Gannett is diversifying beyond its newspaper and local TV businesses by "pulling together a group of companies with agency-like [marketing] capabilities under one roof called G/O Digital," writes Alex Kantrowitz. "The new entity will include BLINQ,  the Facebook ads agency it acquired last year, Shoplocal, Key Ring, GannettLocal and daily deals site DealChicken."

Wrapports, owner of the Chicago-based Sun-Times newspaper group, has launched Aggrego, a separate unit that will create lower-cost content by  using "automated processes to repackage data for use in news reports," writes Lynne Marek. "To produce the content, Aggrego recruited about 40 employees, including web engineers," who will be doing data analytics and collection.

Was The New York Times website the victim of a cyber attack? That's what some reports said about the fact that the site had been down from the count of about 9 a.m. Eastern time to some time in the early afternoon. However, "The New York Times' Twitter account attributed the outage to 'technical difficulties ... that we hope to resolve soon,'" according to The Wrap. And, according to an update from a Times spokeswoman, "The outage occurred within seconds of a scheduled maintenance update, which we believe was the cause."

The American Medical Association will cease publication of its 55-year-old news magazine, American Medical News, as of Sept. 19.

Though Fox's new sports channel, FS1, is set to launch on Saturday, it has still not signed carriage deals with at least three major pay TV distributors: DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable. "Distributors that do not cut a deal for FS1 by Saturday will continue to carry Speed, though it will be a stripped down version of the motorsports channel," writes John Ourand.

Online dating site HowAboutWe has partnered with Elle magazine, which will offer memberships to the site for $30, and a $500 matchmaking package with the pub's long-running advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. HowAboutWe has also been working with New York magazine as part of the site's "media partners program, which brings in some 25% of the site’s new members," writes Jeff Bercovici.

The Toronto Star, Canada's largest-selling daily newspaper, is erecting a digital paywall. After accessing 10 free articles a month online (The same limit imposed by The New York Times), readers must subscribe to read more content: 99 cents  for the first month's full digital access, and then $9.99 monthly.

So who's profiting from the two-week-old CBS station blackout in key Time Warner Cable markets? Radio Shack, for one, which is reporting a "double-digit spike in high-definition antennas" in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas, writes Jeanine Poggi. "It's unclear exactly how many antennas sold that translates into, however: RadioShack declined to release concrete numbers on that score."

Dead celebrities on magazine covers (most recently, Princess Diana) are key to high newsstand sales for Vanity Fair, where they've practically become an institution to be lampooned -- but also a trend echoed by the likes of Town & Country. "What genre of books is most popular? Biographies. And those are often about dead people,” T&C editor in chief Jay Fielden tells Erik Maza.But some live celebs are top sellers for other pubs, according to numbers quoted here from the Alliance for Audited Media. And "Beyoncé trumps everyone, even the First Lady of the United States," writes Maza.

NBC News has just bought Stringwire, a start-up whose technology will enable the network to have live videos of breaking news scenes "streamed straight to its control rooms in New York from the cellphones of witnesses," ready for producers to pick footage for broadcast, writes Brian Stelter. "Such a vision fits neatly into the future many academics predict," one with "fewer professional news-gatherers but many more unpaid eyes and ears contributing to news coverage."