While many magazines are leaving mobile apps for dead, "a new breed of app is going the freemium route," with companies like Time Inc. "offering a top layer of content for free but requir[ing users] to shell out for a deeper dive," writes Emma Bazilian. People CelebWatch, for example, "lets the user access exclusive content and track favorite celebs" for 99 cents a month.  Hearst is also "in the early stages of developing its own freemium products," according to Bazilian.

It’s not just the U.S. government’s spying that companies need to worry about. The Chinese military has been conducting what The Washington Post calls “economic cyber-espionage” against American companies, the Justice Department said on Monday. The accusation represents the first time the United States has aimed such criminal charges at a foreign country, WaPo reports. 

Perhaps a little too late, one of the godfathers of biometrics -- the science of identifying people based on their unique physiological characteristics -- is worried about its potential abuses. Readily available face-matching technology is already capable of “basically robbing everyone of their anonymity,” Joseph Atick, the godfather, tells The New York Times. Estimated to be a $7.2 billion industry back in 2012, it has only recently caught the attention of Madison Avenue. 

Albeit as a shadow of its former self, Patch appears to be doing well under the ownership of Hale Global -- the investment firm that took the local news network off of AOL’s hand earlier this year. “Patch is on the mend, pared down and profitable under a fresh leadership team,” The New York Times reports. As Charles Hale, head of Hale Global, tells NYT: “We’ve eliminated a great deal of corporate bureaucracy from the AOL model … We’re back in start-up mode.” 

As rumored, AT&T formally agreed on Sunday to buy DirecTV for about $48.5 billion, or $95 a share. Including debt the deal is worth $67 billion.

While FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler was laying out his Net neutrality proposal, this week, Web giants like Google and Microsoft got something they’ve long lobbied for unsuccessfully. They “sneaked through a huge victory when the agency agreed to set aside up to three channels of TV airwaves for unlicensed use,” Re/Code reports. “Most airwaves can only be used by companies or parties that hold exclusive licenses; unlicensed airwaves can be used by anyone … Wi-Fi networks run on unlicensed airwaves, and tech companies have been trying for years to get more set aside for more powerful Wi-Fi networks.” 

Arianna Huffington and her Huffington Post co-founder, Ken Lerer, have quietly settled with two Democratic consultants who claimed critical roles in founding the popular news hub. In a lawsuit filed back in 2010, Peter Daou and James Boyce said they had been unjustly deprived of any stake in the site’s $315 million sale to AOL. As for the size of the settlement, “Daou … is establishing a foundation to dispense grants to young women … that suggests the financial component of the settlement was significant,” Forbes reports. 

Gannett bought six Texas-based TV stations from  London Broadcasting Company for $215 million as part of its "corporate strategy of reducing its dependence on print media," writes Roger Yu. That will make a total of 46 stations the company owns or operates.

In the wake of Jill Abramson’s unplanned exit from The New York Times, an internal memo has surfaced that portrays the publisher as struggling to adapt to an increasingly digital world. “The report largely ignores legacy competitors and focuses on the new wave of digital companies, including First Look Media, Vox, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and BuzzFeed,” BuzzFeed reports. As the memo warns: “They are ahead of us in building impressive support systems for digital journalists, and that gap will grow unless we quickly improve our capabilities.” 

Among other issues, a dispute over native advertising apparently factored into Jill Abramson’s dismissal from The New York Times this week. The now former executive editor and Mark Thompson, the paper’s CEO, didn’t see eye to eye on the controversial ad format, Ken Auletta reports in The New Yorker. “She had already clashed with … Thompson, over native advertising and the perceived intrusion of the business side into the newsroom,” Auletta writes.