Voices

Politico’s Owner Purchases Another News Site

Robert Allbritton, the owner of Politico, is expanding his digital empire with the purchase of online news site Capital New York. The move comes a little more than a month after the Washington media mogul agreed to sell his eight television stations for nearly $1 billion.

Because Influencing Election Results Is Weird

I hope people don’t take the forecasts too seriously. You’d rather have an experiment where you record it off from the actual voters, in a sense, but we’ll see. If it gets really weird in 2014, in 2016, then maybe I’ll stop doing it. I don’t want to influence the democratic process in a negative way.

Nate Silver, to a Washington University audience, suggests that he might stop writing the FiveThirtyEight blog if it starts to influence election results

The Politico VandeHei and Allen Show Is in Full Swing (Video)

You don’t need a poll to tell you this: Political Web sites are growing in influence.

If You Get the Muppets to Sign On, Hillary’s In

I was delighted to read about your interest in sharing the big screen with me. As you can imagine, I am a little occupied at the moment, but perhaps someday I can help you forget Sarah Marshall … again. My only condition is that there be Muppets involved, and that is non-negotiable.

Hillary Clinton, in reply to Jason Segel’s joking remarks to Jimmy Fallon and Us Weekly about the Secretary of State starring in a movie with him

BuzzFeed Bulks Up Again, With a Tech Section Run by Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan

Another well-known writer for a site that used to specialize in other people’s writing. This one says he’ll write about “tech for humans.”

Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users’ Political Sentiments

A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts to understand how social media users feel about U.S. election candidates.

News Byte

Buzzfeed Raises $15 Million to Make More Buzzy Content

News aggregator/newsmaker Buzzfeed has raised a $15.5 million C round led by New Enterprise Associates. The New York-based site, run by Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti, also features HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer as investor and chairman, and former HuffPo sales boss Greg Coleman has joined as a board advisor. The site recently signaled its intent to generate more of its own content, designed to be flung around users’ social networks, by hiring Politico blogger Ben Smith to beef up its editorial ranks.

Facebook, MoveOn Vets Working on Mystery Media Start-Up for Lefties

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is backing a news venture from former MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser that they’re calling a “viral media start-up” for progressives.

News Byte

Yahoo's Envoy Joins Diplomatic Discussion

Yahoo today launched the latest addition to its growing stable of original blogs–The Envoy, which will cover foreign affairs with Laura Rozen, most recently chief foreign policy reporter for Politico, at the helm. Yahoo now has 23 original blogs across its news, sports and entertainment coverage, and said that in February, monthly traffic to those sites topped 550 million page views for the first time.

Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt and ProPublica’s Paul Steiger Live at D8

What’s the future of the media business? Demand Media, the Google-savvy “content farm” that generates thousands of computer-assigned, low-cost Web items a day? Or ProPublica, a nonprofit that produces deep-dive investigative pieces and publishes them on its own site and in the pages of high-profile partners? Good guess: Some of both. But let’s allow both parties to make their own case.

Obama’s Post-Election Media Bump: Over