• NPR Puts Person Behind Twitter Account, Sees Engagement Soar
    Publishers would be wise to stop using their Twitter accounts like an RSS feed that automatically pushes stories out to followers. Rather, they should take a page from NPR, which recently put a human at the helm of its once-automated Twitter account. The result: “During … five days of manual updating, there were 142,219 visits to NPR’s website from @nprnews tweets -- a 45 percent increase from the average (98,213) of the five weeks leading up to the experiment,” Nieman Journalism Lab reports, citing NPR’s Google Analytics data. 
  • Google Adds "Right To Be Forgotten" Form
    Ostensibly embracing a radical change to its core business, Google has added a request form to its legal page, which EU residents can use to have unflattering or defamatory search results removed from the Web. The move follows a recent ruling by Europe’s highest court, which held that EU citizens have “the right to be forgotten.” As The Washington Post notes, the requests are presently limited to national borders, and US citizens can’t yet be “forgotten” by Google.  
  • Dish Network To Become Largest Company Accepting Bitcoin Payments
    Dish Network will begin accepting online customer payments in bitcoin in the third quarter, reportedly becoming "the biggest company to date to accept the controversial virtual currency," writes George Szalai.
  • 'Newsweek' Partners Up For Foreign Licensing Deals
    Newsweek has signed a deal with "global media consultancy Empirical Media to strike new foreign licensing agreements for the print magazine and its website," first focusing on Central Europe and Asia markets, writes Joe Pompeo.
  • Google Remains Mostly Male & White
    Google’s workforce is still mostly male and white, the search giant admitted this week. “Men make up 70 percent of its global workforce, and hold 83 percent of what it calls tech jobs,” MercuryNews.com reports, citing some freshly released numbers from Google. What’s more, “Whites are 60 percent of its U.S. workforce, and 72 percent of what it calls its ‘leadership’ team.” 
  • 'Cosmo' Mag Launches Conference Series In October
    Cameron Diaz and Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy will be among the speakers at the launch of Cosmopolitan magazine's conference series, Fun Fearless Life, set for New York Nov. 8 and 9, with another two-day session in Miami Dec. 6 and 7.  "The event is geared toward young women primarily in their 20s who are looking for career advice and inspiration," writes Alexandra Steigrad.
  • Study: VOD Users Watch More TV
    Users of TV Everywhere apps and video-on-demand watch more TV overall than other users, and two thirds say such apps offer "a lot of value," according to a Viacom study. Also, "most viewers use TV Everywhere to re-watch or catch up on episodes," writes Stuart Schneiderman.
  • Bittersweet Bert: Even If You're Sick Of Reading About 'Mad Men'...
    You might enjoy this interview with Robert Morse, whose sweet sendoff as Bert Cooper was such a lovely part of Sunday's episode. Morse discusses his newly full inbox, Bert's socks, and how Jon Hamm hung in there like a trouper during the filming of the song and dance.
  • Skype To Translate Real-Time Conversations
    An upcoming version of Skype will be able to translate voice calls between people speaking different languages in “near real-time,” Microsoft said this week. In what would represent a major breakthrough for the software giant, the service is expected to be released in beta later this year, “and possibly as a commercial product within the next two-and-a-half years,” The Verge reports. 
  • History Channel First To Use Peel's Channel-Changing App
    The History Channel just became the first network to use an app from smart remote app company Peel "that will enable users... to change the channel to a promoted show, DVR the show, or set up a calendar reminder by clicking on an in-app banner," writes Adam Flomenbaum. "The potential of this advertising solution is tremendous; networks spend months to promote a new show through traditional and social advertising, but they have never had influence on the viewer as the viewer is deciding on what channel to turn to," with remote in hand.
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