Media Industry Archive

I had an epiphany while reading Virginia Postrel’s New York Times Sunday Book Review piece on Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Postrel was going through what has become a fairly common discussion of the book and the ideas of cross-subsidy (giving away in one place to make money in another), the infinitesimal cost of distribution, and the exploding number of...

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Two things are striking about The New York Times‘ decision yesterday to pull the online version of a photojournalism feature called “Ruins of the Gilded Age” which appeared in print in The New York Times Magazine last week. One, the decision to pull the feature because of some minor retouching issues seems way over the top in our Photo-shopped age, and two, rather than...

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(Note: The first names of the brothers were inadvertantly switched in the original version of this post. My apologies! Meanwhile, my colleague Erik Sherman has also published an interview with David Marburger. — D.W.) There are these brothers named Marburger. One is named David and he is a “first amendment lawyer,” i.e., the same class of practitioners who have been advocating...

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Whenever another company which is living off the host that is Twitter gets funding, my eyebrows raise just a bit. In pure business terms, this is about as meta as it gets: a company receives funding to propagate a business off of another company that makes no money — unless your definition of making money is so broad that getting money from venture capitalists counts. To continue to follow...

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June was a big month in the news biz, headlined by the rebellion in Iran and the death of Michael Jackson, which in turn meant it was a good traffic month at major news sites. After months of declines, The New York Times saw its web traffic grow by 3.45 percent to 15.5 million visitors, according to figures just released at Compete.com. CNN web traffic grew by 5.26 percent to 28.6 million. The...

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Writing in Humanities magazine, a bimonthly review published by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Steve Moyer has taken a detailed look at the future of books and of the act of reading itself. The article is very long and well-referenced, so I’ll just try and convey a few relevant tidbits: Quoting Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of Book, who has received grants...

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It’s difficult to imagine a global Internet giant with nearly a $140 billion market cap, $16 billion in cash reserves and $7 billion in annual free cash flow having a potentially menacing weakness. But in a digital marketplace hell-bent on making consumers pay for preferences, Google could be the odd man out. Apple and Amazon are demonstrating that paid content and apps are the...

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Even as Ad Age’s Rash Report complains that cable TV is doing a lousy job taking advantage of the broadcast network’s rerun-filled summer schedules, some intriguing counterprogramming is going on  over at Hulu: Hulu’s Days of Summer, which launched late last month and highlights content new to the service. Sponsored by Bing — which is quickly becoming the most prominent...

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Newspaper (and magazine) industry people often complain that they cannot charge for their content online, blaming the “culture of free,” as well as other unfriendly characteristics of the Internet. Most of the time, I agree with them — that Pay Train left the station a long time ago, and the news media simply did not climb aboard it in time. But, at a time when many newspaper...

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EveryBlock.com, the hyperlocal project created by Adrian Holovaty with funding from the Knight News Challenge Grant, has released all of its code as of this month, as required under the terms of the grant. “(W)e’ve reached an interesting point in our project’s growth,” Holovaty wrote on his personal blog, “We’re open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system...

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