Media Industry Archive

It was pretty much all tricks and no treats for media companies this Halloween. Washington Post Co. reported quarterly revenue down by ten percent to $1 billion and net income down to $10.3 million from $72.5 million in 2007. The most revealing stat is that its print advertising revenue was down 14 percent, while its online avenue grew by 13 percent. And thus the trend we often note here...

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Big news this morning for the music and video game publishing industries. The Beatles have agreed to license their songs to MTV Network’s Rock Band video game series, the Viacom unit that is battling rival Activision Blizzard, Inc., for supremacy in this lucrative niche of the media market. The Beatles, which have the best-selling album catalog of ny band in history, thus join Aerosmith,...

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Major trends we’ve been plotting are accelerating during this economic downturn. Print newspapers and magazines continue to announce circulation declines, revenue losses, increasing newsprint costs, decreasing stock value and loss of market cap. It’s bad, bad, bad. The Orange Country Register is laying off another 110 staffers this week.  “This isn’t necessarily just to...

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A trip to a great bookstore, say Powell’s in downtown Portland, Oregon, is all that’s required to glimpse the enormous breadth and depth of intellectual property locked away in rare and out-of-print books. Searching through shelves of old books, seeking treasures, offers a certain pleasure few other activities can replicate. But, imagine being able to search through millions of...

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The Christian Science Monitor goes online only — The five-day-a-week newspaper will cease publishing a print edition and appear only on the web, in an effort to keep its foreign bureaus open while still cutting costs. [Source: The New York Times] Google settles book-scanning suit with authors — The search giant has reached an out-of-court settlement with the Authors Guild, the...

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When a colleague told me this afternoon that the Los Angeles Times had announced yet another massive round of newsroom layoffs, all I could do is shrug my shoulders and roll my eyes. It seems like every time my attention is diverted elsewhere, the west coast Times comes back with another shocker. This time it’s a 10 percent staff cutback, which means that the newspaper that once boasted...

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First, the good news, since there’s plenty of bad to follow. The New York Times announced it has launched a new video platform on its website, which provides: A widescreen (16×9) format for high-definition videos; A redesigned video library offering “a clean layout and a black background for optimal viewing comfort;” Individual video pages — an individual...

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The excitement surrounding this year’s election his driving unprecedented growth to the leading political blogs. ComScore says that year over year growth for September was exponential for the likes of the Huffington Post, Politico, RealClearPolitics, DailyKos, Talking Points Memo, and Newsbusters. In recent months, major news organziations like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal,...

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Unless we collectively can figure out how to leverage technology to sustain local reporting, the global potential of the worldwide web will remain under-realized. Why? Because, all news is local, to paraphrase/mangle longtime Speaker of the House “Tip” O’Neil’s  most famous statement about politics. Everything happens somewhere, and when it comes to news, place matters...

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Publishing exec Bill Reilly dies at 70 — The founder and former chairman of Primedia died of cancer on Friday. [Source: The New York Times] The Los Angeles Times gets a redesign — The changes are not dramatic, but new bylines put emphasis on reporters’ whereabouts — seemingly to prove that not everyone has been laid off. [Source: Media Mob] Lala takes digital music one...

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