Media Industry Archive

A sure sign that this economic downturn is far worse than any of the previous ones during the Internet Era is when the perpetually expanding Google hit the outer limits of growth and begins to contract. And that is precisely what has happened. For the second time this (still-young) year, Google killed off one of its ambitious advertising initiatives yesterday — Google Audio Ads, which was...

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Last week, Wikileaks scored a journalistic coup by releasing what it characterizes as “nearly a billion dollars worth of quasi-secret reports commissioned by the United States Congress. The documents cache consists of 6,780 reports by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which is sometimes referred to as “Congress’s Brain.” This represents the agency’s total...

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The other day I wrote a post detailing the online revenues of the Web’s big players, and although Google is still far and away the leader, it’s interesting to see how much its revenue growth has slowed in the last year.  But let’s look at Google and its alleged search competitors from another vantage point, by looking at the raw number of searches performed on their services,...

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Since the beginning of time, or at least since Gutenberg, writers have had to hustle to get their work published. Talk to any writer and you’ll hear horror stories of rejection letters, unanswered queries, lost manuscripts, and a very deep sense of frustration. But now a pair of enterprising writers based in L.A. have decided to try and do something about it. Anne Walls and John...

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Today, I’m going to wade, ever so cautiously, into the discussion former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson has stirred up with his “How to Save Your Newspaper” cover story written for his former employer. In case you haven’t had a chance to read all 2,200 words of it, it boils down to this: micropayments. Not just any micropayments, mind you, but “an iTunes-easy...

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ConnectU gets $65 million from Facebook — ConnectU, a social network, has won a $65 million settlement from Facebook. ConnectU was a social networking site created by two Harvard students that had originally employed Facebook founder and fellow Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg to write code. The company alleged that Zuckerberg took the code originally intended for ConnectU and instead...

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Every Sunday morning, for many years, one of the very first things that I, and millions of other people, do, is to open the front door and pick up The New Your Times. Ever since the newspaper created its national edition, and offered home delivery here, a continent away from The City, that blue-plastic-wrapped bundle of newsprint has been a companion, through good times and bad. But, as...

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Right around the time this piece posts, attendees at a panel discussion entitled “The Rise of eBooks” at O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference will gather in a sixth floor Manhattan venue to discuss the future. There, they will be considering figures published by The American Association of Publishers indicating that between 2002 and 2007, the estimated net...

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The big, depressing news in the magazine industry today is that, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, newsstand sales are down 11 percent. But there’s another story that most media have completely overlooked: that the supply chain which gets those magazines on newsstands is itself broken, with one major distributor, Anderson News, suspending operations last Saturday....

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First, tonight, a shout out to those who remain less-recognized, generally, in the media industry for their communication skills, and that is our graphic designers and art directors. Especially in print media, decisions have long been dominated by writers and editors — people of words. But very rarely can text tell the whole story in non-fiction publications. As they say in Japan,...

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