Media Industry Archive

Thanks to Ad Age’s @simondumenco (that’s Simon Dumenco for those of you not on Twitter), I’ve been made aware of the fact that yesterday, Oprah Winfrey passed the one-million-followers mark on Twitter, doing so in a world record one month-or-so. By contrast, it took @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) what … a year or more? (It should be noted that since passing the million mark...

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Facebook testing payment system — Facebook is alpha testing a payment system in hopes that it eventually becomes the standard method of exchanging money on the Web. The social network plans on offering the payment system to its users and application developers and will make money by keeping a percentage of each transaction, much like PayPal. One Facebook developer, Zynga, is on pace to...

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Do you know which are the top four magazines read on the Kindle, according to Amazon? The New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. These magazines are popular with the older set; I’m not sure there are any teenagers today who have ever even heard of the Reader’s Digest, for example. Partly due to their publishing cycle and partly due to the demographics of their...

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There’s quite a bit of buzz today over the set of social media rules set forth earlier this week for Wall Street Journal reporters by its management (and published by Editor and Publisher), because they raise a lot of questions about the role of the journalist within the communities he or she reports about. While it’s crucial for reporters to build community through social media,...

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Even as the cable industry prepares for that most traditional of business marketplaces — the ad sales upfront — it’s becoming clear that, more than broadcast, it is preparing for its digital day of reckoning. That’s when consumers shift en masse to video on demand, delivered over the Internet, bypassing the pipes, and the business model, that have supported video content for...

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As occasionally happens, my Bnet media industry colleague, Cathy Taylor, and I, have chosen to cover the same topic today. As her post is already up, I urge you to give it a read, as she does an excellent job of reporting the substance of yesterday’s management-to-staff presentation at The New York Times, as captured by a reporter via Twitter. Pulling up and away from the detail,...

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If it isn’t a sign of, well, the times that a New York Times reporter, Jennifer 8. Lee, tweeted a newsroom meeting on what the paper is doing to save itself, I don’t know what is. But the results, some of which I’ve put in the screen grab at right, tell the tale of a company throwing just about everything at the wall to see what might stick. Some highlights: The Times is...

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Google in talks with Washington Post and New York Times — According to reports, Google is in talks with the Washington Post and The New York times over some sort of collaboration, and maybe even investment. In recent weeks, several newspaper executives, particularly at the Wall Street Journal, have accused the search giant of being a “parasite” and collecting revenue by...

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After reading comments like the ones following this blog post by The New York Times Saul Hansell, it once again hits me upside the head just what a dire situation online media is in. There are several reasons for this, some of which I’ll detail in future posts, but the one that jumps out from these blog comments is this: many consumers simply cannot get it through their heads that the...

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If you’ve noticed the exploding world of iPhone apps and Twitter clients, then you know that in technology circles, open source is huge. But what’s interesting about the above clip, featuring “Heroes” executive producer Tim Kring, isn’t just how media properties are using technology to expand across platforms, but how technology is even changing the language and...

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