Media Industry Archive

Whenever I can tear myself away from my grisly daily duty of witnessing the end of media as we knew it, one image of our common future presents itself with exquisite clarity — and that is, of course, that we’re all going mobile. Doh! Of course, only in America could we even be having this conversation. In Europe, Japan, India, China, and most of the underdeveloped world, mobile...

More...

The Sci Fi Channel’s own blog post about its planned name change to SyFy now has almost 1000 (mostly negative) comments and more than 1500 Diggs. But, in case you were wondering if there really was a rationale for what looks to be a reviled name change, I found a video on the Broadcasting & Cable site of Dave Howe, the channel’s president, explaining at length why the plain old...

More...

“The truth shall set you free,” the Bible informs us, but somebody better inform the censors over at Morgan Stanley, who are allegedly blocking some of the best content available online for dissecting the financial crisis–  The Baseline Scenario –from appearing on its corporate site. Any website owner has the right to block any content, of course, so here are...

More...

Tucson Citizen will not close — The Tucson Citizen, which had been slated to close on Saturday, will remain publishing. The newspaper’s publisher, Gannett, announced that there are two interested buyers that may keep the paper afloat. The Citizen has struggled in past decades to keep pace with the Arizona Star, which has nearly 100,000 more subscribers. Gannett said it hopes to make...

More...

Open Letter to Rep. Nancy Pelosi Dear Speaker Pelosi: I am one of your constituents. We share mutual friends. While I don’t always see eye-to-eye with you on the issues, it does give me and a lot of my neighbors back here in your 8th Congressional District a certain pride that we are represented by the first female Speaker of the House in U.S. history. Enough of the niceties. Why did you...

More...

Spent part of the morning reading the suit filed by Discover Communications against Amazon, which is claiming that the e-retailer infringed on a patent it had for an e-reader like Amazon’s very successful Kindle. Having done so, I still don’t get it. It’s not as though Discover founder John Hendricks, who patented his own version of an electronic book reader, was the only...

More...

Perhaps you read yesterday in The New York Times that NBC Universal’s SciFi Channel is renaming itself SyFy. But that’s only the half of it. One day later, the tweeters have spoken, and it’s clear more research should have been done before Sci Fi floated the new name. Welcome to the world of rebranding your media company in Web 2.0, and an object lesson on what it’s like...

More...

The latest forecast for how local advertising dollars will be spent over the coming five years underscores just how dramatically and rapidly the transition to online advertising is becoming. At the same time, the big picture for those existing on local ad revenue is bleak. According to the study, by BIA Advisory Services/Kelsey Group, overall local advertising spending will decline through 2013...

More...

Earlier today, I posted on a topic that, at first glance, is not very near nor dear to my heart: Celebrity Moms. To be brutally honest, I am not sure which celebrities are Moms and which aren’t. Regardless, for those who managed to read a ways into that piece, my true interest did emerge: bilingual publishing — or for that matter, multilingual publishing, which, in my view, is one...

More...

The annual State of the News Media report by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism is out and it makes for some tough reading if you are rooting for the traditional media to survive. For me, the key statement in the report’s overview is this: “Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online....

More...