Media Industry Archive

We’ve been tracking the declining performance of The New York Times Co. for some time. Today, its stock price closed at $13.26, after dipping into the mid-$12s earlier in the day. The company’s market cap now stands at $1.91 billion. With the recent warnings that its stock may be downgraded to “junk” status, management simply had to do something. Thus, today the Times...

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Online ad sales were good — According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s latest report, ad revenues in the first half of 2008 were up 15.2 percent over the same period in 2007. But most pundits say the drop off for late 2008 will be sharp. After all, history shows a strong link between the U.S. GDP and ad sales. Seeing the writing on the wall, Gawker Media laid off 19 people...

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The web “magazines” launched in the mid-1990’s, most notably Salon, but to a lesser degree Slate and others, delivered an elegant, understated design that conveyed credibility and professionalism. Compare that with more bloggery Huffington Post, which screams at visitors with a large block of ALL-CAPS headlines indicating urgency, crisis, and psychodrama in New York and...

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Tina Brown and Barry Diller launch The Daily Beast – The latest release from two media moguls isn’t a content provider but a news aggregator. [Source: PaidContent] DreamWorks and Paramount split but share custody – The two studios will work jointly on as many as 40 projects after their partnership is dissolved. [Source: Variety] Newspapers hit hard by financial downturn...

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One down, one up. As media stocks in general, and newspaper stocks in particular, continued their downward spiral in yet another day of market volatility, a gloomy sense is settling over the entire media industry. Forecasts for advertising revenue have been reduced, and some companies have announced new rounds of job cuts as a result. Furthermore, the trouble is no longer confined to newspapers...

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Even the most ardent advocates of “citizen journalism” had to feel shaken by today’s events on CNN’s iReport, where user posts are carried unedited and unfiltered.This morning somebody fabricated the following story:“Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells me that paramedics were called...

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 Hollywood could get a cut of bailout cash — The federal bailout package includes $470 million in tax breaks for movie and TV employees. [Source: Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily]  iTunes won’t close afterall — Apple threatened to close iTunes if publishers raised royalty rates, but the Copyright Royalty Board ruled for no increase. [Sources: VentureBeat, TechCrunch]...

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Across the board, newspaper companies are getting hammered by the hurricane battering all of Wall Street. Already this year, all sources of revenue were down — national advertising, local display advertising, classified advertising, circulation, newsstand sales, magazine revenue, insert deals, even online advertising. They’ve been cutting jobs, reducing publication days, combining...

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As part of our ongoing inquiry into whether “hyperlocal” news will help transform the media business, today I spoke with Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, a New York-based “data and technology platform that empowers hyperlocal media discovery and aggregation.” This company uses its own geo-tagging engine to parse incoming feeds from thousands of newspapers, blogs, ...

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