Along with confirming its $200 million investment in Buzzfeed, NBCUniversal says it plans to partner with the startup on Olympics coverage. As Re/code’s Peter Kafka notes: “The other point that’s interesting to me is that BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti specifically says his company wants to work with NBCU ‘to extend our reach to TV and film.’” 

In gory detail, The New York Times just laid out the awful work environment that is Amazon. In response, as GeekWire reports, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is encouraging “employees to read the report, and requests that anyone seeing the type of abusive culture described in the piece should report it immediately to human resources or directly to him.” 

At an award ceremony, this week, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson took time to charge Google with “piracy, zealotry and kleptocracy,” and had similarly harsh words for Facebook and LinkedIn. “None of them actually create content, and they certainly have little intention of paying for it, but they do redistribute the content created by others,” Thomson said. 

Buzzfeed took in $46 million during the first half of 2014, Gawker reports, citing internal documents. “The documents also prove clearly for the first time that BuzzFeed pays millions of dollars to sites like Facebook to boost its clients’ advertising campaigns,” Gawker notes. 

Despite early investor praise, Larry Page’s decision to break up Google’s various ventures -- and house them in a holding company called Alphabet is a risky bet. That’s what several management experts tell veteran Silicon Valley reporter Robert D. Hof. “Alphabet will be successful only if the individual projects and companies can be successful enough on their own to be spun off into freestanding companies eventually,” Hof writes. 

Politico’s Joe Pompeo says the time is ripe for NPR to ride the digital revolution to new levels of success. “NPR … has arrived at the most confounding crossroads in its 45-year history, confronted with a boom in podcasts and on-demand digital listening that is both an opportunity and a force to be reckoned with,” he writes. 

Content discovery company StumbleUpon appears to be on life support. “Unable to secure additional venture capital funding, [the company] is now letting go of dozens of employees in a new round of layoffs,” VentureBeat reports, citing sources. “The company had just under 100 employees and will only have around 30 by the end of this week.” 

While Western media types grumble about trolls and otherwise inconsiderate readers, bloggers in Bangladesh are fighting for their lives. As Reuters reports: “Attackers armed with machetes killed a blogger in Bangladesh on Friday, the fourth killing of an online critic of religious extremism in less than six months.” 

Along with Android and some of Amazon’s platforms, HBO Now will henceforth be available through Google’s Chromecast service. “HBO NOW, the new standalone subscription service from HBO, allows you to stream shows at the same time they air on TV without a cable subscription,” 9To5Google reports. 

About four years after putting up its paywall, The New York Times has surpassed 1 million digital-only subscribers. “Of course, the New York Times already has more than one million digital readers,” Venture Beat notes. “Those on a bundled print and digital subscription amount to 1.1 million.”