Daily Must Reads, April 23, 2014

1. Study: How is user-generated content used in TV news? (Justin Ellis / Nieman Lab) 2. The right (and wrong) way to think about how Aereo works (Jeff Bercovici / Forbes) 3. American journalist with Vice News captured in Eastern Ukraine (Brian Ries / Mashable) 4. Comcast close to subscriber deal with Charter Communications (Shalini [...]
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Future-Proofing News Apps

Let’s say that you’re a historian in 2064 and you want to look at the New York Times for a view of how journalists represented celebrity fashion in the early 2000s. You could pull images of the pages of newsprint that hold Oscar photos, but what you’d really want is to see the Times’ 2014 [...]
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Futures Lab Update #56: Beaming Mobile Video to TV; Vizrt’s Video-Editing App

Reported by Reuben Stern and Olga Kyle. This week we explore some new tools that push video from smartphones to television, and we see how one newspaper is working to turn entertainment listings into a real-world audience experience. PART 1: AirCast Live A new app called AirCast Live enables users to send video clips and photos directly [...]
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Daily Must Reads, April 22, 2014

1. Netflix calls out AT&T for lackluster streaming performance (Crayton Harrison / Businessweek) 2. Jonah Lehrer quietly launches new blog, gets Gladwell boost (Jeremy Barr / Capital New York) 3. Slate tries to buck the paywall trend by focusing on membership (Mathew Ingram / GigaOm) 4. ‘Today’ show coming to radio for first time on [...]
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Ami Kassar: Many Small-Business Owners Don't Understand the SBA

By Ami Kassar The U.S. Small Business Administration has a marketing challenge: Many entrepreneurs don't understand its lending program. A lot of the confusion arises when an entrepreneur speaks with a lender about the opportunity to get an SBA-backed loan. If the lender rejects the application and doesn't provide financing, the borrower often assumes that he or she has been automatically disqualified from the program. This is because the borrower thinks that the SBA is the lender, when in fact it isn't. Instead, the SBA is a guarantor of small-business loans.

As Wage Debate Rages, Some Already Make the Move

By Julie Jargon and Eric Morath SAN JOSE, Calif.—As lawmakers in the nation's capital are mired in debate over likely outcomes from raising the federal minimum wage, businesses hit with local wage increases across the U.S. already are grappling with the reality.A Carl's Jr. franchisee in San Francisco offset the county's higher minimum wage—now $10.74—by using less shortening to make french fries. A White Castle in Illinois cut two jobs to match competitors' costs in nearby Indiana, where the mandated wage is lower.

Drop in Tech Stocks Hits Startup Funding

By Rolfe Winkler, Matt Jarzemsky and Evelyn Rusli Tech stocks have taken a pounding over the past month, putting pressure on the ecosystem for financing startups and taking them public.The market's recent downturn—despite a modest rally this week—has changed the tone in Silicon Valley and has some company directors recalibrating their expectations, said Jim Breyer, a partner at venture-capital firm Accel Partners."Not a board meeting goes by when at least half the meeting isn't spent on financial strategy," said Mr. Breyer, who also is chief executive of Breyer Capital.

Searching in Vain for Web-Ad Help

By Khadeeja Safdarand Angus Loten Thousands of small-business owners have paid marketing firms to get their products and services in front of potential customers on Google, Yahoo and other Internet search engines.But a growing number of these advertisers complain about the online marketing firms' sales tactics and say they made promises that didn't pan out. Many of the small businesses' complaints single out two of the industry's biggest players: ReachLocal Inc., a publicly traded Woodland Hills, Calif., firm with annual sales of more than $514 million last year, and Yodle Inc.

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