Media Industry Archive

Ben Silverman, your legacy can rest easy, even as you are eased out of your job as the top programming dude at NBC. According to NewMediaMetrics, which has predicted the outcome of the fall TV season correctly for four seasons running, “The Jay Leno Show” is going to be a hit for NBC, particularly on Tuesdays, when it goes up against two new series: ABC’s...

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Barnes & Noble is finally plunging into the e-book fray after realizing how much it stands to lose once Apple and Google join the exploding digital book business already championed by Amazon. But the dominant bookstore chain will need to master the e-commerce, social community and mobile networking skills of its rivals in order to succeed. Still reeling from a false start with e-readers...

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The crisis sweeping through the U.S. newspaper industry seems to be on everybody’s minds these days. The broadcasters of yesterday’s A’s-Yankees game, for example, were riffing for a while on how few sports reporters travel with their teams any longer, when they turned to the biggest baseball story of the day — legendary base-stealer Rickey Henderson being among the...

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To hear many people in marketing tell it, there is no marketing more powerful than word-of-mouth, the phenomenon in which a friend recommends a product or service to a friend. So, with that in mind, It’s probably little wonder that some TV networks are trying to capitalize on word-of-mouth as a way to value their ad time. In other words, the more people who talk about products they saw...

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You shouldn’t have exactly fallen out of your chair this morning upon the news that NBC Universal Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman was leaving the job. The network has dropped so far in the ratings that a changing of the guard was all but inevitable. As The New York Times’ Brian Stelter tweeted this morning: “Act surprised: Ben Silverman is out at NBC.” (To be...

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The deeper we get into this media recession, the more aggressive industry execs are getting in capturing new sources of revenue, or at launching attempts to recapture revenues they think they have lost. That is perhaps the most benign interpretation of the AP’s recent announcement that it would institute a “wrapper” technology to prevent infringement of its copyrighted material,...

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Yesterday, after rereading all of those leaked internal Twitter documents published by TechCrunch recently, I started getting a better grasp of the company’s strategy going forward. As we noted yesterday, a newly redesigned home page will be launching soon that should help newcomers, including business people, figure out what this micro-blogging service is all about, and how they might...

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There were two reports yesterday that the upfront TV ad sales market has finally begun, and it appears that in a some sense, despite accepting CPM decreases, the broadcast networks have won. While everyone, including CBS, which had hoped for cost-per-thousand increases this year, is seeing decreases in the CPM, advertisers have had to capitulate to the ticking of the clock. They have to get...

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(Update: I received this note from Biz Stone at Twitter this morning, confirming that the new home page described below is under construction: On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Biz Stone wrote: Hi David, We’re still working on it and probably will be up until the point it’s ready to go live so nothing concrete to share just yet. Thanks, Biz Also, the lead designer working on...

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Two stories this morning point out how desperate the print news business is to get someone to pony up cash for their product: The second-quarter earnings for The New York Times Company. On the earnings call, CEO Janet Robinson referenced the company’s plans to get people to pay for online content. The Associated Press’ addition of a software “wrapper” around its online...

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