Media Industry Archive

As my colleague Cathy Taylor wrote earlier today, the death of the singer/dancer Michael Jackson was a major media event that illustrates how much our industry has evolved in recent years. But the pop star’s death also proved to be an unprecedented challenge for the big search engines and social media sites like Twitter. First, consider the effect on Google. According to the...

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The story most befitting this upfront TV ad sales market that stubbornly refuses to start, is one that appeared on Mediaweek.com; yesterday, it said that Group M, perhaps the biggest media buying agency on earth, was going to do an early deal with NBC Universal. But now, in an updated version of that story, the headline has been rewritten to underscore that Group M is denying the whole thing....

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Tucson, AZ. Not all print publications are suffering the same degree of pain during this period of retrenchment for newspaper industry. At the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies‘ annual convention yesterday, it became apparent that some of the smaller, community-based newspapers are proving more nimble in embracing multiple technology channels for building their businesses that are...

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If you were to look at the tea leaves that led to me pursuing a career in which media played a prominent role, you could see indications in my enduring fascination with how media covers big stories, and how, big events, and yes, I speak here of the death of Michael Jackson, almost always illuminate media trends that have actually existed for some time.  Here then, five things I noticed in the...

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You may have heard that TV Everywhere, the initiative which intends to protect cable’s subscription model, even as people become more accustomed to watching full-length video on their PCs, is now out, if not exactly everywhere. The first two cable operators to sign on — Time Warner and Comcast — make up only one-third of the nation’s cable footprint. How does TV Everywhere...

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The ratings service Alexa provides one of the best tools available for assessing current traffic trends at websites, and as the chart above indicates, Twitter has now eclipsed both CNN and The New York Times on the web. Note that this does not reflect all the usage on smart phones, which no doubt would only amplify this disparity. Th trend lines are stark reminder to traditional media companies...

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One good thing about Twitter’s spare U.I., limited functionality, and chaotic stream of content is that it creates a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to step into the vacuum. One example is Breaking Tweets, which was launched earlier this year by Craig Kanalley, a graduate student at DePaul University in Chicago, online editor of DePaulia, the student newspaper, and a freelance...

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Woke up this morning to find the Twitterization of Facebook continues — with the announcement that it was allowing us all to share our status updates with everyone. Not just everyone within Facebook, but everyone, as in members of the human race. Is this a mind-blowing, game-changing moment? Actually, no. But it is an important signpost in the annals of the too-much-information age. My belief...

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I spent yesterday at a twice-a-year social media conference I run called OMMA Social, and once again, it hit me how deep MySpace’s problems are — because it’s rarer and rarer that it even merits a mention among online media agencies and clients, the people who will need to have a vested — and invested — interest in MySpace going forward. Worse, mentions of MySpace often seem...

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Chris Anderson has made a name for himself as editor of Wired and, even more so, as author of the books The Long Tail and Free. But a number of critics are coming forward, alleging that in writing the latter, Anderson made relatively free use of the work of others without adequate credit. The first to get on the scent was Waldo Jaquith in the Virginia Quarterly Review: In the course of reading...

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