Media Industry Archive

A year from now, we’ll be talking about 2009 as one year-long train wreck for the newspaper business. We’ll also review the significant number of obits we had to write for major magazine titles, book sellers and book publishers. That’s a year from now. For the present, all we can do is watch the train wreck approaching in its exquisitely painful slow-motion. The number of...

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Tomorrow marks the second  high-profile use of Facebook Connect, the Facebook application that lets users interact with their Facebook friends while they are on other sites. The first one was the inauguration; now CNN and Facebook are busily promoting a second CNN.com/FB Connect collaboration around tomorrow night’s “State of the Union” address. So what does CNN have to pay...

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Amidst reports of an imminent executive shakeup at the top this week at Yahoo, it’s worth noting that the company’s performance has been improving lately. Its share of the domestic search market increased by half a percentage in January, to 21 percent, while Google’s fell by half of a percent, to 63 percent. That is still a three-to-one ratio for Google, of course, but...

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Hulu pulls content from Boxee and TV.com, CBS responds — Hulu, the joint online video venture by FOX and NBC, has taken its content off of CBS-owned TV.com and the open-source video streaming software Boxee. According to Boxee, Hulu asked that the content be removed at the request of content partners. Hulu has claimed that contractual issue have forced the company to pull content from...

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Much like my Bnet Media colleague, Cathy Taylor, I watched this week’s controversy over at Facebook with interest but didn’t choose to write about it until it was over. This morning, Cathy is postulating that Facebook’s failed attempt to assert ownership over its members’ content may lead to an even more radical change — demands by members to share in the revenue...

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You’ve probably followed this week’s Facebook about-face, in which the burgeoning social net first changed its terms of service to let it be known that it could do whatever it wanted, in perpetuity, with user content — and then, in a replay of Facebook controversies gone by, reconsidered. But one angle you may not have considered is whether Facebook, in conceding “that...

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All you need to know about the network TV business in this economy is the following: being far and away the top-rated network gets you a six percent decline in fourth quarter revenue and a 46 percent decline in operating income. That’s what CBS (owner of BNET), which broadcasts 11 of the top 20 TV series, reported this morning. For the year, revenue was down one percent, and operating...

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YouNoodle, a free-reg. startup based in San Francisco, announced today that it is releasing its database of 25,000 other startups to the public with a scoring system that aims to achieve a comparative analysis of each firm’s chances of success in the future. So naturally I joined and navigated my way through the site, and while it’s clear that this is an innovative tool for tracking...

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Today comes more bad news for San Francisco’s Asian-American community, which comprises a third of the city’s population. After 12 years, the Chinese newspaper, Ming Pao Daily, has ceased publication, according to a report appearing on New America Media’s online site by Jun Wang. The paper had a daily circulation of around 33,000, according to David Lee at San Francisco State...

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Facebook backtracks on Terms of Service flap — After seeing a backlash from users over the company’s new Terms of Service, Facebook scrapped the new policy. Facebook’s new controversial ToS had outlined the company’s right to keep user data and information even after the user’s account was deleted. Facebook also claimed full rights over anything published on the...

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