Piers Morgan has found a new gig. The former CNN anchor just joined the UK-based Daily Mail Online as Editor-at-Large for the United States, Politico reports. “This is Morgan's first major news role since he ended his prime-time CNN program in March amid poor ratings,” it writes. “Morgan has essentially been a free agent since then, though his contract with the network officially ended in September.”

Call it an opportunity for digital marketers or a death sentence for city and regional magazines, but the sector still relies on print for up to 93% of its revenue, according to new research from Folio. “Companies aren't shying away from it either,” Folio reports. “More print products are scheduled to launch in 2014 than at any point in the last five years.” That said, a few publishers are predicting a shift away from print and toward alternative revenue streams -- digital media and events, chief among them -- in 2015 however.” 

Capital New York spends some time with Meredith Kopit Levien, head of advertising at The New York Times, and a big proponent of native ads. “It was this enthusiasm for native advertising that put Levien in the hot seat during comedian John Oliver’s 11-minute take-down of native on the August 3 edition of HBO’s ‘Last Week Tonight,’” Capital notes. “Oliver compared the Times’ native campaign for ‘Orange is the New Black’ to ‘hearing the one Katy Perry song that you like ... but it still feels wrong to be listening to.’” 

The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) is introducing an audience measurement system, which, as The New York Times reports, “will allow individual magazines to capture broad consumer engagement for the first time, whether it is a fan watching a Cosmopolitan fashion video on a mobile phone or a reader looking at a favorite new recipe from Bon Appétit on Pinterest.” The new monthly system, Magazine Media 360, “will measure audience engagement for print and for digital editions and video across desktop and mobile devices,” NYT reports. 

Microsoft has long aspired to rival Apple’s retail presence. Taking one step in that direction, the software giant is finally firming up plans to open a Manhattan flagship store on Fifth Avenue. “The software company confirmed that it will be setting up shop at 677 Fifth Ave. as it continues to expand its retail presence and take more control over its consumers' shopping experience,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The Fifth Avenue store has been five years in the making, Microsoft executives said … It is expected to open sometime in 2015.” 

There’s a long history in news media of publishers putting out what they think is best for readers, rather than what they think readers want. GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram thinks new and newish properties like Buzzfeed and Gawker have been so successful because they take the opposite approach. Taking it even further, “They are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people,” Ingram writes.

Doing its part to relegate climate-change deniers to an unfortunate historical footnote, Google is cutting ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) -- a group that, as ars technica explains, “has said human-created climate change could be ‘beneficial’ and opposes environmental regulations.” Regarding Google’s past support for ALEC, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said this week: “We’re trying to not do that in the future.” 

Continuing to reshape itself for today’s always-on audiences, The New York Times is launching First Draft -- “a morning email newsletter and politics site within NYTimes.com,” HuffingtonPost reports. Hulse said First Draft, which is expected to land in subscribers' in-boxes around 7 a.m., will highlight political stories running that morning in the NYT  and include some aggregation and links to competitors. 

Who’s needs native advertising? Rather than pander to newspapers and their fussy ethics boards, deep-pocketed corporations are increasingly publishing their own brand of “journalism.” Take the Richmond Standard, which the Financial Times calls “one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands,” not to mention a division of the Chevron Corporation. Regarding such “brand journalism,” FT writes: “Social media and digital publishing tools are allowing this strain of corporate news to reach vast audiences, with profound implications for the way businesses communicate with the public and for the media outlets they are learning …

The Microsoft Research (MSR) Silicon Valley lab is the latest casualty of the company’s existing plan to shed as many as 18,000 employees. “The MSR Silicon Valley lab is primarily focused on distributed computing research, including ‘privacy, security … Internet search and services, and related theory,’” ZDNet reports. Yet, “Microsoft operates a number of Microsoft Research labs worldwide, including labs in Asia, Cairo, Cambridge (UK), Europe, India, Israel, New England, New York City and Redmond.”