Media Industry Archive

In quite a sign that it’s come a long way since starting as a nightly program devoted to the hostage crisis in Iran, ABC’s “Nightline” is launching a Twitter-based online news show on Wednesday night, which will use the show’s 400,000 odd (and no doubt growing) Twitter followers to shape debate on the show and ask questions. Called NightTline, the show’s...

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The speculation over how this year’s network TV upfront will work out has begun in earnest, and the overall theme is, of course, that it will be down; the only question is by how much. Here are some individual headlines: Ad Age predicts volume among the broadcast nets will be down by 10 percent to 20 percent. TNS Media Intelligence sees a decline in ad spending of 4 percent at the 10:00...

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As he noted in his popular media column in today’s Washington Post, Howard Kurtz has long been one of the newspaper industry’s “most fervent optimists.”  But, witnessing the kinds of chaos gripping his industry these past few weeks, he says, has undermined his belief that newspapers can “find a path to survival.” Kurtz blames a collective “lack of...

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Wall Street Journal to use micropayments — The Wall Street Journal announced that it will begin charging for content using a micropayment system this fall. Micropayments are a system where readers pay a small fee for each article read.  The paper said that it would charge a “rightfully high” price for content. Currently, the Wall Street Journal is one of the only newspapers...

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Remember the news back in January about the sudden arrival of Carlos Slim Helu and his extended clan from South of the Border as the purported saviors of The New York Times, then staggering under a debt load that was threatening to break the back of the old gray lady? The terms of the deal as revealed by The Times then were sparse — a quarter-billion in cash from Slim in exchange for...

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When he bought the Wall Street Journal two years ago, Rupert Murdoch at first made noises about freeing the newspaper’s content from behind the paywall, where it has dwelt since 1996. But, more recently, Murdoch came to the conclusion that it was a better strategy to continue charging for online subscriptions than harvest the increased ad revenue that would come with the larger traffic...

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The Hollywood Reporter is letting its readers in on a dirty secret about the TV-friendly Obama Administration, and now I’ll let you in on it: President Obama and all his press conferences is costing the TV networks too much money, and they’re not happy about it. According to the story, Obama’s three primetime press conferences have cost the nets, collectively, $30 million, so...

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Three times in the last week or so, I’ve gotten “messages” from Facebook friends that linked me to at least, a bogus link, and at worst, a link that would infect my computer if I was dumb enough to click on it.  (I admit the first time I was dumb enough, but caught myself in a nanosecond and stopped the site from loading before it could start.) But, every time this happens, a...

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The U.S. Senate, through the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, has been holding hearings — Important Hearings — on the fate and future of newspapers. And, according to committee chair John Kerry, Congress can help the industry. Unfortunately, that help is ultimately only going to be no more helpful than a sympathy card. As Kerry said to Reuters, he wants “to...

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So, the proof is in. As we predicted last month, April was the month that Twitter grew bigger than The New York Times on the Web, according to Compete.com. A few observations: Most people access Twitter not via the web but via a mobile device, probably a smart phone. Only about five percent of Americans have tried Twitter yet, which means that ninety-five percent are still potential...

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