Media Industry Archive

When S&P downgraded the Washington Post Co.’s credit rating late in June, the ratings agency said it expected the company’s total EBITDA to sink by 30% in 2009. Well, the company’s Q-2 earnings report is out today, and there’s a lot of red ink, especially at the Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper and at Newsweek magazine. But the company’s overall financial...

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At the beginning of this month, I wrote a post about my encounter with D&T Connection, a magazine subscription sales company which employs young people who are trying to better their situation in door-to-door sales of magazine subscriptions. After a visit from two of the company’s saleswomen, I closed the door wondering if I’d just been had, despite their earnestness. The next...

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The Great Recession we’re in has caused me, and others, to ask, whether cost-cutting consumers would connect the dots on how to cut their entertainment budgets and consume entertainment too, by cutting back or cancelling their cable subs and watching some of the same shows online. Now, new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project confirms that it’s happening —...

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Right on schedule, Twitter launched its new home page this week, though you would not necessarily have known that if you are a regular visitor. Log out from your account, however, and and — presto! — there it is. You can evaluate whether this addresses the issue Biz Stone identified in an interview late last week: Username or email Password Remember me Forgot your password?...

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When a friend forwarded that article from TechCrunch claiming AOL has 1,500 writer/bloggers on staff, and is planning on doubling or tripling that number over the coming year, I started thinking it might be time to dust off my old resume, eh? After all, the list of names now employed by AOL includes a lot of experienced journalists, including old friends like the gifted political reporter and...

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Microsoft gave Yahoo bare minimum terms in their new 10-year partnership: a fortified combined search engine off of which it can sell and retain advertising revenues, and a possible exit strategy down the road.  Either way Microsoft wins. The long-anticipated search and advertising pact announced today did not include the favorable terms — primarily billions in upfront revenue...

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Reading this morning about a second Facebook click-fraud suit should leave anyone interested in the social network’s monetization model queasy. What this complaint, from the software company Unified ECM, and one from earlier this month, alleges, is that Facebook is charging advertisers for “non-existent, fraudulent or invalid clicks.” (As many Facebook advertisers buy on a...

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Well over a year of flirtation, rejection, avoidance, reconnecting and late-night romantic trysts has finally yielded a Relationship today between Microsoft and Yahoo. The wording in the joint statement released as part of an SEC filing was delightful: “This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry,” was the shout-out from Yahoo CEO Carol...

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A concern many of us have re: companies like The New York Times when they say they are going to start charging for online content soon is based in the sense that they remain stuck inside the box of a traditional business model; one that’s broken. Most reports of these imminent changes indicate that publishers still think they may be able to coax “readers” into paying for access to some of...

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Quite a few Big Media players are likely to join the chorus of public companies whose latest quarterly earnings results have matched or beat analyst forecasts. But don’t be fooled — they’re really just getting by. Fully three-quarters of all public companies that have so far met or exceeded analyst estimates for second-quarter earnings have also reported virtually no revenue...

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