Media Industry Archive

A while back, Google News opened a Twitter account, and after monitoring it for a while, I have to raise the question, “Why?” It’s hard to divine any useful function this tiny little Tweet stream is yet providing to Google, its news partners, or even to Twitter users. Here, for example, are the (approximate) load times for its most recent Tweets: One hour ago. Three hours...

More...

New iPhone likely to be announced today — At its World Wide Developers Conference in San Fransisco, Apple is expected to reveal the latest version of its popular iPhone smart phone. Most analysts suspect that the phone will get a bump in storage capacity and a few hardware upgrades such as a front facing camera. The phone’s third version of firmware is also expected to be released...

More...

Circulation figures in the magazine business have always been, well, a matter of some dispute; now, a story in  Mediaweek points out another way in which circulation figures can be deceiving: they, to an increasing degree, include digital copies of magazines. Not Web site traffic, mind you, but, essentially electronic replicas of magazines, like what you can get from a service like Zinio,...

More...

Opening my local Sunday newspaper this morning, I gasped: “Wow, it must be going out of business! This looks like it is writing its own obituary!” Not so. The San Francisco Chronicle only seemed to be uttering its final “bye-bye.” In fact, in a wraparound section, the newspaper was simply continuing a long celebration of the past 144 years of waging journalism here by...

More...

It may be just another “#followfriday” over at Twitter, but it seems to be me who can’t stop following the micro-blogging service on this particular Friday. This is my third post of the day on developments at Twitter, and it’s not that I planned it that way. (BTW, the previous two dealt with Twitter’s role as a radical management innovator, and the growing adoption...

More...

Over eighty percent of Twitter users (most of whom work in small businesses) polled in a recent study by MarketingProfs, say they expect their company’s use of the social media service to increase over the next six months. A widelarge majority, roughly two-thirds, of respondents said that Twitter is either “somewhat” or “extremely important” to their company’s current...

More...

My former Adweek colleague Brian Morrissey helpfully did a post earlier this week outlining Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson’s Rx for The New York Times: to shut down all non-core competencies, such as coverage of sports and business; and to stop printing the newspaper entirely, partly as a cost-cutting measure and partly to get the company out of that newspaper mindset. Make a...

More...

It looks as though another week has gone by in which there will be no movement in the upfront TV ad sales market — I just scanned the Web sites of the most likely suspects among the media trades to see if they’d reported anything, and all I came up with was this: some quotes from the CFO of our ultimate corporate overlord, CBS, that the scatter market is up by single digits compared to...

More...

If nothing else, Twitter has caught the attention of the people who are focused on how businesses have to transform themselves to remain relevant in the 21st century. There’s nothing quite like the bankruptcy of General Motors, after all, to drive home the point of “innovate, or die.” Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media Lab, published a piece this morning on Harvard...

More...

One of the social media headlines from this morning: that Grady Burnett, who had worked on Google’s AdWords platform, is moving to Facebook, where he’ll head up online sales, reporting to another former Google exec — COO Sheryl Sandberg. According to paidcontent.org, part of his role will be to run  Facebook’s user-generated ad platform, in which registrants can create...

More...