Media Industry Archive

AOL cuts 700 employees — In the midst of declining advertising revenues, AOL has cut 10 percent of its workforce. The company also announced that it will freeze all merit pay raises. In addition to the cutbacks AOL has been reorganizing its media properties under its MediaGlow brand and last week the company received a write down from investor Google. [Source: TechCrunch] House axes...

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What if someone gave a big TV conference in Las Vegas, and nobody cared? Well, it seems to have happened with this year’s NATPE conference, which concludes today at the Mandalay Bay. For those who don’t know, NATPE stands for National Association of Television Programming Executives, and though that title paints rather a broad brush, the annual NATPE show has traditionally been...

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The soft launch this week of U.S. News Weekly seems like a throwback to another era, and extremely unlikely to succeed. After all, it is once again an attempt to push a subscription model online, and plenty of other ships have already crashed on those shores. This digital iteration of what used to be the weekly print magazine U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) looks like a magazine but...

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Ever since the inauguration of President Obama, I’ve been waiting for NBC to tell the world that it was going to use Facebook Connect, or a similar platform, to do for Super Bowl viewing what CNN.com and Facebook Connect did for the inauguration. I’m still waiting. What did CNN and Facebook do? On inauguration day, they partnered on the TV viewing model of the future, particularly...

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Buried in its earning report this morning is the decision by The New York Times to stop releasing monthly revenue reports. Since the news continues to be bad, month after month, the Times apparently wants to cut back those monotonous headlines about how poorly it is doing from 12 a year to four. Makes sense, I guess, sort of the equivalent of me not looking at my IRA account balances, right? If...

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Internet advertising down at New York Times — Amongst the announcement of down forth quarter, the New York Times revealed that digital advertising revenues fell 3.5 percent. Total forth quarter earnings were down 48 percent from last year. The earnings report comes as the company is taking steps to add more cash by selling its share in the Boston Red Sox and accepting a loan from Mexican...

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Yahoo reported a $303 million loss, or about 22 cents per share, for Q-4 in an earnings report filed after the market’s close today, but that was slightly better than analysts expected, sending the company’s stock up sharply (over 4 percent) in after-hours trading. This was the first earnings call for new CEO Carol Bartz, and besides the usual blather at such events she made this...

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Rick Warren, powerful evangelist, Obama inaugural ceremony prayer-giver and author of the best selling “Purpose Driven Life,” is launching “Purpose Driven Connection,” a quarterly magazine for the evangelical community, reports the Wall Street Journal. In some respects, the venture represents a sweet spot for publishers, who often think of their brands not as magazines but as tools to...

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News Corp. cuts five percent — News Corp. has cut roughly 100 jobs from its Fox Interactive Media division. The cuts came from several divisions including photo sharing site Photobucket, MySpace and corporate. According to MySpace, the social networking site will still be hiring later in the year. [Source: TechCrunch] Digital TV switchover may be delayed — In agreement with...

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This age of user-generated content has spawned a parallel upsurge in user-generated commerce, leading to the emergence of platforms like CafePress, where millions of users create and sell “print-on-demand” products like T-shirts, posters, books, CDs, cards and artwork. Enterprising members set up virtual shops to sell these products; some of the more creative and robust shops are...

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