Media Industry Archive

TechCrunch has published the latest bad news for the newspaper industry. Here is its report: The newspaper industry in the U.S. continues to shrink at an alarming rate. According to the Newspaper Association of America, total industry advertising (both print and online) in the third quarter was $8.9 billion, down 18 percent from the year before. The online portion of that was $750 million, down...

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Imagine if just four years ago, an industry analyst estimated the value of your family’s majority-owned (50.5 percent) newspaper company at $900 million. Then, two years ago, when a publicly- traded national chain took over the minority stake (49.5 percent), it placed the value of its investment at $120 million. Now, in its most recent SEC filing, your minority partner has downgraded the...

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Lately, there’s been plenty of suggestion that the road to a productive future in journalism is through blogging, but SixApart’s announcement of its cheekily-titled “TypePad Journalist Bailout Program”  is hardly worth the excitement it seems to have generated. The program promises qualified journalists a free account to its blogging service, TypePad, and other perks,...

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Every industry has its legendary companies. In the newspaper business, one of those is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was long owned and operated by Joseph Pulitzer and family. Today, however, the paper is owned by Lee Enterprises, a giant conglomerate that holds around 54 newspapers across 23 states with a combined daily circulation of 1,536,842 (1,856,147 on Sunday.) The crown jewel of...

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Maybe in Connecticut. According to a report in today’s edition of the Register-Citizen, “Two of Connecticut’s top elected officials, Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, said they don’t want to see local newspapers close and would be interested in taking part in a bipartisan effort to save them.” The officials spoke out after news broke that a number...

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It’s become commonplace for us here to chronicle the decline of newspapers and magazines, but two other arms of traditional media — TV and radio — are next in line to fall before the financial tsunami that is engulfing the entire industry. Two new reports detail just how dire the situation has become. Cumulus Media President Lew Dickey Jr. predicts that half of all radio...

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How refreshing to read this morning in Mediapost that ESPN thinks online viewers should pay for some content. The sports media mega-brand is now asking consumers to pony up if they want to watch two of its sports-debate shows at ESPN.com — “Pardon the Interruption” and “Around the Horn.” (That’s former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti, a talking head...

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The video game industry has produced games that make us smarter, scare us to death and even help us burn excess calories. Now games can make players physically ill as well. Electronic Arts‘ new title Mirror’s Edge is a first-person adventure game set in a futuristic police state where the protagonist is constantly on the run. Players can see their limbs wave wildly as they leap from...

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I’ve been joking a lot lately that you’re better off working in a building where the windows don’t open, lest the headlines make you want to jump out of them. But in a break from the dirge-like background drone of massive layoffs and revenue declines, two recent news stories jumped out at me because they didn’t fit that mold: One about Gannett buying a company called...

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New York, N.Y. The end of the week brought yet more bad news for several big media companies. Everywhere I went around town, I heard tales of layoffs –at  Time-Warner, huge stock selloffs (Media General), slashed dividends (New York Times), as well as hushed conversations with journalists of all stripes. (”I’m worried about what’s going to happen to this place.”)...

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