It might not come as much of a surprise after KTRV Channel 12 lost its Fox affiliation earlier this year, but news operations at the station are officially over.

According to a release issued by the station, all news programming has been immediately suspended, and the company—Block Communications—will work to place affected employees in jobs in other markets.

“We have some exceptional people here who put forth a terrific and honorable effort every day,” said Rick Joseph, president and general manager of KTRV in a written statement. “But the new business model we find ourselves having to adopt does not include news.”

The station hasn't closed the door on ever offering news programming again, but Boise just won't see it on Channel 12 anytime soon.

Since losing its affiliation, KTRV has operated as an independent station, largely airing nationally syndicated shows and reruns of older series.

The chief executive of Netflix told his company's subscribers this morning, Whoops. Our bad.

In a stunning reversal, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reversed his decision to separate his company's DVD rental business and online video streaming service. The company had earlier planned to put movie and television DVD rentals on a different website. The original announcement sent shares of the one-time Wall Street darling down 60 percent since July. This morning's announcement sent Netflix stock up 7 percent in early trading.

"Subscribers voted and Netflix realized the whole thing was stupid," said Charlie Wolf, a media analyst at Needham and Co. "It was an act where you didn't raise prices but you lost subscribers."

In a statement issued on its blog this morning, Hastings said, "There is a difference between moving quickly, which Netflix has done very well for years, and moving too fast, which is what we did in this case."

The Montreal Gazette is reporting that after the attack by right-wing extremist Anders Behring Brevik that killed 77 people in Norway, several Swedish newspapers have announced that they will no longer allow anonymous online commenting because they feel that their comment sections are being exploited as forums for hate speech.

The need to moderate comments by anonymous Internet users became apparent after the twin attacks by Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 people in Norway in July, said the editor of the Aftonbladet daily, Jan Helin.

Bad news in the world of daily journalism is leaking out of the Idaho Statesman today.

The Idaho Business Review is reporting that the Statesman's already tiny newsroom was cut even further on Aug. 15, when nine positions were cut—including seven from the editorial department. IBR cites Statesman reporters who survived the bloodletting as saying that veteran reporters Anna Webb and Joe Estrella were among those cut, as were online editor Sara Cassinelli and copy editors Randall Post and Joi Topete.

It looks like this means surviving employees will be further doubling up on duties and the paper's new publisher, Mike Jung, will be arriving to a bare-bones newsroom.

The Idaho Statesman announced earlier today that Mike Jung will take over as the daily paper's new publisher as of Monday, Aug. 22.

Jung was most recently the publisher of the Santa Cruz Sentinel and is a native of the Bay Area. That paper is owned by Media News Group. Jung is taking over the post left vacant when Mi-Ai Parrish left to take over at the Kansas City Star in June.

The digital music service Spotify is spending its first weekend on laptops and smartphones across the United States. The Swedish company already has more than 10 million registered users and 1.6 million paying customers in the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Spain. It added the United States as its market on Thursday.

Spotify is the latest company to offer a subscription music plan with the cooperations of major music labels. Its chief competitors in the United States will be Rhapsody, MOG and Rdio. All offer a $10-a-month plan that allows for unlimited listening to millions of songs and the ability to save tunes for playback.

Spotify gives users access to 15 million songs for free as long as they listen to some 15-second ads. For $5 a month, the ads are stripped out on a computer-only version. For $10 a month the ads are stripped away from iPhones and Android devices.

The most popular of the subscription services, Rhapsody, has more than 800,000 paying subscribers.

There are big shake-ups in Boise's print media world. McClatchy Co. announced today that Mi-Ai Parrish will leave her post as publisher to take over the same position at the Kansas City Star.

Parrish has been at the Statesman since not long after McClatchy bought the paper in 2006. No date has been given for her departure, but the company said the search is on for a new Statesman publisher.

Oh, snap. Apparently President Barack Obama can crack a joke and throw a punch. At the same time.

At last night's White House Correspondents Association Dinner, the president delivered a couple of punchlines with Donald Trump as the butt of the joke.

Among them:

“Tonight, for the first time, I am releasing my official birth video,” he declared. On the video screens around the room, up popped the birth scene from The Lion King.

“I want to make clear to the Fox News table: That was a joke,” Obama said. “That was not my real birth video. That was a children’s cartoon. Call Disney if you don't believe me. They have the original long-form version.”

Last week, President Obama released his long-form birth certificate after Trump riled up the birthers with his foray into politics as he tests the waters for a possible presidential run. Obama wasn't the only one to take aim at The Donald at last night's dinner. Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers had a few Trump jokes of his own and—get this—The Donald was in the audience.

The Andrus Center for Public Policy has launched a new blog with three high-profile contributors expected to focus on "the ongoing discussion of public policy in the American West."

Contributors include Marc Johnson, managing partner for the Boise office of Gallatin Public Affairs and former chief of staff and press secretary to ex-Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus; Chris Carlson, retired Gallatin founder who also served as the director of the U.S. Department of the Interior's Office of Public Affairs under President Jimmy Carter; and John C. Freemuth, senior fellow at the Andrus Center for Public Policy and a professor of political science and public administration at Boise State.

The Andrus Center, which was founded in 1995, has published white papers and reports on topics from forest management and wildfires to river management and an overall view of wildlife, people and land in the West. The new blog looks to be a more frequently updated discussion of those topics, albeit covered in a depth more appropriate for reading on your smartphone than your typical white paper tends to be.

Sony Computer Entertainment says its PlayStation Network was hacked, shutting down its global gaming systems. A company statement late Saturday said that Sony "was working around the clock" to fix the issues.

"An external intrusion on our system has affected our PlayStation Network and Qriocty services," said Patrick Seybold, Sony's senior director of corporate communications and social media.

The PlayStation Network is a way for users to download movies, TV shows and games over the web to a PlayStation. Access to the network is free, though users have to pay for some of the content.

Meanwhile, Amazon.com is still working to restore some of its servers used by other websites as an outage stretched into a fourth day. Besides selling books and DVDs, Amazon.com rents out space on its servers that run other websites and online services. Amazon said Saturday that it was making progress fixing the problem, but more slowly than it had hoped.