Media Industry Archive

Is Slate becoming the highbrow equivalent of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab? It’s a fair question to ask now that the online magazine has hired disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer to pen an ongoing column. You might recall that a few years back, Slate rehabbed someone else with a tarnished reputation to be a columnist: Henry Blodget, the former Merrill Lynch analyst who became...

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Widespread media malaise in 2008 hurled U.S. newspapers and magazines into a death spiral of shriveling revenues and massive layoffs. And while a slew of challenges stand to threaten — and alter — print media for years to come, 2009 may be the year unprecedented economic gloom sets it sights on a new victim: television, particularly local TV stations. While political advertising...

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Whatever happens to print newspapers in our time, Google seems determined to preserve them in digital form for all time. First updating yesterday’s report about the massive jobs cuts at Gannett, the watchdog blog that is crowd-sourcing the carnage now lists a total of 1,794 known layoffs at 65 of the chain’s 86 newspapers. Google, meanwhile, has purchased Paper of Record, an...

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Have blogs become the new AP for news outlets? The New York Times has announced the launch of Times Extra, an online view of its front page that comes with links to content from other news outlets and blogs. For a long time, news outlets have been proprietary in what they report, largely because they put their reputations on the line to make sure that the information was fair, balanced and...

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For the past 24 hours, I’ve been monitoring the large crowd-sourcing experiment being conducted by current and former Gannett employees about the massive round of layoffs that are being implemented right now by the nation’s largest newspaper chain. Beyond the irony that this sort of collaborative reporting, if earlier sanctioned by the management, might have once helped transform...

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Last week, I posted here about ESPN’s initiative to get users to pay for some online video content. But ESPN and other big media properties might reconsider such plans after reading a new report on the media and entertainment industries from Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente. (Unfortunately, there’s no online link.) The report says Barclays is not “broadly...

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(NOTE: As of 8:05 PM PT Dec. 2, 2008, this post has been updated. Previously inaccurate figures regarding traffic in October to newspaper websites have been corrected. — DW) According to his biographer, Rupert Murdoch isn’t satisfied with owning the Wall Street Journal. He also has his eye on the struggling New York Times. Numerous sources have started covering the financial...

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Not much is sacred in the way broadcast TV operates anymore. So last year, when network bigs such as Les Moonves of CBS and NBC’s Jeff Zucker and Ben Silverman, came out pooh-poohing the benefits of pilots — those test versions of prospective new series — it seemed like just another nail in the coffin of the way the nets have done business for decades. (Disclosure: BNET is...

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After flying across the country on my birthday in 2000, from Silicon Valley, where I’d just inked a new job, to my home in suburban Washington, D.C., I was shocked to discover that my (extremely modest) net worth had just taken a one-day hit on a scale — ten-fifteen percent — that I’d never before experienced, and certainly hadn’t anticipated. A year later, with...

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The New York Times reports today that CNN is looking to compete with the embattled Associated Press, inviting some 30 newspapers to come to its Atlanta headquarters this week for a look at CNN Wire, its lower-cost alternative to the AP. It’s hard to argue with the logic that having become a news brand in TV, radio and online, CNN might be poised to establish itself as an AP rival. It...

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