Earlier, I saw the AP having trouble if a group of Ohio papers didn't use it. Now, Jay Rosen points us to to a Wired pickup that links to this story from the MinnPost about Minneapolis Star Tribune sending the AP the requisite two-year notice that it' [...]
If the major reason for the American daily newspaper industry's demise were its stories contained too many dangling participles, then the industry could more easily comprehend its situation than instead hearing that the reason was it had violated the Principle' [...]
Ignorance isn't bliss to the dying. Witness the pathos of American daily newspaper companies. Most have finally begun to realize that the deterioration of their businesses isn't cyclical but grave. Yet few, if any, understand why. Almost all grasp for the reasons.
Some attribute their grave condition to advertisers suddenly switching [...]
... That's what Google Trends says. Like I've said, sometimes when you're poking around for other work, you find curious stats. Like, today, if you search "NYTimes.com" in Google Trends, it shows that more visits come from California than New York.
Today was the first public edition of “The Sporting News Today.” This is a free, online daily version of The Sporting News, the weekly magazine that got its start as a bible for baseball fans.
The Sporting News has a rich history, starting publication in 1886. I remember [...]
Sure, Alex Rodriguez is a star, and it's a big deal in advertising and entertainment circles that he's signed with a given talent agency. But why exactly is this worth interrupting us on Monday evening (I'm signed up for general Wall Street Journal alerts, not every last smidgeon of entertainment' [...]
Mediabistro blog FishbowlNY’s swipe at the valuation of Rafat Ali’s ContentNext, sold for a reported $30 million (including an earn-out over time based on performance) to the Guardian Media Group, smells at least a little bit of tit-for-tat over something Rafat wrote after mediabistro’s sale to Jupiter Media. [...]
For the upcoming episode of Naked Media, I’ll be speaking with Patrick Spain and Michael Wolff, co-founders of Newser.com. Preparing one of the “fun” segments of the show, we went out on the street this morning and asked about a dozen people of all ilks where they get [...]
In spite of all the new ability to measure. digital media also present new challenges in figuring out what works. This thought gelled for me during a Naked Media discussion with Erin Byrne and Ben Ezrick, both leading digital strategists, he for Ogilvy, she for Burson-Marsteller. We watched the Bronze [...]
I really, really promise that I will not be stuck forever on what might be seen as a crusade about the change in the editorial mix of The Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch took control. I don’t want to become the Ben-one-note on this as Lou Dobbs has become [...]
My colleagues will forgive me for going a little off-topic (unless one thinks in the larger sense):
George Carlin is one of my heroes. Not for the routine that made him most famous -- the seven (later 10) dirty words you can’t say on TV -- but for so much of [...]
There’s a lot of grumbling and retorting about the AP’s attempt to then sort-of retreat from making bloggers either paraphrase or take down their pickups of material from the venerated wire service. But there’s a more immediate problem that runs deeper than complaints from bloggers like Michael Arrington, [...]
UPDATE: A carrier exec gives a rebuttal.
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Spend almost any time with people in the mobile (meaning mobile phone) content, advertising or applications industry, and you’ll surely hear something about how the cell phone carriers are making life more difficult for them. At the [...]
Twittering Argyle Executive Forum call on Future of NYTimes. Twitter.com name: DorianBenkoil. Or feed is in right column of mediaflect.com.
There's a discussion on a listserv (remember those?) some of us here are on as well as some Internet discussion about Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer's remarks that paper media will go away in 10 years. Only he doesn't say that, exactly. He says it's immaterial whether it's 8' [...]
The Wall Street Journal's editors again flub an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the fading pack of daily local newspapers. At least the Times used the slightly more accurate "Claims" rather than "Clinches" and uses a marginally less trite photo.The Journal used the same photo as chosen by the [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter, recently. (Twitter, in case you’re not in the thumbs-of-steel set, is a technology that allows people to send short bursts of text under a unique logon about anything they want.) Sometimes, it’s journalism -- an executive just said “this!” Other times, it’s [...]
Most of what my colleagues and I write about in this space back in some way to the tsunami-scale scale changes overtaking the legacy media and the absence of a roadmap for what they should do. We can only track what seems to work for others, try to prognosticate the [...]
CBS buying CNET might make sense financially and the chart they released (see bottom of post) showing the various properties makes a good case for "synergies" of adding unduplicated audience in various verticals. CBS Chief Les Moonves, in PaidContent interview, makes a good case for the assets [...]
What do you think are/should be the rules of Twitter journalism?
A few folks have been using Twitter as a kind of live-blogging mechanism, so folks following a Twitter feed can read what a reporter has to say about an event or news scene as he/she types it in a [...]
Sometimes less can be more. This is the implication of my colleague Dorian Benkoil’s thoughts here last week about how newspapers (and other legacy media) might position their Web-based content to optimize revenue over eyeballs. Special interest magazine publishers have long worked this way, charging far higher cost [...]
I’ve said (and perhaps blogged — who can remember) that while I find Twittering for its own sake inane, from a societal perspective utility will come when enough people Tweet that a cloud is created to monitor the zeitgeist. So, let’s say a few hundred, or thousand, people give their [...]
There’s been a debate on a Poynter Institute journalism discussion group about how to increase pageviews, bring in new traffic to news websites, to increase ad views, when newspapers are struggling to bring in digital revenues, and that inventory is topping out. My friend and mentor Vin Crosbie points out [...]
Former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz’ inaugural commentary for the paper today repeats a fair amount of what he told the Chicago School of Business last month : that James Rothschild was annoyed over how the telegraph leveled the information playing field (and that we tend to [...]
At the Brian Storm (of MediaStorm.org) Hearst Foundation New Media Lecture at Columbia J. school. Brian talks about the fallacy of objectivity, or at leas the fallacy of being unwilling to be an advocate, pointing to Darfur, and that it was extremely hard to produce a piece for the [...]
Have you heard about the “Freemium” business model? It’s a label offered by James Governor Jared Lukin in a “name-that-model” contest proposed almost exactly two years ago in a post at A VC by Fred Wilson, a partner in a New York venture capital firm.
Wilson looked at [...]
Time Inc’s attempt to launch MagHound, a “Netflix of magazines,” in September is a great idea, and on the face of it something that should succeed. What’s better than getting to choose the magazines you want every month, rather than being stuck with multiple subscriptions to mags that [...]
When News Corp. first announced its intention to bid for Dow Jones, some critics moaned that Rupert Murdoch would impose his political ideology (presumably conservative) at the flagship Wall Street Journal. Jack Shafer at Slate, no knee-jerk Murdoch critic (“I genuinely admire the rotten old bastard”), nonetheless [...]
We know?or thought we knew?that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer are smart fellows. But smart, as in understanding software architecture or how to manage a company or develop products is a different kind of smart than strategic smart. Apparently Messrs Gates and Ballmer don?t have the smart big acquisition gene.
I [...]
NPR?s On the Media in its show before the most recent episode brought up the issue of paying sources and brought back some poignant thoughts about whether and why sources should or shouldn?t be paid. Sure, there are all the usual arguments about polluting the system, encouraging untruths, and [...]
Did I say in November that Rupert Murdoch said that the Wall Street Journal Online would do better with a totally ad supported business model? As Emily Latella would have said, ?Never mind.?
We had some discussion here last summer on the scenarios that might justify a free strategy, [...]
The votes have been cast and the results are in.
Im referring to the decisive TKO win for Sonys Blu-Ray high definition DVD format over Toshibas HD-DVD format. Warner Bros. Entertainment announced yesterday that starting in May it will release high def DVDs only in Blu-Ray. Up to now [...]
Who owns you? This is part of the battle brewing over social networks, and networking applications like Facebook. Robert Scoble, the Scobelizer, complains that when he tried to run a script on his profile on Facebook, Facebook detected it and kicked him off. Hes appealing the decision. He wont [...]
While my colleague Dorian Benkoil has been writing about entrepreneurial journalism, Ive been studying a slightly different universe, media entrepreneurs. In collaboration with Anne Hoag at Penn State, we have been seeking to learn whether media entrepreneurs are different than entrepreneurs in general. That is, does one go [...]
Mark Glaser calls the entrepreneurial acumen of journalists into question, but most start-ups fail, in any industry. He and others in comments give examples of those whove succeeded. This on the heels of Jeff Jarvis entrepreneurial journalism contest, which, if it works, will help seed a new generation [...]
That newspapers continue to lose advertising market share to the Internet is not a revelation. That newspapers are losing share of local advertising is a reason for concern. According to the latest tally, newspapers accounted for 43.7% of the local online advertising pie of $8.5 billion for the [...]
Could this be a sign that there's not enough room in the market for all the feed readers? (I know I'm not alone in wondering why we need so many different ones, and when the shakeout would come.)
CNET.com has, they say in an email, decided to turn off Newsburst, [...]
When I first saw on Jeff Jarvis Facebook page that he was assembling the jury for his entrepreneurial journalism contest, I quipped that what used to be an oxymoron is now worthy of a prize. Wonderful, isnt it, that students in J-school now can ask for a few thousand [...]
Is a large circulation newspaper likely to generate more revenue by charging for its online edition or making it free to maximize advertising revenue? Is the online version of a newspaper a complement to the print versionor a substitute? The stakes are high and the answers have been elusive. With [...]
(Finally) Getting around to posting some info I compiled on tough times for business magazines. Late October, for a panel on magazines at the Future of Business Media conference, I prepared some figures and charts about business magazines, based on the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) data for the [...]
That question, raised indirectly last night at the Hearst-funded new media discussion at Columbia J-school, sent a chill down my spine. Iranian born blogger and iconoclast Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, talked a lot in ways that took shots at conventional wisdom. He talked about "the tyranny of the popular," [...]
News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has made news with several talks this week.
Yesterday he declared that "the sky's-the-limit profits from traditional broadcast TV are over.Free-to-air television faces a lot of challenges, just from the sheer fragmentation of the audience. Overall he characterized broadcast television as a [...]
Talk about Google entering the mobile phone sector has been rampant of late. It has driven Googles already stratospheric stock price up an incredible 20% in the past month.
What Google is apparently working on is not the hardware per se, but an open operating system [...]
In a sign the universes of marketing and journalism are converging, Hilary Schneider, EVP of Yahoo's Local Markets and Commerce Division and the Yahoo publisher network gave a list of attributes (she wasn't completely clear but I think she meant) that journalistic content has to follow. She was speaking at [...]
You've probably heard that for its album "In Rainbows" released today, British band Radiohead is taking what industry watchers are calling a revolutionary step: letting fans determine the price they'll pay for it. But it isn't so revolutionary, if you've been watching media and business trends. It's not just that [...]
Andy Serwer, the managing editor of Fortune, wrote in his blog on Monday that Twenty years from now, the media biz will look completely different. Yeah. But his reasoning for this went beyond the usual digital transformation.
Serwer foresees two other equally important seismic events: the passing of the old [...]
Jeff Jarvis is asking for newspapers' "iPod moment" without fully describing what it is. Here's my response:
The iPod moment for newspapers will be when truly functional ePaper hits... color, touchscreen, wireless Internet built in, agnostic to standard, plays video, can work and read when not connected. A cross of [...]
A professor today asked me:
"What will the future of the newspapers be?"
Meanwhile, someone on the Online News publishing discussion lists notes:
The question is often asked: 'What will be the future of the newspapers? But, it seems that before we ask that question, we'll have to first figure out what, [...]
Many commentators are hailing the demise of The New York Times' TimesSelect service as the demise of paid content online. I hate to rain on their parade, but paid content isn't dead. Consumer Reports, Zagat, Playboy and other premier brands prove everyday that paying for the premier content in [...]
The most e-mailed story at The New York Times site today is the one announcing that the Times is terminating its subscription TimesSelect service, effective tomorrow.
Calculated from the Times press release , TimesSelect had about 227,000 subscribers beyond its print base. This was generating an estimated $10 [...]
It's not news to anyone who regularly reads this space that that "if you take out classified ad profits from newspapers, you take out the profit." Those were the words today of Michael Price, Senior Managing Director at private equity firm Evercore Partners, at the Convergence 2.0 conference in New [...]
A poll conducted in May by Harris Interactive for INNOVATION International Media Consulting indicates that online news and information will supplant television network news as the leading news source over the next five years. But news from television in general (including from cable networks) should continue to [...]
There have been a number of developments and announcements in recent weeks, which, individually, amount to little more than the now-normal background noise of the media business. But seen collectively, they add further arrows to the growing quiver of ammunition that the media landscape is continuing to sift beneath our [...]
There have been a number of developments and announcements in recent weeks, which, individually, amount to little more than the now-normal background noise of the media business. But seen collectively, they add further arrows to the growing quiver of ammunition that the media landscape is continuing to sift beneath of [...]
There have been a number of developments and announcements in recent weeks, which, individually, amount to little more than the now-normal background noise of the media business. But seen collectively, they add further arrows to the growing quiver of ammunition that the media landscape is continuing to sift beneath our [...]
New York Times tech writer/videographer/blogger and general wise guy man David Pogue has created an avid following for his tech videos on NYTimes.com. It's not uncommon to hear someone at a conference or gathering ask if you've seen the latest one – whether a goofy review of the [...]
There's been some good discussion of whether the Wall Street Journal should go free since the original post here. I have to admit I was thinking tactically, rather than long-term strategically, and may have been in the mindset of the old Journal, not the new Murdoch. WSJ publisher Gordon [...]
Dorian Benkoil last month e-mailed me asking what I thought about Business Week columnist Jon Fine's recent article, When Do You Stop The Presses?.
In the column, Fine ponders which major American newspaper will be the first to stop publishing a print edition and publish online only. He speculates [...]
I know the forces of impudent American prudishness are hijacking the whole Hillary/cleavage "issue", but the point of the original Washington Post fashion writer's article, if you read it, was not that Hil's gone mad, flopping her orbs around wantonly or that her slight V-neck somehow caused a mistaken [...]
Last week I participated with a small group for an informal half day mini-conference at MIT to revisit the arena of online micropayments. This was a very hot topic in both academia and among some newspaper people 10 years ago. As described by Bill Densmore, one of [...]
Two makes a trend. Meredith publishing president Jack Griffin this morning said editors are now not just editors, but rather "content managers." That echoes remarks Hearst president Cathy Black's been making to the same effect, in private conversations and at a previous Magazine Publishers of America "Breakfast with a Leader" [...]
Back in the early days of consumer online services one of the hot topics for prognosticators was the expectation of “disintermediation.”
In brief, this referred to cutting out middlemen in the supply chain, such as stockbrokers between buyers and sellers of securities. Online services, then the Internet, they [...]
"In the online video syndication space, the largest video owners will not be the broadcasters. It's going to be the newspapers." That prediction from Critical Mention CEO Sean Morgan at this morning's NYMIEG breakfast (full disclosure: I'll be moderating a breakfast June 20 on career change in media for [...]
I sometimes feel like an unpopular proselyte in arguing that today's digital journalists – at least at a senior editorial level – need to understand the business imperatives while also understanding the usual journalistic ones (double sourcing, verifiable accuracy, fairness, disclosure, etc).
WSJ.com managing editor Bill Grueskin seems to feel [...]
I thought I'd coined the term "every company is a media company," meaning that the accessibility of the tools and the imperative to touch customers directly makes every company -- whether Wal-Mart or HP or Sun Microsystems or GM or Caldwell Banker or the local New York ice cream shop [...]
Yesterday on the Online News Association's discussion list, the editor of a 37,000-circulation daily newspaper asked to hear:
"…from folks who have tried something in between free and paid regarding your online content, such as holding back some print content from online; charging for 'premium' online content; giving access to [...]
Sasa Vucinic and Patrice Schneider of MDLF, Prague. March 2007
In 30 years working in news media, I've never encountered a more beneficial cause than the Media Loan Development Fund. So, I've been volunteering some of my consulrting time to it.
The idea behind the MDLF arose during [...]
Google's got a looming issue over privacy, because of all the data it collects on people -- from Gmail to Blogger to Google Ads and Analytics -- and it had better be out front on this issue, or it could pay a high price in the long run.
I wrote about [...]
Fresh data that has surfaced over the past few weeks has reinforced previously observed trends in media advertising and usage. But they have also raised some red flags or sounded warning bells or whatever imagery you’d prefer. Yet amidst the downers there are some positive signs. The transition from legacy [...]
Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. has entered into an agreement to provide Yahoo with news and commentary from its staff. Initially it will be limited to material from just four foreign bureaus, but could expand.
With more than 36 million unique monthly visitors to Yahoo’s news site alone, the [...]
The recently tabulated results of advertising expenditures in U.S. by TNS Media Intelligence tells a familiar story, with few surprises. Looking at the five years from 2002 to 2006, advertising in “measured media” overall increased 23.7%, from $121 billion to almost $150 billion. This was just slightly ahead of [...]
This letter to The Wall Street Journal yesterday succinctly sums up the state of competition in the media world today and the rapidity with which the landscape is changing. It helps explain why the National Association of Broadcasters, of all special interest groups, is opposing this particular flavor of [...]
When I joined the Program on Information Resources Policy (PIRP) at Harvard in 1979, the message that we were delivering to the media companies was that of convergence. It was a tough—no, make that almost impossible—sell. We tried to explain that the future was in digital. And in digital, [...]
[When terminology gets stretched too far, discussion distorts and tempers snap. A friend in the Poynter Institute's Online News discussion group industry recently stretch the definition of 'citizen journalism' to include Letters-to-the-Editor. That 's when my patience snapped and I released criticisms of the 'citizen journalism' [...]
