Media Industry Archive

The AllThingsD blog has finally posted an almost 45-minute interview with News Corp. and MySpace’s new digital intelligentsia from its D7 conference last month, namely chief digital officer Jon Miller and MySpace chief Owen Van Natta; I believe it is their first big, public appearance since being named to their posts. If you’re a what-will-happen-to-MySpace obsessive, watch the...

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A year ago, the few of us who raised the question of whether The New York Times Company might be in financial difficulty were dismissed as dwellers in the lowly “echo chamber of the blogosphere.” * That was okay; it goes with the territory, so to speak, even though there were hard numbers at the center of our analysis, as opposed to any ideological bent or a built-in bias against...

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While being in the print business isn’t something I’d wish on many these days, perversely, the short-term should be better for celebrity magazines than it has been, courtesy of the death of Michael Jackson. The question is what approach these magazines, running from the relatively respectable People to the down-and-dirty Star, will take in monetizing what in their warped world is a...

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The contentious debate over the proposed settlement of a class-action suit between Google Books and some authors may have reached an intellectual turning point. A rigorous, thoughtful article about the case by Tim Barton from the Oxford University Press published in the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday provides a potential synthesis where the opposing parties may find common ground. This...

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Looking at new data from London-based Screen Digest concerning the ad haul for U.S. broadcast networks echos another industry that has found the transition to an online world not all it’s cracked up to be: the newspaper industry. First, the good news — ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and Hulu (which is jointly-owned by all of the above except CBS), now account for more than half of the online video...

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When it comes to those advising the terrified newspaper industry how to survive, there’s been the dumb and then the dumber. Now, we officially have heard from The Dumbest Person in The World, although in conventional circles he’s considered one of the most brilliant. Chicago-based U.S. Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner, who very occasionally blogs about the newspaper industry has...

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It’s looking as if it would’ve been smart for NBC to launch its new 10 p.m. Jay Leno show in the summer. The reason is that CBS has rolled out a package to its affiliates, dubbed “Project L.E.N.O.” to give more promotional heft to its affiliates; the network — BNET Media’s ultimate corporate boss — is betting on the ratings of its 10 p.m. series to go up with...

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Via the news letter of publishing consulting Bob Sacks, I learned of a student hoax that won a top prize from the magazine Paris Match. A pair from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts convinced a group of “experts” that a faked spread on “students prostituting themselves or looking for food in dustbins” was the real thing. The point of the duo was to rub the nose of...

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Measured by daily circulation, the Gannett Co. is the largest newspaper publisher in the U.S. In addition to USA Today, it owns seven other of the top fifty largest daily newspapers in the country; dozens of radio and TV stations; and a number of digital properties, most notably, the promising elevator-based Captivate Network, which we profiled last week. But despite its size, or perhaps...

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If you haven’t yet seen this TwitScoop video that captured the tag cloud of trending topics at Twitter as the news broke of Michael Jackson’s death on Thursday, check it out. TwitScoop is only one of a massive number of efforts to build a business (or a cool app) on top of Twitter’s open platform. The best way to get an overview of all of this activity is at the Twitter Fan...

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