Media Industry Archive

Earlier this week, comScore released numbers to its clients that Facebook has finally surpassed MySpace in terms of unique users in the U.S. It’s been inevitable for some time now, but as of this writing, it’s official. Facebook had 77 million uniques in May, while MySpace dropped to 68.4 million. In other words, it’s not just that Facebook use is surging, but that MySpace use...

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TechCrunch got one of those gifts yesterday that every journalist dreams of — a cache of 310 internal documents from Twitter that includes business projections, product plans, project pitches — and also personal information about company employees, including co-founder Evan Williams and his wife. Thus, this is what you could call a mixed-bag gift, from someone calling himself Hacker...

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So, The New York Times Company has finally sold WQXR, its classical station, for $45 million. For the station’s management and listeners, there’s a change that is at least as big as a shift of ownership to WNYC, and a shift to a weaker signal, at 105.9 from its customary 96.3. That’s the shift to being listener-supported, just as WNYC is. While the story by its...

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That little survey The New York Times is circulating among its paid subscribers to determine how they would react to a new paid model for its online content contains some intriguing questions. I’ve been holding back posting about it for a few days, because I did not trust my initial impulse (”This is just another bad idea.”). First, here, according to Editor’sWeblog.org...

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Is it really possible that BusinessWeek could be sold for $1? I’m not talking about the newsstand price. I’m talking about the whole franchise. Sources are telling the Financial Times that BW could actually go for a buck — the same price that TV Guide went for earlier this year. Let’s put this into context, shall we? At $1: BusinessWeek would go for one cent more than the...

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Yesterday in the mail I finally found out what life was going to be like after the first 12 months of Cablevision’s Optimum Triple Play is over — our new bill shows an almost 34 percent rate hike to just under $162 per month for Internet, phone, cable and a DVR. This is what I signed up for, of course, but it still comes as a shock. I guess I’d been hoping that, the economy...

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An academic study titled “Tracking the life and death of news“ published earlier today does no such thing. Under the auspices of Cornell, this study purports “to track and analyze the ‘news cycle’ (defined as)  the way stories rise and fall in popularity.” The first thing I must object to is this definition of the news cycle. We journalists traditionally...

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Though there have been many outlandish estimates as to when the upfront ad sales market for TV — which is usually pretty much concluded by now — will finally move this year, a pronouncement by Steve Neder, Volkswagen of America’s general manager-brand strategy, that the company has to “nail ourselves down by mid-September” ranks, I think, as the farthest-out statement of...

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Morgan-Stanley’s 15-year-old intern, Matthew Robson, is shaking up the financial and media industries in London upon release of his report about teen’s media habits today. So far, much of the news coverage seems to be centered on his finding that Teens don’t use Twitter, although this has been documented in previous studies. What he has to say about all media channels is of...

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Around two and a half years ago, experienced journalists Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar and Alex Gronke decided to bring what was at that time a mostly abstract concept — hyper-local news — to Oakland, the sprawling metropolis at the other end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The pair noted that there were few blogs or local websites in the city at the time other than the Oakland Tribune,...

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