Media Industry Archive

Today SanDisk made a decidedly old-school announcement: a new medium for music. Yes, that’s medium as in “tangible product that you buy at the store.” The initiative, called slotMusic, will put complete albums on microSD cards, the cell-phone memory cards that are about half the size of a postage stamp. The cards, which also come with USB adapters for use with computers, will...

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Every year, trade industry pub Mediaweek acts as kingmaker, nominating the top 50 “most indispensable executives shaping the future of media.” The purpose is to highlight those unsung heroes who lurk in the shadows of the Zuckers and Moonveses. These so-called media “superheroes” are selected based on their impacts on the industry, the value of the deals they’ve...

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Maybe the stars are simply aligned against the newspaper industry. The latest figures from Nielsen Online are encouraging about traffic growth — all of the Top Ten sites grew in August, six of them by 50 percent or more. Newcomer Politico, which was started by former reporters and editors from some of the nation’s best papers, has surged onto the list with triple-figure traffic...

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Discovery Communications, the company behind the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, picked quite the week to go public. Even so, as the financial crisis wreaks havoc on the markets, the company’s execs are enthusiastically promoting plans for growth — CEO David Zaslav told the WSJ (subscription required) that he’d “take a look” at picking up Scripps Networks...

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This is a widget from Predictify that BNET is testing. Each week, a VIP (Very Important Predictifier) poses a question to the crowd. This week, it is Editor at Large Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle asking at what point will user-generated content overtake the journalistic content in a major daily newspaper…

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Our posts this week about the ideas that Google executives are advocating for helping news sites build better business plans have stimulated quite a bit of conversation, only a fraction of which appears as “comments” following each of our posts. Many people, for whatever reason, prefer to just send me an email, and excerpts from one of those are reprinted here, with the permission...

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One of our readers raised some salient points about our recent post “Google: A New Physics for the News.” The gist was that he likes to embed widgets from the Washington Post that dynamically update subjects that interest him on a web page or in his bookmarks. This yields the kind of  “narrative story buckets” envisioned in the post. He is absolutely right that widgets...

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This week, those in the music industry expected a minor player to challenge Apple iTune’s hegemony of digital music. And it may have happened — just not in the way anyone expected. The anticipated news was the debut of online store MySpace Music. But the launch was delayed, apparently by drawn-out negotiations with EMI, the last of the big four music companies to sign with the...

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Google V-P for search engine and user experience Marissa Mayer gave a succinct and powerful two-minute explanation to the Knight Foundation last month of the “atomic unit of media consumption” theory we discussed here yesterday. I’m not going to beat around the bush: Any media executive who is seriously concerned with how to help her company succeed online needs to take a deep...

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Foreign financing of American movies certainly isn’t a new concept, but the Abu Dhabi Media Company’s keen interest in Hollywood (to the tune of a $1 billion investment over five years) has raised more than a few eyebrows — not to mention questions about whether or not the government-owned media company has some kind of hidden agenda by getting into the American movie...

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