Product Hunt, an online community for the gadget obsessed, just raised $6.1 million in a Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. “Product Hunt’s uniqueness comes from the full breadth of activity around new products and those enthusiastic about them,” Steven Sinofsky -- the startup’s newest board member -- tells TechCrunch. “It’s a place to launch, learn, share and curate.” Additional investors include Greylock, Ludlow Ventures, and SV Angel, to name a few. 

Can Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella save the software giant, and correct the many missteps of former head Steve Ballmer? Vanity Fair devotes more than 7,500 words to the matter, by taking a close look at the company’s management history going back to founder Bill Gates. For what’s its worth, VF considers Nadella to be more like Gates than Ballmer. Yet, according VF, it is too early to tell whether Microsoft’s full history will be “celebratory -- or a cautionary tale.” 

Finally embracing the future of publishing, the UK’s Telegraph Media Group is undergoing a radical transformation that will prioritize digital over print. Management’s vision to is to “transform the organisation’s print-focused mind-set into a digitally led approach,” The Guardian reports. Said a source close: “The engine driving the content decisions is the 80 million worldwide unique users per month.” 

As part of a major media rights deals just reached by the NBA, Disney, and Turner Broadcasting, the league plans to let ESPN live stream regular season games. “In a significant move for ESPN … [the new] service will be open to people who aren’t cable or satellite TV customers,” The Wall Street Journal reports. “The contracts with Disney and Turner will give them the rights to NBA games through the 2024-25 season.” 

With Vice’s rebellious reputation on the line, a former editor is accusing the media company of killing (and modifying) stories to protect advertiser relationships. In one instance, editor in question, Charles Davis, filed a story about unpaid labor at the South by Southwest festival. At the time, however, “Vice Media [had] co-sponsored [a SXSW] event venue with AT&T,” Capital New York reports. A source at Vice tell Capital that the story was killed for “editorial reasons that had nothing to do with AT&T, though what Davis was told may be another matter.”

Live coverage of NFL games will not be coming to the Web anytime soon. “DirecTV has renewed its deal to carry the NFL’s ‘Sunday Ticket’ subscription package,” Re/Code reports. Translation? “The renewal means that the most plausible way for a non-TV company to get its hands on TV’s most valuable programming is now off the table; people familiar with the deal say it will extend for eight years.”

Unlike many newspaper executives of a certain age, Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, is a big fan of what he calls “technological disruption.” In fact, in an interview with Re/Code, Barber goes so far as the say: “One of my mentors used to say journalism used to drive software, and now software’s driving the journalism.” What’s more, “The software people are telling us about new ways to do something, and as journalists you’ve got to be more humble about that.”

Earlier this week, The New York Times said it was shuttering a recently launched app, NYT Opinion, in which it had the highest hopes. What went wrong? Simply put, It was “unable to find a substantial paying audience,” Nieman Lab reports. As such, according to Andy Rosenthal, editorial page editor for the Times: “It’s just not working as a business.” Another app that launched alongside Opinion, NYT Now, will continue to live on, but with what Nieman Lab calls a “tweaked subscription model.”

Confirming related rumors, The New York Times said Wednesday that it plans on cutting an additional 100 “newsroom” positions, along with select editorial and business positions. “In addition to the job cuts, NYT Opinion, a new mobile app dedicated to opinion content, [is] shutting down because it was not attracting enough subscribers,” NYT’s own Ravi Somaiya reports.