Media Industry Archive

Yahoo Firing 1,500 Workers; 3Q Profit Falls 64 Percent- AP “Mired in a deep slump, Yahoo Inc. will fire at least 1,500 workers to cope with a crumbling economy that dented its third-quarter profit and turned up the heat on the Internet company’s management as investors stew over a missed opportunity to sell to Microsoft Corp. for $47.5 billion.” Yahoo’s new round of job...

More...

Troubled papers are canceling their A.P. service – Subscribing to the Associated Press news service, at a cost of around $1 million a year, is an expense fewer and fewer newspapers can afford. [Source: The New York Times] Private equity fund buys TV Guide for one dollar – The 55-year-old magazine lost $20 million last year. To unload their lemon, Macrovision sweetened the deal with...

More...

Ten days ago, we reported on the first cracks appearing the most famous news cooperative in the U.S., the Associated Press. There’s more bad news for A.P. today, but first, let’s consider the critical role it plays in news dissemination. Although AP was built around the newspaper industry, it actually serves all media channels, especially online, by supplying the bulk of the news...

More...

So what, you may ask, did your faithful BNET media blogger do today? He toured a chocolate factory; indeed, the only chocolate factory in San Francisco.  Now, even though we cover a fairly wide range of companies in this space, I bet you couldn’t have seen this one coming. The occasion was to visit an old friend (and my once-boss), Louis Rossetto. Louis was the co-founder and Editor of...

More...

Every conversation with every media person I have these days comes around to the financial crisis and the credit crunch. The people working for big companies, small companies, established industry leaders, and brash start-ups are all asking, “Where is this going. How bad will it get? What, when, and where is the bottom?” Anyone thinking that I have answers to those questions had...

More...

Advertising revenue figures for magazines in Q-3 have been released by the Magazine Publishers of America, and it was a bloodbath. Industry-wide, ad revenue dropped 8.8 percent from the same period last year, from over $6.5 billion to under $6 billion. Particularly hard-hit again once were the leading titles once known as “newsweeklies,” e.g., Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News &...

More...

In almost every article you’ll read on the topic, it’s noted that newspapers still collect more ad revenue than do digital media. AdAge estimates that in 2008 newspaper ad revenue will drop 7.7% to $41.9 billion, while internet and mobile ad revenue will grow 20.9% to $26.6 billion, based on forecasts by Price Waterhouse Coopers. It is worth noting that if these trends continue,...

More...

As an increasing number of media sites begin featuring links to articles by their competitors, an age-old enmity may begin to dissolve between the likes of, say, the New York Times and the Washington Post. There was a time when neither newspaper would credit the other with a scoop unless there was literally no alternative to doing so. Similarly, within its own circulation area, the Times...

More...

At the epicenter of the troubled U.S. media industry sits the venerable Associated Press, a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio, and television stations. Its members both contribute stories that are circulted over the AP news wire, and publish original articles written by AP’s own staffers. In addition, many other media companies, both here and overseas, maintain paid...

More...

First, an update of yesterday’s news. The New York Times today has clarified what was reported yesterday by Forbes, and repeated by us that it would be closing its IHT.com site in Paris. The Times says that in fact it is simply merging the IHT and NYT brands, with the former henceforth representing its global “edition.” *** The turmoil in the markets sent stocks diving to new...

More...