Media Industry Archive

From the time it launched, there have been things about Digg that I’ve admired. It harnesses the opinions of the tech-saavy crowd as well as anyone out there, at least in terms of which recent news stories apparently enjoy the largest support among Diggers. Also, Digg’s distribution model — providing a button that quickly became ubiquitous across the web, leveraged the Web 2.0...

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Most Mondays, we’re confronted with another barrage of bad news for the newspaper industry, but not today. Nielsen Online is out with a new report that eight of the ten largest newspaper websites are showing double-digit growth in traffic. But, first, to one of the most exciting online experiments I’ve seen in action for quite a while. One of the questions hanging over all newspaper...

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Boston Globe reporter Tania deLuzuriaga quotes a Portland, Maine, resident as asking, plaintively, “Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?”  That’s a question hanging over every city, small or large, in the U.S. these days. The Portland Press Herald has been struggling; advertising revenues are down 19 percent this year, and circulation is falling steadily. The...

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When the nation’s largest newspaper chain reported huge losses in its Q-2 earnings report last month, everybody knew it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped. Sure enough, late yesterday  Gannett watchers started blogging a leaked internal memo indicating that 1,000 newspaper jobs, or three percent of its workforce, will be eliminated. Gannett’s profits were down...

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If someone wanted to take all of the air out Web 2.0 before the thousands of little companies developing it even achieve lift-off, it would be restrict the growth of targeted advertising based on users’ online behavior. That’s because, as we’ve noted many times in this space, media companies — indeed virtually all online companies — need to attract advertising...

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The New York Times is one rung of the ladder above getting a junk bond rating and a Moody’s analyst says the company may need to reduce its annual dividend (which runs to $132 million annually) in order to avoid junk status. Meanwhile, “recovering journalist” Mark Potts has compiled a useful PDF on the newspaper industry’s job cuts over the past year, which he...

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The perennially fat September issue of Vogue this year looks like it’s been on a bit of a diet. It’s still robust, but with “only” 674 ad pages, it’s down 7 percent from last September’s 725. Last year’s issue weighed 4.9 pounds; this year’s look to be around half a pound lighter. Vogue is not alone. The fashion and beauty segment of the magazine...

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First, I overlooked one piece of Rupert Murdoch’s global expansion the other day, and that was his announcement Monday that News Corp. is investing $100 million in six new regional television channels in India. These will carry programs in local languages and should be operational within a year. *** I’ve been issuing so much praise for Google recently that just to maintain some...

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If anyone thought that streaming, downloading and viewing multimedia content had peaked, think again. Compete.com reports that of the top 20 fastest growing sites in July, 10 were sites primarily focused on serving up rich media. There is no known ceiling for this particular trend since, according to Kryder’s Law, magnetic disk storage capacity doubles every year. It is easy to envision a...

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It’s been a while since we checked in with Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal. Rumors of the newspaper’s decline under the magnate’s ownership proved to be wildly exaggerated. Instead, the Journal seems to be systematically enhancing its appeal to a broader audience via both its print and online products here and overseas. When Murdoch’s News Corp. announced its...

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