Media Industry Archive

Even as media conglomerates struggle to stabilize finances by cutting costs and retrenching, their CEOs remain a well compensated group — averaging $27 million in cash payments last year while equity values plummeted as much as 70 percent. Blame it on the complex formulas used to determine bonuses and other compensation, which are frequently tied to qualitative and sometimes subjective...

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MySpace has yet to deliver the digital fix to Fox Interactive Media that News Corp. expected when it paid $580 million for the social-networking unit three years ago. Instead, MySpace will begin emulating rivals Facebook and Twitter in an effort to offset an anticipated $100 million-plus annual revenue shortfall stemming from waning online traffic and revenues. Heightened competition —...

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We’ve examined the late-night TV wars from many different vantage points over the last few months, and now I’ll add this: that people who watch Conan O’Brien are more loyal to him than they are to a particular show. While not so shocking it will make you fall off your chair, it’s another demonstration of the fact that if NBC wanted to attract younger viewers to...

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So, The New York Times‘ Q-2 numbers are in and they’re not good — everything is down. Near the end of the narrative portion of the company’s 8-K is this unsettling juxtaposition: “At the end of the quarter, cash and cash equivalents were approximately $37 million and total debt was approximately $1.0 billion.” Some $44.5 million of this debt (more than the...

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Forgive me for giggling, just a little bit, over the fact that President Obama decided to change the time of his primetime speech about healthcare for NBC’s special night featuring Susan Boyle, the “Britain’s Got Talent” sensation who is giving an exclusive interview tonight to “The Today Show”’s Meredith Vieira followed by an appearance on...

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An ongoing business issue for most media companies is how to better connect with the diverse audiences that make up today’s U.S. media markets. Hispanics, for example. A new report by Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer of ComScore, Inc., outlines this market opportunity succinctly: The online U.S. Hispanic market is bi-lingual. U.S. online Hispanics are heavier Internet users than the...

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It’s time to pause for a moment and lament the passing of Pelham Video, the only video store that served our small town of 12,000 just outside of New York. It passed away, after a long struggle, at the age of 23. In its final days, its storefront was scrawled with the “Going Out of Business” signs that are all too common these days — but the passing of a video store in 2009...

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The news of the continuing editorial bloodbath at Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur Magazine, have been making extensive rounds of the media circles. Even after a round of lay-outs earlier this year, editorial folk have continued pulling their ripcords to parachute out at a time when media staff jobs are none too plentiful. And now a recent flare-up from an ex-employee elicited a...

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Even as I commented yesterday that there were many (perhaps too many) moving parts to AOL’s press blitz around new CEO Tim Armstrong’s Obama-esque first 100 days, one fact jumped out: that the company has pared down the number of ads on its highly-trafficked home page to one, and pulled 60 percent of inventory from some “important” pages on Mapquest. At least on...

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Much has been swirling through the ether about Condé Nast over the last few days — the biggest news being that it has hired McKinsey & Co. to help it “realign … to be a successful business in an emerging economy that is now predicted to be painfully slow in recovering.” (That quote is from an internal memo that CEO Chuck Townsend sent to the troops yesterday, before he...

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