Taking down its network of Web sites for a number of hours, the BBC reportedly was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack on Thursday. “The attack on the BBC hit the main website as well as associated services including the main iPlayer catch-up service and iPlayer Radio app which were also not working properly,” BBC reports, citing sources inside the company.

The Wall Street Journal checks in with The Washington Post under the ownership of Jeff Bezos. “In the more than two years since Mr. Bezos bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million, the billionaire Amazon.com Inc. founder has increasingly made his mark on how the paper is run, The Journal reports. “His focus on customer experience has become a near mandate within the news operation.”

The Washington Post is shelving its “What was Fake” column, which was intended to debunk untruths and hoax stories being spread online. The problem is that said debunking did little to slow spread of the fake news. Why? “A series of Internet entrepreneurs [who] have realized that not much drives traffic as effectively as stories that vindicate and/or inflame the biases of their readers,” WaPo notes.

NiemanLab surveys some of the 18 publishers presently participating in Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative. Among other improvement, Julia Beizer, director of mobile products at The Washington Post, wants to see more metrics. “We’re working with Facebook to try to develop even deeper metrics on what we’re seeing on the shares front, what we’re seeing in terms of video views, and all that, and hopefully learning more,” she tells NiemanLab.

Eddy Cue, Apple's SVP for Internet software and services, says Apple News is the best thing to happen to publishers since electricity. “This gives them an opportunity to focus on what they do really well, which is the journalism part, and let us handle the technology piece of building the apps and distributing them,” he tells CNNMoney.com.