Media Industry Archive

The Pirate Bay found guilty — Four men behind the popular torrent tracking site, The Pirate Bay, have been found guilty of copyright infringement by a Sweedish court. Each defendant was sentenced to one year in prison and fined $905,000. The verdict of the case leaked before being publicly announced, and the defendants plan to appeal. The money is to be distributed among more than a dozen...

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I’ll try to stay as far away as possible from grandiose statements about what this all means, but I’ve been struck over the last few days about what an incredibly high and low week it’s been in the world of viral video. Here’s all the evidence any of us needs: A video from the English show “Britain’s Got Talent” featuring a dowdy, 47-year-old named...

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Q-1 was a bloodbath for the magazine industry. According to the Publishers Information Bureau, the 246 titles it tracks collectively lost almost $1.2 billion in advertising revenue compared to the first quarter of 2008,  for a 20.6 percent decline. In round numbers, what was a $5.7+ billion industry a year earlier shrunk to $4.5+ this year. The magazine industry is on an even more serious page...

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Even as online publishers look at ways to bring the subscription model back, media that are not quite as far along in the technological revolution are wondering how to preserve the subscription model for themselves. Or, maybe they should start worrying more, if this video featuring Verizon CMO John Stratton is any indication. Speaking at Ad Age’s Digital Conference, Stratton put the onus...

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Over the past two weeks we’ve covered the controversy that the hoary old Associated Press itself may be partly responsibility for killing off the print newspapers that own it; followed closely by the angry threat from the AP to hold Internet search, portal and aggregation companies accountable for allegedly stealing its Intellectual Property via headlines & abstracts. Earlier today,...

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As Twitter ascends to the stratosphere as the communications channel of choice — and there’s no stopping it now – media types can’t be blamed for wishing there were some easier ways to separate out, say, what our dear fellow Twitterers may have had for breakfast, from significant breaking news stories. Now, there are ways, involving tags and such, but the barrier to...

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You may have heard that the controversy du jour yesterday involved this video, posted on YouTube, in which two Domino’s employees do things like put cheese in their noses first before placing it on the pizza. (I was too disgusted to watch the whole thing.) While Domino’s deals with the fallout, it’s worth a minute to also wonder about the fallout for YouTube as it attempts to...

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Okay, we all realize that we have an industry — print media — that’s in serious trouble here. And it’s easy to see why some execs are starting to panic. But a word to the wise: Beware of that first wave of cavalry now visible on the horizon. Three veterans of old media, led by Steven Brill, who’s a serial entrepreneur (Court TV, The American Lawyer, as well as the...

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Opening up my local Sunday newspaper the other day, the one that’s been on a serious diet, I was confronted with one of the key dilemmas facing the entire media industry: How can any old-new partnership possibly work? There it was: Yahoo! hotjobs on newsprint, looking flat as a worn-out pancake. It was gray, uninviting, a relic of a bygone era even though the content was supplied by the...

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Layoffs coming to Yahoo — Yahoo is expected to cut hundreds of jobs when it announces first quarter earnings on Tuesday. While not yet confirmed, the cuts would be the third round in slightly over a year for the search company. Yahoo is steadily losing market share to Google, and is in on-again, off-again talks with Microsoft to form an advertising partnership. Yahoo also is seeking to...

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