Media Industry Archive

UPDATED: Thank you to Anna Christopher, Senior Manager, NPR Media Relations, for the following clarification: David — Unfortunately, the 990 you referenced is a bit confusing, and there is an error with one of the names listed. First, the name: Richard Harris should be Richard L. Harris, who is Director of Afternoon Programming at NPR.  The science reporter Richard Harris is a different...

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Jim Romenesko picked up a priceless piece of video this week (see below) showing a 1981 news report from KRON Channel 4 in San Francisco on “turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper.” Anyone who has worked in the media, or cares about its economic future, will watch this clip and weep — first with laughter, and then with grief. Every word of the report...

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A couple weeks back, we reported on the deal between NBC and Outside.in to provide hyper-local coverage in New York and other cities where the network has affiliated stations. Today comes news that The New York Times has launched a similar deal with another of our favorite startups — EveryBlock.com. This particular partnership aims to expand political news coverage throughout the city. ...

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The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) is widely considered one of the most authoritative efforts tracking the quality of journalism in mainstream media, but until today, it has not been able to provide a similar service for bloggers, social media sites (SMS), or other user-generated content (UGC) sites. With the launch this morning of its New Media Index,...

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All things, including TV ratings, are relative, which may be why it sounds almost positive to hear that CBS’ experiment of running an extra, primetime edition of the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” on Wednesday night came in second in its time slot, behind the Fox powerhouse “American Idol”. True, it was a distant second; Couric had 6.45 million viewers in the...

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Gannett sees drop in forth quarter profits — Newspaper publisher Gannett announced a down forth quarter that saw the loss of 3,000 jobs, roughly $5 billion in write downs and a 36 percent drop in profits. The company was hit especially hard by the real estate collapse’s effect on classifieds. [Source: paidContent] Cuts may be coming to the Wall Street Journal — Portfolio is...

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Maybe you recall reading back in December that NBC was going to break new territory in its efforts to launch “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon”, the show that replaces Conan O’Brien as he moves to Jay Leno’s slot. The plan? To run a daily video blog (or vlog for you social media elites), which serves up small, so-called “snacks” of the kind of content that will...

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Memo to book publishers: Beware of the rejected novelist! That may prove to be the moral of the story of Smashwords, a digital self-publishing platform started by entrepreneur Mark Coker after a carefully-researched novel he’d co-authored with his wife Lesleyann about the dark side of the L.A. soap opera scene (called Boob Tube) failed to find a conventional publisher. In an almost...

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As we explored in a post last month, many parts of the alternative press are weathering the economic storms better than their mainstream cousins across town. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area, with access to so many great outlets (SF Weekly, Bay Guardian, East Bay Express, the (Berkeley) Daily Planet, among others), I’ve long known that these publications have at least as much...

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In case you were sitting around wondering what the future is for the Webisode, you have to look no further than the front page of The New York Times‘ business section, which reports today that the William Morris Agency is about to ink a deal with YouTube to have its talent produce films for the service. In short, there’s going to be more of them. The story doesn’t go into the...

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