Media Industry Archive

One video clip currently making the rounds among the social media crowd is this promo piece from Gawker Media, taking an unusually old-school approach to why advertisers might want to play there. Hell, it even shows how Gawker has made its way into the vernacular! Even Brian Williams talks about it on TV! But this being Gawker, it’s a little odd, positioning the company’s blogs as...

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Among the headlines about the newspaper industry I saw this morning was this: that The New York Times is raising the price for the print edition for the second time in the last 12 months, from $1.50 to $2 for non-Sunday editions, and a whopping $5, from $4, for the Sunday paper, if you live in New York. (If you don’t, it’s now $6). Is this a wise move? Of course, not. In case you...

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If I may be allowed to have one grumpy moment, let me admit that I don’t really want to cover this particular psychodrama any longer, but there, now I’ve said it, onwards: So, now The New York Times informs us that the Boston Writer’s Guild has agreed to put a package of concessions before its membership for a vote. Said vote, should it pass, would theoretically make the...

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If you prefer bad news, a new Harris Poll reports that only 5 percent of Americans are using Twitter so far. If, on the other hand, you prefer good news, this means that the upside for Twitter, the fastest-growing service in our time, hasn’t even begun to be realized. The Harris findings also indicate that 51 percent of Americans do not yet have a MySpace or Facebook account. Again,...

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Normally as I sift through each day’s 8-Ks, 10-Q’s Form 4’s and all the other “paperwork” media companies file routinely with the SEC, most of the stuff, to be honest, makes my eyes glaze over. But today’s batch included a stunner: Senior management turnover at Salon. Elizabeth Hambrecht, daughter of one of Salon’s largest and most loyal investors, Bill...

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News Corp exploring pay wall — News Corp. CEO Ruport Murdoch has assembled a global team in charge of figuring out how to repurpose the company’s online content behind a pay wall. The group is said to be looking at hardware that would best distribute paid online content. Murdoch has said in recent weeks that he is considering releasing his own e-reader to compete with the Amazon...

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As we continue to track the emerging synergy between print publications and mobile devices, it’s worth noting some of the parallels with the music industry. Talk about platform confusion! In my lifetime, I’ve watched it evolve from vinyl to reels of tape, to cassettes, to CDs, to mixers and digital systems that virtually remove any opportunity for error, to downloads and the...

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Even though Jay Leno’s primetime show has been getting all the headlines, another sign of the network TV apocalypse has just come from the CW, which, in the minds of many of us, barely qualifies as a broadcast network. That’s because Its qualifications as a network just slipped even more; after various experiments, including last year resorting to running MGM classic movies on...

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If you’ve been following Google TV, as I have, over the last few years, you might have been more than a little curious to find out what data about TV viewing Google has been gathering from the set-top boxes that are part of its initiative. Well, the data is in, and as Advertising Age points out, it’s pretty much what we knew already. Sigh. Most of Google’s TV viewing data,...

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Over its first year of operations, the eBook publishing platform and online book store Smashwords has catered mainly to authors, publishing some 1,200 titles from about 600 authors. As is fitting on its first-year anniversary, Smashwords announced today that it is broadening its services to add support for book publishers. The company says around 20 small publishers have tested its new system...

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