoo announced Monday that continued congressional impasse would shutter the zoo and its Panda Cam, the sole window onto the zoo’s newborn cub, fans traveled the stages of grief, from rage to bargaining and grim acceptance. “This just got real,” wrote several contributors to the zoo’s Twitter feed.

NBC Scraps Hillary Clinton Miniseries (THR / The Live Feed)
NBC has scrapped its controversial Hillary Clinton miniseries project. “After reviewing and prioritizing our slate of movie/miniseries development, we’ve decided that we will no longer continue developing the Hillary Clinton miniseries,” the network said in a statement Monday. Politico / Dylan Byers on Media CNN Films is canceling its highly anticipated documentary about Hillary Clinton after director Charles H. Ferguson backed away from the project on Monday, citing a lack of participants due to pressure from Clinton-world. “Charles Ferguson has informed us that he is not moving forward with his documentary about Hillary Clinton,” CNN Worldwide spokesperson Allison Gollust told Politico. “Charles is an Academy Award-winning director who CNN Films was excited to be working with, but we understand and respect his decision.” PRNewser The minute CNN announced that it would be producing a film version of Clinton‘s career, critics pounced on the move as evidence of the network spinning its wheels on behalf of the former Secretary of State and all-but-certain presidential candidate. Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus went so far as to cite the doc, along with NBC’s planned miniseries, when calling on his party to boycott both networks in 2016 due to “obvious bias.” TVNewser Commissioned by CNN in July, the project started getting push-back right away. It all started from Hillary’s camp, then from other parts of the left, and then the right. TVNewser The Clinton miniseries and film were the impetus behind an RNC effort to lock out CNN and NBC from hosting any 2016 GOP primary debates. The RNC voted to block those networks from hosting debates back in August, citing “an obvious bias.” Now the question becomes what the RNC’s preferred 2016 debate plan is, and whether CNN or NBC will be included.

Another Wall Tumbles: Dallas Morning News Dismantles Its Paywall, Tries to Sell Premium Features Instead (paidContent)
When the San Francisco Chronicle said that it was demolishing its news paywall in August, we wondered whether it might be the beginning of a paywall rollback trend. Now a second metro newspaper has decided to go the same route: The Dallas Morning News announced that its news content will once again be free to all Web visitors starting on Tuesday, Oct. 1. Poynter / MediaWire It will also offer a premium service with “enhanced design and navigation, limited advertising, and access to unique subscriber benefits” to print subscribers; nonsubscribers will pay $2.99 a week, the release says. Dallas Morning News Readers of the paid site will see an image-oriented, collage display with far fewer ads (Web pages maintained by third parties also may contain ads). Eventually, more personalization and a loyalty program will be added to the site. The free site will look just like the News’ current website with advertisements.

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The New Newsweek Staffs Up (Capital New York)
Word is beginning to leak out about the first new recruits at the legendary newsmagazine turned digital publication. Newsweek’s new international editor, Capital has learned, is Nicholas Wapshott, a veteran British journalist who’s held top positions at The Times of London in addition to a role as a contributing columnist at Reuters. Additionally, Newsweek has dipped into DNAinfo’s talent pool, poaching reporter Victoria Bekiempis from the neighborhood news venture as a senior writer.

Content Will Vanish From Shuttered Patch Sites (Poynter / MediaWire)
In a post on Facebook, Mark Maley says all content on Milwaukee-area Patch sites will get zapped when the sites close. “That includes our outstanding political coverage of the Wisconsin recall and presidential elections, our top-notch coverage of the Sikh temple shooting and other breaking news, hard-hitting investigative stories about the suburbs and thousands of wonderful feature stories about the people who live here,” Maley writes.

The MediaBriefing Editor Patrick Smith Named Media Editor BuzzFeed UK (NY Observer)
Patrick Smith, the editor of The MediaBriefing, a London-based B2B website that covers the media industry, will be the media editor for BuzzFeed UK, he announced in a blog post Monday morning. “I’m as proud of the achievements with TMB as anything I’ve done. However I’ve been a reporter/editor on the media beat in B2B publishing for seven years, so now feels like the time to move on and do something different,” Smith wrote. FishbowlNY MediaBriefing co-founders Neil Thackray and Rory Brown are surely sorry to see their editor and chief analyst go. A spokesperson for BuzzFeed tells FishbowlNY there are currently 10 editorial employees at the London office, with plans to add several more by year’s end.

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Breaking Bad Series Finale Ratings Smash All Records (Entertainment Weekly / InsideTV)
Breaking Bad will not only be remembered as a TV drama that went out on top — creatively, and in terms of popularity — but possibly as a game-changer for underdog TV shows. The second half of the fifth season premiered last month to a stunningly large audience for the long-struggling cult-favorite series, delivering a record 5.9 million viewers. A couple weeks ago, ratings notably rose to 6.4 million viewers. Then last week’s penultimate hour crept up to 6.6 million. TorrentFreak The season finale of Breaking Bad has resulted in a record number of pirated downloads for the popular TV series. Just 12 hours after the first copy appeared online more than 500,000 people had already downloaded the show via various torrent sites. Most downloaders come from Australia, followed by the United States and the UK, where thousands of file-sharers prefer unauthorized copies over legal alternatives.

National Journal Goes Responsive, Shuns App (Adweek)
Atlantic Media Co.’s National Journal is adopting a responsive design while moving away from apps, counter to the thinking of other publishers who believe there’s a role for both to play in reaching mobile users. Whether to go with a responsive site, apps or both comes down to the individual publisher, of course. Some are tethered to apps because they help prop up their print subscription model, or see them as a way to let readers enjoy a lean-back experience that’s different from the Web. For others, the cost and time of designing apps for multiple devices isn’t worth the audience and revenue payoff.

Stars And Stripes Cuts Print Edition Features (JimRomenesko.com)
Stars And Stripes announced Monday that several columns and features, including “Dear Abby” and “Click and Clack Talk Cars,” are being dropped as the print edition goes from 40 pages to 32. The comics in the weekday paper go from three pages to one, while the Sunday funnies are cut in half — to eight pages.

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Kathy Best Is New Editor of Seattle Times (Seattle Post Intelligencer / Strange Bedfellows)
Kathy Best has been named the new editor of The Seattle Times, taking the place of David Boardman, who resigned to become dean of the communications school at Temple University. Best’s 33-year journalism career began in 1980 with the Quad City Times, on the Mississippi River, along the Illinois-Iowa border. Best did two stints at the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the first as a Washington, D.C. reporter, later returning to be assistant managing editor.

A Profile of Tumblr And David Karp After Yahoo! (NY Mag)
In mid-May, a few days before Yahoo! announced it would be acquiring Tumblr, there was a housewarming party in Greenpoint. A Tumblr employee was moving into an apartment with a friend who happened to be dating another Tumblr employee, and the overlapping social circles resulted in a room full of Tumblr people. It was Saturday night. Late the previous afternoon, a cluster of posts had appeared on tech blogs with the announcement that Yahoo!’s board would be meeting on Sunday to approve a $1.1 billion offer for Tumblr, and though everyone at the party had read the posts — or fielded texts from someone who had — nobody had really paid attention. Rumors skittered around the office on a weekly basis. Employees always joked that it didn’t matter what kind of options you had because Tumblr was never going to sell.

A La Carte Journalism: Where People (And Reporters) Set The Agenda (HuffPost / Karthika Muthukumaraswamy)
So you want to do investigative journalism? Or produce a TV series? Or create a biopic? But you don’t have the money to fund it? No problem. Ask your future consumers for money. The conundrum in journalism today is that most people are not willing to pay anything for content. At the same time, there is a small pool of consumers that is willing to pay a large amount of money to see a story covered or content produced on a specific topic. So what do journalists and media organizations do? Tap into the generosity of a few to fund production for many.

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Journalist Glenn Greenwald to Host Reddit Q&A About NSA Files (CNET)
If like many people, you have questions about the confidential files detailing the National Security Agency’s data-gathering activities, Tuesday may hold one of your best opportunities for answers. Glenn Greenwald, one of a handful of journalists who were provided the documents by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, will host a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) about the leaked files, The Guardian announced in a tweet Monday evening.

I Analyzed A Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias And This Is What I Found (Medium / Adrienne LaFrance)
Women are underrepresented in the news in just about every way imaginable. There are fewer women’s bylines on front pages, fewer women sources quoted, and fewer women as the focus of stories. Just 24 percent of the people heard or read about in print, radio, and television are female, according to a 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project study. And male reporters dominate hard-news beats, including 67 percent of stories about politics and government, 65 percent of stories about crime, 60 percent of stories on the economy, and 56 percent of stories about science. As a woman who quotes people for a living, I’ve often considered what I ought to do about this problem. But first, I had to figure out the extent to which I’m contributing to it.

To Tell A Complicated Climate Science Story: Simplify, Shorten, List (CJR / The Observatory)
In a world of short attention spans, small screens, and social media, a massive United Nations report on the threat of global warming, compiled by hundreds of scientists over six years, presents a special journalistic challenge. How can the complexities of climate science be condensed into bite-size morsels for public, and political, consumption? It’s simple: Take a page from Late Show host David Letterman, and make a list.