Media Industry

Media Roundup: Tina Brown Unleashes Daily Beast, DreamWorks and Paramount Split, and More

Karen Steen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:20:02 +0000

Tina Brown and Barry Diller launch The Daily Beast – The latest release from two media moguls isn’t a content provider but a news aggregator. [Source: PaidContent] DreamWorks and Paramount split but share custody – The two studios will work jointly on as many as 40 projects after their partnership is dissolved. [Source: Variety] Newspapers hit hard [...]

Blog Network Gawker Cuts Staff; Google Optimizes Blog Search

David Weir — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:36:59 +0000

One down, one up. As media stocks in general, and newspaper stocks in particular, continued their downward spiral in yet another day of market volatility, a gloomy sense is settling over the entire media industry. Forecasts for advertising revenue have been reduced, and some companies have announced new rounds of job cuts as a result. Furthermore, the [...]

False Steve Jobs Report Shows Hazards of “Citizen Journalism”

David Weir — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 22:16:01 +0000

Even the most ardent advocates of “citizen journalism” had to feel shaken by today’s events on CNN’s iReport, where user posts are carried unedited and unfiltered.This morning somebody fabricated the following story:“Steve Jobs was rushed to the ER just a few hours ago after suffering a major heart attack. I have an insider who tells [...]

Media Roundup: Hollywood’s Bailout Cut, iTunes Saved, WSJ’s New Editors, and More

Karen Steen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:52:52 +0000

Hollywood could get a cut of bailout cash — The federal bailout package includes $470 million in tax breaks for movie and TV employees. [Source: Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily] iTunes won’t close afterall — Apple threatened to close iTunes if publishers raised royalty rates, but the Copyright Royalty Board ruled for no increase. [Sources: VentureBeat, [...]

Minneapolis Paper Stops Paying Debts; NYT Close to “Junk” Status?

David Weir — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:59:26 +0000

Across the board, newspaper companies are getting hammered by the hurricane battering all of Wall Street. Already this year, all sources of revenue were down — national advertising, local display advertising, classified advertising, circulation, newsstand sales, magazine revenue, insert deals, even online advertising. They’ve been cutting jobs, reducing publication days, combining forces with other papers to [...]

Outside.In Gives Your Neighborhood New Transparency

David Weir — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:25:50 +0000

As part of our ongoing inquiry into whether “hyperlocal” news will help transform the media business, today I spoke with Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, a New York-based “data and technology platform that empowers hyperlocal media discovery and aggregation.” This company uses its own geo-tagging engine to parse incoming feeds from thousands of newspapers, blogs, [...]

All News is Local in the Global Village

David Weir — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:01:58 +0000

We’ve looked at Topix and we’ve looked at EveryBlock. We’ve examined the efforts by the Hartford Courant, among others. Tomorrow, we’ll look at another hyper-local news resource, called Outside:In. But today, I want to establish from the perspective of a media executive the business rationale for this kind of approach to reporting the news. First, this is [...]

NYT, Gannett, Yahoo, McClatchy, Apple, and Google Stocks All Get Hammered

David Weir — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:10:02 +0000

Black & Blue Monday brought the biggest one-day point drop in U.S. stock market history. As the indices all melted down today after the House failed to pass the Bush administration’s $700 billion bailout bill, media companies — especially newspapers — were sinking fast. The New York Times‘ stock fell to $14.35; Gannett’s fell to [...]

Media Roundup: Congress Bails Out Pandora, Wal-Mart Yanks DRM-free Songs, and More

Karen Steen — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:06:38 +0000

A reprieve for Pandora – On Saturday, Congress voted to give internet radio sites more time to negotiate royalty rates with recording companies, which may save popular site Pandora. [Sources: Portfolio, Silicon Alley Insider] Creative Loafing files for bankruptcy – The publisher of alt weeklies including Washington CityPaper has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in order [...]

The Publishers and The Posers

David Weir — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 22:40:10 +0000

It’s Friday, and rather than digg into specific companies, just this once I feel like stepping back and taking a long view of the media industry we monitor here so closely. Think about it. What now qualifies as “media” — in one form or another — theoretically could include virtually every website published. That was not [...]