New York Times

[Commentary] A merger between 21st Century Fox and Time Warner would reduce control of the major Hollywood studios to five owners, from six, and major television producers to four, from five.

Fox and Time Warner may no longer publish old-media newspapers or magazines, but they certainly disseminate information and opinions that may be even more vital to the “welfare of the public” today than the newspapers of Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black’s era.

How many news shows and opinion panels would be produced on TV under the ownership of a Rupert Murdoch, or for that matter, any other media mogul who controlled close to 40 percent of all major film production and nearly 20 percent of all television?

To look only at price competition and economic efficiency “makes no sense whatsoever” in the media context, added with Maurice Stucke, a law professor at the University of Tennessee. He posits that any analysis of competition in media mergers should include the impact on “the marketplace of ideas,” where competition “advances truth.”

Using cat pictures -- that essential building block of the Internet -- and a supercomputer, Owen Mundy, an assistant professor of art at Florida State University, built a site that shows the locations of the cats (at least at some point in time, given their nature) and, presumably, of their owners.

His site displays random images from a sample of one million of what Mundy estimates are at least 15 million pictures tagged with the word “cat” online. The images are displayed on a map using satellite imagery, with nearby cat photos also visible. Specific street addresses are not displayed, but the geographic information can leave few details to the imagination in rural areas.

The lesson for people who share pictures online, whether it’s kittens or your children, is this: If you include more metadata than you have to with your photos, don’t be surprised if it’s used online in ways you didn’t expect and can’t fully control.

Comcast reported net income of almost $2 billion in the second quarter, with revenue growth in the company’s cable business offsetting a lackluster performance in its NBCUniversal entertainment group.

Revenue in Comcast’s cable unit increased 5.4 percent, to $11 billion. Comcast added 203,000 broadband subscribers in the quarter.

Time Warner is playing defense. The company has amended its corporate bylaws and removed a provision that allowed shareholders to call a special board meeting.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Time Warner said the change was effective immediately.

The move gives shareholders -- and 21st Century Fox -- fewer avenues to press the company into a potential deal with Fox, which recently made an unsolicited $80 billion offer to combine the companies. Without the ability to call a special meeting, shareholders supportive of a Fox offer would not be able to replace Time Warner’s board of directors before the company’s next annual meeting, which would likely come next June.

After months of speculation, Amazon has announced that it was introducing a digital subscription service that allows subscribers to download unlimited e-books and digital audiobooks for $9.99 a month.

The service, Kindle Unlimited, offers a Netflix style, all-you-can-read approach to a library of more than 600,000 e-books, including blockbuster series like “The Hunger Games” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” nonfiction titles like Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys,” and literary fiction and classics.

Over nearly five decades, Murdoch has struck numerous deals to build and reshape his media juggernaut. His acquisitions, through his company News Corporation, included technology properties like Myspace and venerable publications like The Wall Street Journal, making him a major force for consolidation in the media business.

The Chinese government, which already maintains tight restrictions on the country’s media, has issued new warnings to local journalists not to cooperate with foreign news agencies.

Months before the World Cup, Univision unveiled its plan to reach female viewers, many of whom are devoted to the Spanish-language media giant’s daytime talk shows and telenovelas.

The primary weapon has been a series of promotional ads that overtly emphasize the multitude of manly qualities of various star footballers -- with a woman’s sultry voice-over. The strategy to link soccer and the steaminess of telenovelas appears to have worked.

Combined with other elements designed to attract female fans of Univision’s lifestyle programming, weekday World Cup viewership for women 18 to 49 has soared by 74 percent, to 646,000, from the regular programming in the month before the tournament began.

To keep all the subscriptions straight, and to avoid paying for services no longer wanted or needed (or forgotten about entirely), it is worthwhile to conduct a regular audit of your digital life.

Microsoft has kept its head down since a European court in May ruled that people could ask Internet search services to delink personal information.

But the company is about to invite a lot more attention. Microsoft plans to follow the lead of Google, which responded to the court ruling by creating an online form that lets individuals request removal of links to material they say violates their online privacy.

Microsoft, which operates the Bing search service, is expected to roll out its own request form. The release date of the online form is not yet certain, because Microsoft must coordinate with Yahoo, which also relies on the Bing search engine to power its own search services.