Media Industry Archive

It was impossible to resist writing that headline, but here’s what it relates to: the contention by New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof that online games can actually create “an entry point” into understanding of deep issues that even his best columns can’t do, when those games work to create empathy for the plight of others. As far as the oppressed women,...

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(UPDATE: Dave actually beat Conan on June 9 with a 3.4 rating/8 share, compared with Conan’s 2.9 rating/7 share. There were some mitigating circumstances, but looks like there’s a new late-night war on. Goodie!) Somehow, in all of the hubbub surrounding Jay Leno’s sacrificing the “Tonight Show” chair to Conan O’Brien, one possibility has been little talked...

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The long-anticipated vote by Newspaper Guild members at the Boston Globe is in, and management’s proposal to cut wages and benefits by $10 million was rejected by a 51-49 percent margin. Management, of course, is The New York Times, which now says it will unilaterally impose a 23 percent salary cut on all the union’s members, starting next week. A cynic might say the Times got...

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Many people go on about the salvation for news media being sites that offer free content and find other ways — most often advertising — to pay the freight. I understand that the industry is heavily populated by people who are most comfortable with words, but we’re talking about the business of news. And when business is the topic, you’d better have numbers and a...

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When I went on The New York Times Web site yesterday morning, I was greeted with another one of the new super-sized ads that the Online Publishers Association has been rolling out to its members. Well, this one actually rolled up. The ad, which was for this little tweak to Microsoft’s search offering called Bing, is I think what the OPA calls the Pushdown, since it rolls down the page...

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According to the metrics service Compete, Twitter’s dazzling month-over-month growth rate slowed down dramatically last month — at least on the web. Compete says that the micro-blogging service grew by a paltry 1.47 percent in May to a total of 19,728,619 unique visitors. This rendered one of my predictions a few months back — that Twitter would eclipse CNN’s web...

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Electronic Arts, home to some of the most popular PC games of all time, including the blockbuster Sims, Madden football, and Rock Band franchises, reported a loss of $1.08 billion for fiscal 2009 ended March, hurt by weaker-than-expected holiday sales and an admitted failure to score enough big sellers on the most popular game console system, Nintendo’s Wii. The video game publisher can...

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Well, folks, Nielsen’s tallies of first quarter ad spending are in, and they show the deepest percentage decline since Nielsen started to tabulate this data in 2002. All told, ad spending was down by 12 percent compared to Q1 2008 to $27.9 billion. Ouch. You probably don’t have to guess which medium did the worst — yes, it was newspapers, which got hit three ways from, well,...

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Been playing around with Hulu’s new desktop app this morning, and trying to suss out whether Hulu just killed the TV business, or whether this is just another bit of Hulu hype.  On the one hand, it always boggles my mind that things that are already easy need to be made easier. How hard is it to type in Hulu’s URL and then watch whatever you want, when you want to?  On the other...

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I’ve heard many people insist that the future of traditional news media is to work with aggregators like Google, because they represent a new model of delivering the news. Recently, I noticed a blog post by Jeff Jarvis, which was about the auto industry. Although it may seem off-topic on first thought, it actually isn’t, and the flaws in his argument about cars explain the...

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