The New York Times announced that 17-year-old company veteran Andy Wright has been promoted to a new position, publisher of The New York Times Magazine. "Wright’s appointment comes ahead of the magazine’s expected relaunch and only a few months after Jake Silverstein was hired away from Texas Monthly to become the magazine’s editor in March," writes Arti Patel.

So many media company mergers are expected in the wake of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, "and the enormous scale and power that [the combined company] will have over the television and broadband industry," that the Federal Communications Commission "will be under tremendous pressure to block at least one of the mega-deals lest they be viewed as being asleep at the switch,” writes Mike Farrell, partly paraphrasing and also quoting from a report by industry analyst Craig Moffett.

Nieman Journalism Lab traces Mashable’s evolution from tech news site to real-time global news gatherer. The transformation is largely due to executive editor Jim Roberts, who spent 26 years at The New York Times and other “serious” publishers before joining Mashable last October. In addition, Brian Ries, Mashable’s real-time news editor, is bringing a more “modern” approach to reporting. “You can have the 1,200-word article if you want … but if you think the story can be better told in a series of Vines … then go with that,” said Ries.

Re/Code’s Kara Swisher is calling bull on a report that Google considered a bid for Spotify. “According to multiple … sources at both companies, there have been neither formal nor informal discussions between the companies about an acquisition, directly or indirectly,” she writes. “That said, Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek has indeed met with Google execs about various and substantive commercial deals at YouTube, Google Play and Android.”

Web audiences appear to be loving the “continuous scroll” feature, which connects content together. “It’s been adopted by Time.com, NBCNews.com and LATimes.com, reflecting the fact that direct homepage traffic is waning … and traffic from social media (particularly Facebook) just keeps growing,” Poynter reports. “Since its March redesign, Time.com’s bounce rate … has declined by 15 percentage points.” 

A new research paper is drawing a lot of negative attention to AddThis and its “canvas fingerprinting” technology. The paper -- from researchers at Princeton University and KU Leuven University in Belgium -- claims that the online ad company is behind 95% of the consumer tracking technology, which is extremely difficult to block. “They can’t be prevented by using standard Web browser privacy settings or using anti-tracking tools, such as AdBlock Plus,” according to a joint report from ProPublica and Mashable. The reports coincides with the release of Privacy Badger -- a tool from the Electronic Frontier Foundation aimed at …

Susan Sarandon will be taking over as TONY's editor in chief this week. Or at least, for one day, according to this story, which says the actress and social activist is "spending the day in our Manhattan offices today, July 21st, planning the articles, layouts, digital packages and social activity for our August 14th issue." Um, doesn't it take more than a day to actually do that job? Still, it's a cute gimmick, having a celeb editor, one which should get the mag some notice, anyway.

Will robot-written stories save traditional news publishers, or serve as another nail in their collective coffin? We’re about to find out as the Associated Press has begun to publish earnings-report stories written with automation technology. AP managing editor Lou Ferrara tells Poynter that the move will actually give his human reporters more time to report news. “What I’m trying to get out of is the data processing business,” Ferrara recently told Poynter. “I can’t have journalists spending a ton of time data processing stuff … Instead, I need them reporting.” 

Could Edward Snowden’s next target be Madison Avenue? Such a scenario is actually possible now that the NSA leaker plans to dedicate his life to personal data privacy. Along developing related technology, Snowden is using his star power to preach the gospel of personal privacy, Re/Code reports. “We the people … have both the means and the capability to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols upon which we rely every day,” Snowden said via a Google Hangout at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference, this weekend. 

Some of the world's largest video game publishers offer sponsored deals to prominent YouTubers, and apparently sometimes the game makers try to make deals to get flattering commentary, this story hints.