Media Industry Archive

OK, we all know the newspaper business is really bad right now, in some cases terminally bad, but just how bad is it? With the release of its fourth quarter 2008 ad revenue numbers yesterday, the Newspaper Advertising Association has quantified it, and it’s baaaaaad. Overall ad revenue is down 19.74 percent, with print declining by 20.59 percent, and online by 8.1 percent. The most...

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Like many of you, I’ve been trying to separate the wheat from the chaff concerning the Facebook redesign over the last week, and, like many of you, I’ve found myself so overloaded with the activities of my so-called friends that, not only can I not distinguish wheat from chaff, I’ve had to summon up all of the energy I have just to log on. It’s been the digital...

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In our daily reminder that the entire newspaper industry is crumbling before our eyes, The New York Times has announced its latest retrenchment — layoffs of 100 staffers on the business side of its operation, with virtually every other non-unionized position subject to a 5 percent salary cut. An internal memo obtained by NYFishbowl adds that the company’s management is asking the...

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As the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart feud grabbed headlines a few weeks ago, I kept wondering what Rupert Murdoch was going to do to leverage Stewart’s blows at Cramer’s and CNBC’s credibility. No one ever talks about his Fox Business Network, and, yet, suddenly, here was an opportunity. Just as MSNBC has positioned itself as the anti-Fox News, FBN (do you ever even see that...

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Soon after he finished sitting for an interview with journalist Doug McGray last night, Craig Newmark was back hard at work doing what he says he does best — handling customer service for his company, Craigslist. I know this because he was answering my emails pretty much as quickly as it would have taken him to drive from the interview at Ft. Mason on the Bay to his home here in San...

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China blocks YouTube — The Chinese Communist Party has blocked the entire country’s access to YouTube. The Chinese government often blocks Internet content that is critical of the party’s policies, often involving Tibet. Google, the owner of YouTube, says that is currently working to resolve the situation and would not confirm any communication with China. YouTube and Google...

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Buy the Hallmark Channel: it’s predictable. That’s the message that the cable channel gave to advertisers yesterday during its upfront presentation explaining why it’s a good buy as opposed to the dozens of other networks out there. The real theme was “predictability in an unpredictable world”, but, whatever the wording, it raises an interesting question about what...

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There’s a lot of noise out there — offline and on — about how to “save” newspapers and other crumbling media institutions, but precious little signal to it all. A U.S Senator is calling for allowing newspapers to attain non-profit status, under which they could do everything they did traditionally except endorse political candidates. The Speaker of the House...

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You probably thought the stock market rose yesterday by about 500 points because of some incredibly-complicated plan to lift the world out of the financial crisis. Those who tweet, however, are probably so self-involved that they think it was because the first inkling of a Twitter business model emerged yesterday, with the announcement by Twitter, Federated Media and Microsoft that MSFT would...

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Late yesterday, Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, emailed out a link the video above entitled, “I Am the Long Tail,” which is aimed at humanizing all of those small publishers that make up the hackneyed — but vital — long tail. It certainly does that, and therefore accomplishes about half of what Rothernberg described as the video’s mission...

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