Media Industry Archive

Now that NBC has filled in the holes in its primetime schedule, which it did today with its upfront presentation to advertisers, it’s easy to see what a simplified world the network is now living in — with five of its weekly programming hours now accounted for with the 10 p.m. hour-long “The Jay Leno Show,” every weeknight. It’s even managed to squeeze two reruns into...

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Yesterday, I read one of those news items that seemed strangely overlooked, maybe because a lot of people who read it didn’t really grasp what was going on: it was the story that the legendary Silicon Valley v.c. Roger McNamee was stepping down from the board of Forbes Media, which his fund, Elevation Partners, had bought a significant stake in only two and a half years ago.  Here is the...

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Sometimes I stumble upon a proposal for how to save the newspaper industry that is so preposterously and horrifically wrong-headed, it leaves me speechless, or in this case, WordPressless. Such has been the case since reading a piece called “Laws That Could Save Journalism” in the Washington Post Saturday by two “first amendment lawyers” (who make their money off of...

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The day I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the sun rose at 5:54 a.m. and it later set at 7:12 p.m. for a daylight duration of 13 hours and 18 minutes. There was a waning crescent moon that night over a city of some 1.85 million souls, which is roughly a million more than live there now. The temperature looks to have been in the high forties that day. I learned all of this trivia courtesy of the...

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By now, you may have read my colleague, David Weir’s, post about the Newsweek redesign, in which the editors do everything, up to and including making the news! But seriously, folks, another key part of Newsweek’s new life is to put itself more aggressively onto other platforms, and thus, though I got to the party too late to join in, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham did an interview...

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Tucson Citizen closes — This Saturday was the last published issue of the Tuscon Citizen. Gannett, the paper’s owner, has been trying to find a buyer for the embattled Arizona newspaper for nearly six months. The paper plans on moving to an online-only version following the model of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The online version will be significantly trimmed down, featuring only...

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It’s refreshing to listen to two guys from The New York Times talk about the future in terms of years and not months, as if the Times had all the time in the world to figure out a new business model. The two guys — Nick Bilton, the Times’ design integration editor, and Derek Gottfrid, a senior software architect — who are featured in this video from Creativity Magazine,...

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With so many voices loudly urging magazine execs to start re-imagining their products before it is too late, they must feel besieged — sort of like a person going through one of those mid-life crises where everybody seems to have an opinion about what you should do…except you. In this environment, I’m impressed when any traditional media organization stays focused enough to...

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As a CNN corespondent based in New York City, Veronica De La Cruz has the kind of free-speech platform most people can only dream of, yet when it comes to dealing with a family medical emergency, she’s as vulnerable as we all are to the whims of the erratic U.S. health care system. Her brother, Eric, aged 27 is dying in Nevada. He needs a heart transplant. De La Cruz has been lobbying...

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My email in-box is humming this week with people sharing anecdotes about the growth in popularity of e-books. An industry report is about to be published that reportedly finds a growth rate of 400 percent for e-books during Q-1 this year. So I decided to ask an insider what he thinks is going on, and what follows is an analysis from Mark Coker, CEO of Smashwords, the self-publishing e-book...

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