Media Works

Fake Product Reviews Get 5 Stars

2012-01-27T06:54:00.000-08:00

Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is trying to devise mathematical models that can unmask fake product endorsements. “The incentives for faking are getting bigger,” he said. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

Editor's note: This NYT piece shows how the line between journalism, marketing and public relations has blurred. It is true that advertorials have been around for a long time, but we are now in an era where promotional information masquerades as journalism. In the past, old-guard media insisted on firewalls that clearly distinguished what was advertising. But that firewall has fallen down as old-style such as newspapers and news magazines have started falling apart. The Web is a perfect venue for deception. It is very difficult to determine who is producing what content and whether that content is indeed authentic. Advertisers know this and have become extremely clever at covering their tracks. We should all be concerned about this development. - MT

Fake product reviews. It seems they are everywhere these days - Amazon, Hotels.com, TripAdvisor.com. There are so many companies hawking so many things on the Web it seems the only way to stand out is to falsify information about the product by paying someone to write a bogus review.

Fake reviews are drawing the attention of regulators. They have cracked down on a few firms for deceitful hyping and suspect these are far from isolated instances. “Advertising disguised as editorial is an old problem, but it’s now presenting itself in different ways,” said Mary K. Engle, the Federal Trade Commission’s associate director for advertising practices. “We’re very concerned.” Researchers like Bing Liu, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are also taking notice, trying to devise mathematical models to systematically unmask the bogus endorsements. “More people are depending on reviews for what to buy and where to go, so the incentives for faking are getting bigger,” said Mr. Liu. “It’s a very cheap way of marketing.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/27/technology/for-2-a-star-a-retailer-gets-5-star-reviews.html

This is Siri-ous: Talking to cell phones

2011-12-05T18:39:00.001-08:00

Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone "creepy."

NYT- Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.

But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new i Phone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.

In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.

“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.

Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/technology/virtual-assistants-raise-new-issues-of-phone-etiquette.html

Millennials Sell Themselves

2011-11-20T08:24:00.001-08:00

CBS 60 Minutes: The Age Of The Millennials: They are young adults and have been coddled by their parents to the point of being ill prepared for a demanding workplace. Morley Safer reports on the generation called "Millennials."

Editor's note: What follows this 60 Minutes clip is a very interesting piece written by Bill Deresiewicz. This essay attempts to examine the soul of current 18 to 25-year-old's who grew up being bombarded by media images. Our media saturated culture - where everyone manages their own brand - has played a major role in this group's view of the world.

NYT - Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement. So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. Call it Generation Sell. Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html

Newspapers' Digital Apostle

2011-11-19T14:40:00.001-08:00

John Paton, the MediaNews chief, notoriously said the industry needed to "stop listening to newspaper people."

By David Carr, New York Times - Last week, John Paton met with executives of the MediaNews Group, the second-largest newspaper chain by circulation in the country, home to papers like The Denver Post, The Detroit News, The Salt Lake Tribune and a broad swath of dailies throughout California, including The San Jose Mercury News.

Mr. Paton was given control of MediaNews by its owners in September based on his success operating the smaller Journal Register Company after it emerged from bankruptcy in 2009. Among other feats, he increased digital revenue by over 200 percent in his first full year as chief executive.

According to Mr. Paton, his new employees at MediaNews were hoping to discern the silver bullet that would enable them not only to survive, but prosper. Instead, he worked his way through a detailed presentation about outsourcing most operations other than sales and editorial, focusing on the cost side that might include further layoffs, stressing digital sales over print sales with incentives, and using relationships with the community to provide some of the content in their newspapers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/business/media/paton-prepares-his-newspapers-for-a-world-without-print.html

Newscast Appeals to Media Skeptics

2011-10-24T09:56:00.000-07:00

Amy Goodman, right, interviewing Tawakkol Karman, left, a Nobel laureate, with an interpreter.

NYT - Hours after Amy Goodman, the host of the grass-roots newscast “Democracy Now!,” was arrested in Minnesota in 2008 while trying to cover protesters at the Republican National Convention, she was sitting in a network news studio above the convention floor, when a producer said: “I don’t get it. Why wasn’t I arrested?”

Ms. Goodman asked him, “Were you out on the streets?” No, he said, he had been in the studio the whole time. “I’m not being arrested here either,” she said she told him. “You’ve got to get out there.” For Ms. Goodman, that exchange expresses both a shortcoming of the network newscasts that many Americans consume and a strength of “Democracy Now!,” the 15-year-old public radio and television program. The newscast distinguishes itself by documenting social movements, struggles for justice and the effects of American foreign policy, along with the rest of the day’s developments.

Operated as a nonprofit organization and distributed on a patchwork of stations, channels and Web sites, “Democracy Now!” is proudly independent, in that way appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who are skeptical of the news organizations that are owned by major media companies. The program “escapes the suffocating sameness that pervades broadcast news,” said John Knefel, a comedian and freelance writer who started listening about four years ago and now tries never to miss an episode.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/business/media/a-grass-roots-newscast-gives-a-voice-to-struggles.html

Videocamera Captures 360 Degrees

2011-10-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

NYT - Video in 3-D may be all the rage, but there is an inexpensive new video tool that I think has greater potential to change the way you shoot video. It’s from a company called EyeSee360, which makes lenses that put you in the middle of the action. It records in a complete circle (well, doughnut, really). The person watching the video can use a mouse to pan around and see what is happening all around the camera.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/a-videocamera-that-captures-360-degrees-of-action/

Small sites trump big media on Web

2011-09-12T06:29:00.000-07:00

As news surges on the Web, news giants are being outmaneuvered by smaller sites that have passionate audiences and sharply focused information. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/12/business/media/news-consumption-tilts-toward-niche-sites.html

NTY - Like newspapers, portals like AOL and Yahoo are confronting the cold fact that there is less general interest in general interest news. Readers have peeled off into verticals of information — TMZ for gossip, Politico for politics and Deadspin for sports, and so on.

Part of the problem is the result of a fundamental shift in Web behavior. Media stalwarts erected a frame around the Web and organized, and sometimes produced, content. Now the frame around content is the Web browser itself, and consumers do their own programming and are more inclined to see news consumption as a kind of voting, selecting smaller brands that reflect their sensibilities.

Bloggers: We Won't Be Fooled Again

2011-09-07T08:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/business/media/when-bloggers-dont-follow-the-script-to-conagras-chagrin.html Editor: Great article on bloggers refusing to be duped by marketers. - MT

NYT - IN August, food bloggers and mom bloggers in New York were invited to dine at an underground restaurant in a West Village brownstone run, apparently, by George Duran, the chef who hosts the “Ultimate Cake Off” on TLC.

Enlarge This Image

Brian Ach/AP Images for Marie Callender’s

George Duran, left, a celebrity chef, and Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst, hosted evenings at an underground restaurant, where invited bloggers thought Mr. Duran would prepare the meal

Sotto Terra, the invitation said, was “an intimate Italian restaurant” where attendees would enjoy a “delicious four-course meal,” Mr. Duran’s “one-of-a-kind sangria,” and learn about food trends from a food industry analyst, Phil Lempert. The invitation continued that upon confirming — for one of five evenings beginning Aug. 23 — bloggers would receive an extra pair of tickets as a prize for readers and that the dinner would include “an unexpected surprise.”

The surprise: rather than being prepared by the chef, the lasagna they were served was Three Meat and Four Cheese Lasagna by Marie Callender’s, a frozen line from ConAgra Foods. Hidden cameras at the dinners, which were orchestrated by the Ketchum public relations unit of the Omnicom Group, captured reactions to the lasagna and to the dessert, Razzleberry Pie, also from Marie Callender’s.

But it was the marketers, not the diners, who were in for the biggest surprise. The hidden camera is a staple in commercials, from Folger’s ads in the 1970s and 1980s where diners in upscale restaurants unknowingly enjoyed instant coffee instead of the house brew, to more recent Pizza Hut ads, where diners, again in upscale restaurants, unknowingly enjoyed pasta from Pizza Hut.

But while consumers tend to laugh along with the ruse, ConAgra was about to learn that bloggers, who often see themselves as truth-seeking journalists, find the switcheroo less amusing, especially when it entails them misleading their readers beforehand.

“Our entire meal was a SHAM!” wrote Suzanne Chan, founder of Mom Confessionals, in ablog post after the event. “We were unwilling participants in a bait-and-switch for Marie Callender’s new frozen three cheese lasagna and there were cameras watching our reactions.”

Groupon worth (gasp) $30 billion?

2011-09-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Hard to believe that a company that sells coupons would be worth $30 billion. Who does Groupon employ? Lots of ex-journalists who have left or been laid off. This is just another example of the sorry state of journalism. - MT

NYT - Groupon is considering a delay to its long-awaited initial public offering amid turmoil in the stock market.

While the online coupon giant had been hoping to go public by the end of this month, it is studying the market conditions and may push back the timing of the offering, said two people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions.

Earlier this summer, Groupon was aiming for an I.P.O. at a valuation near $30 billion and had been considering a roadshow for potential investors next week. The roadshow now appears to be off the table.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/groupon-weighs-delay-to-i-p-o/.

Yahoo dumps CEO

2011-09-07T08:08:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: The firing of Bartz doesn't come as a surprise. Yahoo is still figuring out what it wants to be - a tech company or a content development company. Meanwhile, the company continues to get squeezed by Microsoft and Google. - MT

SAN FRANCISCO — Carol A. Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive, was fired Tuesday, ending a rocky two-year tenure in which she tried to revitalize the online media company.

Ms. Bartz has been under pressure from her first day in the job to turn the company around, and in recent months the pressure from major investors intensified. The company remains adrift despite management shuffles, layoffs and the shedding of underperforming services. She engineered a deal that turned over its search operations to Microsoft, but that has also failed to live up to expectations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/technology/carol-bartz-yahoos-chief-executive-is-fired.html

David Leonhardt: Math's Loss, Journalism's Gain

2011-08-24T22:05:00.000-07:00

The incoming New York Times Washington bureau chief places a premium on explanatory journalism and expresses optimism about the future. I interviewed David a year ago for my book, the New York Times Reader: Business and Economics published by CQ Press. David is a very smart guy who is enormously talented. His comments here are worth reviewing. The future of journalism is not just chronicling events, but putting them in perspective. It seems very basic, but journalism remains far behind the curve in this regard and journalism schools for the most part don't teach these skills. - MT

David Leonhardt: Math's Loss, Journalism's Gain | American Journalism Review

Social media dirt on job candidates

2011-08-24T16:15:00.000-07:00

"All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today," said Max Drucker, chief executive of Social Intelligence,.

The New York Times reports that companies are using Social Media - Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter - to scour the Web for information. Employers pay companies like Social Intelligence to scrape the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

“We are not detectives,” said Max Drucker, chief executive of the company, which is based in Santa Barbara, Calif. “All we assemble is what is publicly available on the Internet today.”

Is the practice legal? The Federal Trade Commission, after initially raising concerns last fall about Social Intelligence’s business, determined the company is in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, but the service still alarms privacy advocates who say that it invites employers to look at information that may not be relevant to job performance.. While companies are not supposed to ask about a person’s religion, race, marital status or disabilities, information about sexual orientation is not federally protected.

And what relevant unflattering information has led to job offers being withdrawn or not made? Mr. Drucker said that one prospective employee was found using Craigslist to look for OxyContin. A woman posing naked in photos she put up on an image-sharing site didn’t get the job offer she was seeking at a hospital.

Other background reports have turned up examples of people making anti-Semitic comments and racist remarks, he said. Then there was the job applicant who belonged to a Facebook group, “This Is America. I Shouldn’t Have to Press 1 for English.” This raises a question. “Does that mean you don’t like people who don’t speak English?” asked Mr. Drucker rhetorically.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/technology/social-media-history-becomes-a-new-job-hurdle.html

Local TV News Starts Expanding

2011-08-23T11:45:00.001-07:00

Leisa Zigman, an anchor at KSDK, which will begin newscasts as early as 4 a.m. next month.

NYT - ST. LOUIS — Coming soon to this city’s television screens: more news at 4 in the morning, again at 10, and at 4 in the afternoon.

KSDK, the local NBC affiliate, is adding newscasts to those time slots next month, giving it six and a half hours of local news each weekday, its highest count to date.

As in many other markets, the news is starting earlier than ever in the morning, and replacing “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in the afternoon. To supply it in St. Louis, KSDK is hiring 10 people and buying new cameras and trucks.

This is what the rebound in local television looks like. Three years after the business buckled under the weight of the advertising recession, the more popular stations in markets like St. Louis are adding newscasts and in some cases employees — though not as many as were dismissed during the downturn.

Station economics affect the nation’s news diet because local TV news is consistently identified in surveys as the top news source for most Americans.

A study commissioned by the Federal Communications Commission concluded earlier this year that although there were pockets of excellence in local news, there was still a heavy reliance on thinly stretched staffs and predictable crime and weather coverage

Dispatch decides to both create and cover news about casino

2011-04-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

: When it comes to whether a casino should be built in Columbus, it is pretty clear where the Dispatch stands: Against. But is this good journalism? More importantly, should newspapers take sides in a dispute?

It has always been a no-no for newspapers to step over the line and create news as well as cover it. In the pre-Web era, it was much easier to say one thing and do another. This is because readers had no way to check the facts. That, of course, has all changed with the evolution of digital media and search engines. Readers can quickly check up on whether journalists are doing their job or if a particular publication has an axe to grind. This change has forced some journalists to cover their tracks, but old habits are hard to correct.

One newspaper that suffers from shortcomings is this department is the Columbus Dispatch and its patriarch John F. Wolfe. John F., as he is known in Columbus, has long been known for meddling in local affairs and then assigning its reporters to cover it. The paper champions itself as being a beacon of truth and free from bias. But what has been going on lately is not anything Dispatch journalists should be proud of. The newspaper is using its influence to block a casino from being built in Columbus. Why? Owner John F. Wolfe is against the idea.

This behavior isn't something new for the Dispatch. Although the newspaper Wolfe owns has moved more mainstream in the past decade, Wolfe has never been bashful about using the Dispatch Printing Co. to further his own business and political interests. Some might argue this is province of a newspaper publisher. In fairness to John F., I am sure he believes he is only acting in the community's best interests. But this behavior poses a major conflict for the Dispatch. Let me explain. On one hand, Dispatch editors profess to be ethical and honest and present both sides of an issue. But how can the editors remain impartial if the publisher who owns the newspaper is a central figure in the dispute? The story that appears below is an excellent case study of how the Dispatch engages in questionable conduct by allowing its owner's business interests influence the newspaper's editorial content. In the battle over construction of Columbus' first casino, the Dispatch has purchased land adjacent to the casino so it can object to its zoning with the hope of blocking construction.

Dispatch Editor Ben Marrison, no doubt, reluctantly published this story after it was going to become an embarrassment to the paper. This editorial action was taken to defuse critics who might claim the publisher wants the Dispatch's involvement to be kept quite. Editors will now tell critics: We are covering that story. Of course, that argument totally ignores the issue of having a newspaper's owner wage a fight with another business and then using a newspaper (which is supposed to be impartial) to help wage that fight. I am sure Penn National is not very happy with the way this issue is being handled or covered. Watch for Dispatch editors to rationalize this sort of conflict as being in the public interest in editorials and further news stories even if the slant of the coverage is more a personal selfish interest of John F. Wolfe's than a public interest.- MT

Friday, April 22, 2011 03:04 AM

BY DOUG CARUSO

A subsidiary of The Dispatch Printing Company is objecting to Penn National Gaming's request that Franklin County issue a zoning certificate for the company's casino site.
The county shouldn't issue the zoning certificate because Penn National can't show that it has sewer service for the casino, an attorney for the subsidiary wrote in objection. That's a violation of the county's health and plumbing codes, the objection says.
Just hours before the objection was filed yesterday, Penn National announced plans to break ground at the casino site at 11a.m. on Monday.
Capitol Square Ltd., the real-estate arm of the company that publishes The Dispatch, is now one of those neighbors because one of its subsidiaries purchased a vacant lot next to the casino site. That gives Capitol Square standing to object, Tigges said. The company bought the lot at 3839 Scales Dr. for $95,000 on March 28, county auditor records show.
Attorneys for Penn National said in their application for the zoning certificate that the Ohio Constitution says that zoning issues can't be used to stop casinos. The constitutional amendment that allowed for four Ohio casinos does, however, allow communities to enforce health and building codes
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/04/22/casinos-sewer-zoning-disputed.html

Party Crashers Stopped by Secret Service

2010-05-21T07:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - This time, at least, they didn’t get in. Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the Virginia socialites and future reality television cast members, were stopped by the Secret Service driving near the White House during Wednesday night’s state dinner.

The Salahis, who earned international fame — or notoriety — when they managed to get into President Obama’s first state dinner in November without an invitation, were in a stretch limousine that drove through a red light, then tried to turn into a restricted area, the Secret Service said.

A uniformed Secret Service officer stopped the car and discovered the Salahis were in it. “The driver and occupants of the vehicle were interviewed at this point,” said Edwin M. Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman. “The driver was issued a notice of infraction for passing through a red light and all the subjects in the vehicle were released.”

It’s not clear whether the Salahis, who have been tapped to appear on the Bravo channel reality show “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” were trying to enter the Obamas’ second state dinner, being held for President Felipe Calderón of Mexico. They have insisted they were invited to the November dinner but were not on the guest list.

As the Obamas played hosts on Wednesday to Mr. Calderón and his wife, Margarita Zavala, the Salahis were spotted having dinner at Kellari Taverna, a Greek restaurant about four blocks from the White House, according to The Washington Post. They were joined by friends and a camera crew.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/salahis-stopped-by-secret-service/

As CNN Considers Prime-Time Changes, Spitzer’s Name Is Mentioned

2010-05-21T07:35:00.001-07:00

The New York Times - As CNN scrambles to replace Campbell Brown on its wounded prime-time lineup, the most intriguing name purportedly on the channel’s list is that of Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York.

Mr. Spitzer has held conversations — but so far only informal ones — about becoming a regular contributor to the cable news channel, according to two people who were briefed on the matter. But the people said he was not being courted for an anchor job, meaning he would not directly replace Ms. Brown at 8 p.m.

Rumors of Mr. Spitzer’s hiring set off widespread speculation inside CNN this week, and even made it into David Letterman’s monologue Tuesday night. His punch line: “That would be a switch — somebody paying him for an hour.”

Mr. Spitzer resigned the governorship in 2008 after it was revealed that he had solicited prostitutes.

Seemingly wrapping himself in the redemptive spirit of television, Mr. Spitzer is a budding pundit, and has even tried his hand at anchoring on MSNBC, one of CNN’s cable news competitors. His first two times as a substitute for the anchor Dylan Ratigan were well received inside MSNBC last month, and he filled in again on Monday.

“He’s a smart guy, extremely smart. And he communicates well,” a cable news executive said of Mr. Spitzer. “The question about him is, how much stench is on him, and is he likable enough?”

MSNBC declined to comment on Mr. Spitzer’s status at the channel. But two news executives said MSNBC was not in talks with him about a paid position at the channel. Like the people briefed on Mr. Spitzer’s conversations with CNN, the executives requested anonymity because they were not authorized by their employers to speak on the record.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/as-cnn-considers-prime-time-changes-spitzers-name-is-mentioned/

Social Media Sites Send Private Data to Advertisers

2010-05-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

WSJ - Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent.

Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.'s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.'s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven't made use of it.

Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names.

Most social networks haven't bothered to obscure user names or ID numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the issue.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704513104575256701215465596.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

How to Save the News

2010-05-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Plummeting newspaper circulation, disappearing classified ads, “unbundling” of content—the list of what’s killing journalism is long. But high on that list, many would say, is Google, the biggest unbundler of them all. Now, having helped break the news business, the company wants to fix it—for commercial as well as civic reasons: if news organizations stop producing great journalism, says one Google executive, the search engine will no longer have interesting content to link to. So some of the smartest minds at the company are thinking about this, and working with publishers, and peering ahead to see what the future of journalism looks like. Guess what? It’s bright.

Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.
Of course this overstates Google’s power to destroy, or create. The company’s chief economist, Hal Varian, likes to point out that perhaps the most important measure of the newspaper industry’s viability—the number of subscriptions per household—has headed straight down, not just since Google’s founding in the late 1990s but ever since World War II. In 1947, each 100 U.S. households bought an average of about 140 newspapers daily. Now they buy fewer than 50, and the number has fallen nonstop through those years. If Google had never been invented, changes in commuting patterns, the coming of 24-hour TV news and online information sites that make a newspaper’s information stale before it appears, the general busyness of life, and many other factors would have created major problems for newspapers. Moreover, “Google” is shorthand for an array of other Internet-based pressures on the news business, notably the draining of classified ads to the likes of Craigslist and eBay. On the other side of the balance, Google’s efforts to shore up news organizations are extensive and have recently become intense but are not guaranteed to succeed.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/how-to-save-the-news/8095/1/

John Stewart Takes On Fox News

2010-04-24T11:55:00.003-07:00

The New York Times - George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are long gone. Fox News Channel is Jon Stewart’s new enemy No. 1.

Last week that comedian did something that the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” the morning show on Fox News, did not do: he had his staff members call the White House and ask a question.

It may have been in pursuit of farce, not fact, but it gave credence to the people who say “The Daily Show” is journalistic, not just satiric. “Fox & Friends” had repeatedly asked whether the crescent-shaped logo of the nuclear security summit was an “Islamic image,” one selected by President Obama in his outreach to the Muslim world. The White House told “The Daily Show” that the logo was actually based on the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom.

“This is how relentless Fox is” in savaging President Obama, Mr. Stewart said.

On the subject of Fox, Mr. Stewart is pretty relentless too. As demonstrated by that crescent segment and dozens of others since Mr. Obama took office, he may well be television’s pre-eminent fact-checker of Fox News, the nation’s highest-rated cable news channel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/arts/television/24stewart.html

Thinking about getting a PhD? Read this before you do.

2010-04-18T16:46:00.000-07:00

Universities encourage graduate students to get PhD's but there are few jobs for those who complete the degree. It takes 9 years on average to complete the degree. Why does anyone do it? Good question - especially in the area of communications. Many former journalists are now trying to obtain jobs teaching journalism. But they are finding the pay is below what they were making in the news business (55K) and obtaining tenure is a long climb. It takes 7 years. - MT

The New York Times - Law students get a diploma in three years. Medical students receive an M.D. in four. But for graduate students in the humanities, it takes, on average, more than nine years to complete a degree. What some of those Ph.D. recipients may not realize is that they could spend another nine years, or more, looking for a tenure-track teaching job at a college or university — without ever finding one.

As the recession has downsized university endowments and departments, the sense of crisis that has surrounded graduate education for more than a decade has sharpened. “What’s worse than desperate?” asks William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Michigan, who writes a column for The Chronicle of Higher Education under the name Thomas H. Benton.

A graduate-school Cassandra, Dr. Pannapacker calls the graduate apprenticeship system bankrupt and warns students against the heartbreak of pursuing a Ph.D. While finishing his own degree in American civilization at Harvard in 1999 (another difficult job year), he helped organize a protest at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, an organization of scholars and professors of language and literature.
On a large reproduction of Goya’s bloody painting “Saturn Devouring His Son,” he wrote, “Enjoying your apprenticeship yet?”

First- and second-year Ph.D. students in, say, English literature may not face the same aching course load or backstabbing competition as their friends in medical and law schools, but they have a longer haul ahead. Doctoral students are expected not only to master a wide swath of material to pass general and oral exams, but to produce a nearly book-length dissertation of original research that, depending on the subject, may ultimately sit on a shelf as undisturbed as the Epsom salts at the back of the medicine chest. These students must earn their keep by patching together a mix of grants and wages for helping to teach undergraduate courses — a job that eats into research time. Third-year medical students may be bleary eyed from hospital rotations, but at least the work goes toward their degree.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18phd-t.html

Twitter nonsensical babble, study finds.

2010-03-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Twitter is nonsensical babble, concludes a study by two Rutgers University professors Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase. The professors dissected more than 3,000 tweets from more than 350 Twitter users and concluded that 80 percent of users are "meformers," meaning writing mostly "me now" status updates, according to a recent issue of Public Relations Society of America tactics. "Me now" updates cover everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts and emotions, according to researchers. This study comes on the heels of research showing that 40 percent of tweets are pointless babble, along the lines of "eating sandwich now," according to a random sample of 2,000 messages by Pear Analytics.

So why the race by PR professionals, journalism schools and established media outlets to associate with Twitter? Good question. My analysis is we are seeing a herd mentality with little thought being given to the content. Journalism schools are racing to offer courses in social media. Communications departments at major universities are hiring scholars who then get research grants to study this development. In reality, all this hubbub makes little sense. Like so many fads, it deserves to be viewed skeptically.

So what is the explanation for the rise of Twitterdom? My guess is so many people fear they are going to be left behind that they are jumping on the Twitter, Facebook and social media bandwagons. In reality, much of what is being posted is not new information, but self-serving, narcissistic nonsense. These dispatches offer little in the way of collective wisdom.

Murdoch's Ploy to Try and Sink the New York TImes

2010-03-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Maybe newspapers really are dying, as some media analysts have been predicting for decades, but apparently that does not apply to newspaper wars. A doozy is shaping up at the moment between The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

In an attempt to eat into The Times’s mass-market audience and lure away some of its luxury advertisers, The Journal has already edged away from its traditional role as a national business paper, adding a daily sports page and a bimonthly magazine, strengthening foreign and Washington coverage and shifting the mix of articles on its front page.

Now The Journal, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, is making its biggest and most audacious move yet away from its roots, starting up a local news section for New York to compete directly with The Times for affluent, general interest metropolitan readers and the high-end advertisers who covet them.

The new daily section, to start on April 12, will average 12 pages and be included only in those copies distributed in the New York market. According to journalists at the paper, there will be a daily real estate page, and separate daily segments devoted to culture, business and particularly sports.

Reporters will also cover traditional metro news, including government, but insiders say the section will be selective in its approach to such topics.

The initiative is intended less to raise circulation numbers than to steal away a large portion of the consumer advertisers — like high-end retailers, luxury goods makers and residential real estate companies — that have traditionally preferred The Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/business/media/22journal.html

Questions Over Former Political Candidates Becoming Paid Political News Analysts

2010-02-21T08:13:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Today, that is a list of paid Fox News political analysts. Two years from now, it could be a list of Republican presidential candidates.

A former Fox analyst, Angela McGlowan, entered a House race in Mississippi last week. Over at MSNBC, Harold E. Ford Jr. was on the payroll until a few weeks ago, when he told his boss that he was seriously contemplating a run for the Senate from New York. TV names are also constantly being run through the candidate rumor mill. There is a “Draft Larry Kudlow” movement. There is also talk of a political bid by Lou Dobbs, who left CNN last fall.

“It does seem amazing how many are being either discussed as candidates, rumored as candidates, or are actually doing it,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC.

Television and politics have always been intertwined, but never to this degree, TV executives and journalism professionals say. It would seem that the so-called revolving door for political operatives has been extended to the politicians themselves, at a time when cable news is more politically charged than ever.

The benefit for the part-time, but highly paid, pundits is clear: it increases their visibility. “It makes sense for candidates to seek out positions in niche cable, because it is a direct pipeline to voters,” said Jonathan Wald, a former senior vice president at CNBC and an adjunct professor at Columbia’s journalism school. “It’s an automatic affinity group.” The benefit to the viewers is less clear. Some experts say the arrangements can cloud the objectivity of the news organizations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/business/media/15candidate.html

How the tablets will change media

2010-02-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

Great piece that looks at the impact of tablets on traditional book and print publishers. -MT

Fortune Magazine - In fact, for the past year I've been pushing the theory that the Age of Tablets will give print media one last bite at the apple -- and publishing companies that are able to make the transition could one day thrive again. I'm so convinced that it will happen that I've been working with other folks here at Time Inc. (Fortune's publisher) to create prototypes of digital magazines that will soon be delivered to tablets and smartphones. So consider this my apologia.

This is one of my favorite parts of the article:

The biggest mistake newspaper companies made was in ignoring the people who might have been able to solve their problems in the late 1990s when things went bad: their best reporters. Instead they tapped consultants and strategists. Publishers of the greatest newspapers and magazines should have gone to their very best reporters and deployed them!

The best reporters I've met thrive on chaos. When men, women, children, and livestock are fleeing the scene of some unexpected horror, the best reporters are the ones running in the opposite direction. They all suffer from certain personality defects -- pursuing truth over money, status, personal safety -- that would have served their industry well here.

But the consultants didn't do any new reporting. They prescribed old, tired fixes -- cost cutting, outsourcing back-office operations -- but failed to address the core problem: Distribution no longer had value.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/09/technology/tablet_ebooks_media.fortune/?section=magazines_fortune

Woods Offers Tightly Scripted Apology

2010-02-21T06:47:00.000-08:00

Should we care about what Tiger Woods has to say in a scripted apology before family members? No. This has been covered to death. Too much coverage about too little. The Wall Street Journal, once a serious newspaper had written dozens of stories about this topic. Just another example of how much the paper has changed since it was sold to Rupert Murdoch.- MT

PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla.—In his first public appearance since a withering sex scandal that began in November, embattled golfer Tiger Woods publicly apologized for his behavior Friday, but left unclear when he would return to the sport.Standing at a lectern and speaking from a script in a slow, deliberate voice, Mr. Woods said, "I was unfaithful. I had affairs, I cheated. What I did is not acceptable and I am the only person to blame." Listening quietly to the statement were his mother and a carefully vetted group of reporters, friends and employees. Mr. Woods, wearing a black sport coat and open collar, looked purposefully into the camera and shook his head at times. His wife, Elin Nordegren, didn't attend.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787304575075051038318196.html?KEYWORDS=Tiger+Woods+press+conference

After the Tiger Apology - Another Example of What Ails Our Media Society

2010-02-21T06:33:00.000-08:00

Louis Lacroix, the owner of a Sears store in Berlin, Vt., with employee Caitlyn Lacroix.
The Wall Street Journal - We might actually prefer the silent Tiger Woods.First, can we all just check in to rehab for phony moral outrage? We're loading up the dented Cadillac Escalade—c'mon everyone, hop aboard. Bring the media, furious that Tiger Woods, after a lifetime of blowing them off, is blowing them off. Bring Mr. Woods, indignant that the media—after a lifetime of obsessing over the private lives of public figures—are obsessing over the private life of a public figure.And bring those cranky PGA golfers, upset that Mr. Woods is diverting attention from this weekend's scintillating Accenture Match Play championship. Right: The world was just dying to watch the Accenture Match Play championship. That extravaganza was going to dwarf the Winter Olympics.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787304575075472168189584.html?KEYWORDS=Rehab

With Ads Down, Cable TV Co.'s Raise Prices

2010-01-04T05:59:00.000-08:00

On New Year’s Day, the News Corporation, the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch, wrangled new payments from Time Warner Cable, including subscriber fees for the Fox Broadcasting network, which is free for viewers with over-the-air antennas.

The high-stakes deal reflected the scramble by media companies to reduce their dependence on advertising.
Something else also happened that day: Time Warner Cable put another rate increase into effect.

It will not be the last time. Along with Fox, other broadcasters say they deserve a share of the cable and satellite bills that roughly 100 million American households pay each month. At the same time, the cable-only channels that have lured viewers away from broadcast, with shows like “SpongeBob SquarePants” and “The Closer,” are lining up for further fee increases.

Viewers usually do not notice until the price goes up, but their pay TV bills are a battleground for media companies. “Content providers are testing the limits — hoping to raise the bar as high as possible,” said Steve Ridge, the president of the media strategy group for the consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04cable.html

News Sites Dabble With a Web Tool for Nudging Local Officials

2010-01-04T05:55:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Doug Hardy, an associate editor and Internet supervisor for The Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn., wanted to increase page views on its Web site.

Mr. Hardy had heard about SeeClickFix.com, a local advocacy Web site that lets users write about issues to encourage communication between residents and local government. SeeClickFix users post a complaint about problems that occur within a set of boundaries on a Google Map, like graffiti at a bus stop or potholes on a busy street, and the site communicates the problem to the appropriate government agency and marks the problem on the map.

Users can comment on the issue or label it resolved. Government agencies can post on the site to respond to residents, and journalists can use the site to communicate with readers and see which issues are most pressing to people.
Ben Berkowitz, the chief executive of SeeClickFix, said the tool went beyond government: “Anyone can be held accountable: a business, nonprofit, even a private citizen.”
The Journal Inquirer, which covers the area around Manchester, invested in its Web site, and then paid circulation plummeted. So the editors put online content behind a pay wall.
There seemed to be a trade-off. Once visitors could no longer read articles without paying, circulation stabilized — but page views dropped by about 30 percent. It fell to Mr. Hardy, the associate editor, to attract more visitors.

“We needed new strategies,” Mr. Hardy said. “We needed new ways to draw traffic to our site and to improve our product and make it more compelling.”

He thought SeeClickFix could help. Mr. Hardy drew a SeeClickFix map of the paper’s coverage area last spring and posted some sample issues, but the map did not receive responses until an article about the site ran in The Hartford Courant. After the article, Mr. Hardy noticed new issues on his map and added a SeeClickFix widget to the Journal Inquirer site last August, where it drew many comments.

The basic service is free, but Mr. Hardy spends $38 a month for SeeClickFix Pro, which features The Journal Inquirer’s logo on issues the paper selects and allows access to an advanced management dashboard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04click.html

Virginia Couple Crashes White House Dinner in Media Scheme

2009-12-28T09:06:00.000-08:00

Michaele and Tareq Salahi, on Tuesday in Washington, say they did not "party crash" the state dinner and will explain.

Unfortunately everyone is a journalist in the news media. Or is at the very least pretending to be something they shouldn't. Here's another example of someone that believes they can exploit the power of "new media" to their own advantage - to get on a reality TV show. - MT

The New York Times - WASHINGTON — The Virginia couple accused of crashing President Obama’s first state dinner broke their weeklong silence Tuesday with an appearance on network television to make their case that they had indeed been invited to the most exclusive party on the calendar.

By the end of the day, however, a chain of e-mail messages between a Pentagon official and the couple, Tareq and Michaele Salahi, showed that they knew they had not been given invitations to the dinner, but they went to the White House anyway.

The messages showed that Michele S. Jones, the Pentagon’s liaison to the White House, had offered to try to get invitations for the Salahis, who are aspiring reality television stars. But on the afternoon of the dinner, White House officials said, Ms. Jones left a message on the Salahis’ answering machine, saying she had not been able to put them on the guest list and advising them not to come.

The White House said the Salahis came anyway.

“As the White House has stated,” one administration spokesman said, “as the United States Secret Service has stated, and as Ms. Jones has stated, the Salahis were not invited. Nowhere in the e-mails do they receive an invitation. In fact, the e-mails confirm they came knowing they didn’t have an invite.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/us/politics/02party.html

Parents in Balloon Hoax Sentenced

2009-12-28T09:00:00.000-08:00

Richard and Mayumi Heene, foreground, the Colorado parents who perpetuated the "balloon boy" hoax in October, were sentenced to jail time on Wednesday.

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (AP) -- The parents who pulled the balloon boy hoax in hopes of landing a reality TV show were sentenced to jail Wednesday -- 90 days for him, 20 days for her -- and barred from profiting from their newfound celebrity status for the next four years.

Choking back tears, Richard Heene apologized in court for the frenzy he caused when he claimed his 6-year-old son Falcon had floated away in a giant helium balloon shaped like a flying saucer.
''I'm very, very sorry. And I want to apologize to all the rescue workers out there, and the people that got involved in the community,'' said the 48-year-old Heene, a UFO-obsessed backyard scientist who turned to storm-chasing and reality TV after his Hollywood acting career bombed.

The sentencing was the culmination of a saga that transfixed the nation in October with the sight of the silvery balloon hurtling through the sky on live television. In the end, it was all a publicity stunt by a family broke and desperate for attention and money after networks kept rejecting their reality TV show pitches.

The case -- along with the White House party-crashing by a Virginia couple last month -- illustrated vividly the lengths people are willing to go to become TV stars in this 15-minutes-of-fame world.

Bloggers Crash Fashion’s Front Row

2009-12-28T08:50:00.000-08:00

Another sign of the influence of bloggers - they have invaded the fashion press and are developing a following. - MT

TRUCE The bloggers Bryan Boy, third from left, and Tommy Ton, right, in Milan.

The New York Times - NOT everyone thought it was adorable in September when a 13-year-old wunderkind blogger named Tavi was given a front-row seat at the fashion shows of Marc Jacobs, Rodarte and others.

Oh now, don’t misunderstand. She was totally adorable. You could have gobbled her up, with her goofy spark plug style — a Peggy Guggenheim for the Tweeting tween set. Her feet, in designer stockings, did not quite touch the ground. Within a matter of months, Tavi Gevinson, the author of a blog called Style Rookie, was feted by designers, filming promotions for Target, flown to Tokyo for a party with the label Comme des Garçons and writing a review of the collections for no less than Harper’s Bazaar. Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers of Rodarte, described her in the pages of Teen Vogue as “curious and discerning.”

Rather, it was what the arrival of Ms. Gevinson, as a blogger, represented that ruffled feathers among the fashion elite. Anne Slowey, who has spent decades climbing the editorial ladder to a senior position at Elle, dismissed the teenager’s column as “a bit gimmicky” in an interview with New York magazine. And in an instant, the subtext in her complaint was read by dozens of Ms. Gevinson’s fans as an example of the tension between old media and new, when one leapfrogs ahead of the other.

As a relatively new phenomenon in the crowded arena of journalists whose specialty it is to report the news of the catwalks, fashion bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long-held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated. After all, what is one to think — besides publicity stunt — when Bryan Boy, a pseudonymous, style-obsessed blogger from the Philippines, is seated at the D & G show in Milan between the august front-row fixtures of Vogue and Vanity Fair, a mere two positions to the right of Anna Wintour?

Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites - Will it Work ?

2009-12-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

Until now - most media has been advertising supported. What fees consumers paid were minimal. Most consumers got hooked on this model. It had its benefits, but media has long been partial to advertisers since they pay the bills. The current ad depression has forced media companies to re-examine this model. Many companies are looking at a fee-per-view or subscription model. This would be very good for media since it would give it more independence from the advertisers who have become much too powerful in dictating placement, and in some cases, even media content. But will consumers pay for content? This NYT story examines the push on the part of media organizations to erect pay-per-view fences for content.

New York Times - Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free. Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.Newspapers, including this one, are weighing whether to ask online readers to pay for at least some of what they offer, as a handful of papers, like The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, already do. Indeed, in the next several weeks, industry executives and analysts expect some publications to take the plunge
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/business/media/28paywall.html

The Facebook backlash - Teens begin unfriending Facebook

2009-12-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

America seems obsessed with Facebook - especially journalism school as they fight to stay relevant in the changing media world. No matter that traditional writing and reporting skills are being crowded out by the flash of social media products like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Much of what is uploaded or tweeted is not journalism in the traditional sense - but who cares? Students like it. Scholars gain attention writing about it. And j-schools love the attention the new social media instruments bring. But for some, Facebook is not all that it is cracked up to be. This NYT story talks about how teens are turning off to Facebook - finding it to be an enormous time drain.

The New York Times - Facebook, the popular networking site, has 350 million members worldwide who, collectively, spend 10 billion minutes there every day, checking in with friends, writing on people’s electronic walls, clicking through photos and generally keeping pace with the drift of their social world.

Make that 9.9 billion and change. Recently, Halley Lamberson, 17, and Monica Reed, 16, juniors at San Francisco University High School, made a pact to help each other resist the lure of the login. Their status might as well now read, “I can’t be bothered.”

Facebook will not reveal how many users have deactivated service, but Kimberly Young, a psychologist who is the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa., said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/technology/internet/21facebook.html

Dallas News Publisher Jim Moroney Really Wants to Stress, "Our Content Isn't For Sale"

2009-12-04T11:14:00.000-08:00

The Dallas Observer - Late this evening, Dallas Morning News publisher and chief executive officer Jim Moroney called to discuss editor Bob Mong's memo concerning the paper's new "business/news integration," which has some of the paper's section editors reporting directly to newly assigned advertising-side higher-ups. Moroney said he'd been on the phone all afternoon with Bloomberg News and The New York Times having to explain the arrangement. It wasn't till late today, Moroney said, that he saw our original item, and he took exception to a single line contained therein: "In short, those who sell ads for A.H. Belo's products will now dictate content within A.H. Belo's products."

"That one line got to me a little bit: 'They will dictate content,'" he said. "I think people will read that as, 'Whatever sells the most will be the content that'll get put online and in the paper.' But it's about the audience first. If we don't have a loyal, engaged audience, advertisers will fade away. Our content isn't for sale. If it is, we're out of business."

As I explained to Moroney, Mong's tortuously written memo -- which he explained to Unfair Park in a follow-up interview this morning -- certainly suggested at the very least a demolition of the wall that keeps a paper's sales-siders out of the newsroom. Said the memo, executive sports editor Bob Yates and Lifestyles deputy managing editor Lisa Kresl, among others, will report to so-called "general managers" now, thereby creating "a new business segment structure as the next step toward becoming the most comprehensive and trusted partner for local businesses." Sure sounds like dogs and cats living together.

Moroney said he understood how outsiders could get that perception from the memo, which has since made the virtual rounds on Gawker, The Huffington Post, Editor & Publisher, The Chicago Tribune and Jim Romenesko's Poynter blog. Fact is, Moroney acknowledged, even those on the inside read it that way.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2009/12/now_its_the_newss_publishers_t.php

Hearst Plans Digital Magazine, Newspaper Service

2009-12-04T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal - Publisher Hearst Corp. plans to launch next year a service called Skiff to sell digital versions of newspapers and magazines on electronic readers and other devices, in a system it believes will be more visually appealing to readers and more lucrative for media companies.

Skiff would give publishers an alternative to Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle store, which currently dominates the burgeoning field of digital reading. Through Skiff, Hearst said consumers will be able to buy digital publications that have better graphics and look more like their print counterparts, including the inclusion of advertising, than versions offered elsewhere.

The service will include a digital storefront as well as a back-end system that publishers can use to render their publications for a range of electronic devices, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone and small laptops called netbooks. Skiff, which Hearst has been developing for more than two years as a separate company called First Paper LLC, also is developing its own e-reading device with a consumer-electronics firm.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703735004574574290782602228.html?mg=com-wsj

Ad industry tries to head off regulation of digital media

2009-11-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

Madison Avenue has joined forces with Internet companies in a last-ditch attempt to stop privacy regulations over the $29 billion online-ad industry.

The industry is finalizing an ad campaign to educate consumers about how digital advertising works, creating an icon that would appear on Web pages or ads alerting consumers if their activity is being tracked and deploying new technologies to police the Web for illegal activities. At issue is the practice of tracking consumers’ Web activities — from the searches they make to the sites they visit and the products they buy — for the purpose of targeting ads.

The efforts follow calls from the FTC earlier this year for Web advertisers and Internet companies to do a better job explaining how they track and use information about consumers’ Web activities and creating a simple way consumers can opt out of being tracked.

Meanwhile, scrutiny in Washington continues to build. Lawmakers and regulators have broadened their scope beyond the Internet and are starting to examine privacy practices for a wider swath of media and technologies, from mobile phones and newfangled interactive TV commercials to telephone pitches and the advertisements consumers receive in their mailboxes.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/11/24/ad-industry-works-on-ads-about-ads/

AOL computer tells editors what stories to assign to reporters

2009-11-30T08:02:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal - AOL is putting the finishing touches on a high-tech system for mass-producing news articles, entertainment and other online content, the linchpin of Chief Executive Tim Armstrong's strategy for reviving the struggling 25-year-old Internet company after Time Warner spins it off next month.

Mr. Armstrong's goal is to make AOL, which has been losing visitors and revenue, a magnet for both advertisers and consumers by turning it into the top creator of digital content. He hopes to do so in part by turning some media and marketing conventions on their ear, and potentially blurring the lines between journalism and advertising.

AOL is betting it can reinvent itself with a numbers-driven approach to developing content, based on what Web-search and other data tell it is most likely to attract audiences and sponsors.
Instead of waiting to sell ads until an article or Web video is produced, AOL—which has scores of niche sites, such as beauty and fashion site Stylelist, in addition to its AOL brand—says it plans to offer marketers the chance to work with its editorial team to create custom content.

AOL says that its ad model will allow advertisers to be affiliated with the content but not control what is written or created. Media experts and others say that disclosing when articles or videos have been shaped by advertisers will be crucial to AOL's credibility.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703300504574565673001918320.html

A Friend’s Tweet Could Be an Ad

2009-11-23T15:50:00.000-08:00

Likes.com, left, and Ad.ly offer different paths to having people share advertising messages on social networks. The Likes system is to start next month.

Twitter is getting a lot of attention lately. PR and ad people love it. From the standpoint of having a captive audience that you can sell more stuff to, what's not to love? It is a direct line into consumers. Even academia is jumping on the bandwagon. I listened to a communications school dean at a national conference this summer suggest that PhD candidates should study Twitter as a news medium. "That would make a very interesting dissertation topic," the dean said. (Yes, he was serious.) The news in 41 characters? As this story indicates, it is beginning to look like Twitter is really only good for one thing - quick, short blasts - the kinds of attention getters that have nothing to do with news. Instead, Twitter is more like the clever radio jingles of the 1930s hawking cigarettes, soap and whatever else companies are trying to sell. - MT

The New York Times - Twitter is perhaps the last frontier in advertising — getting regular people to send a sentence or two of text, on behalf of paying advertisers, to their friends and admirers. The idea, according to the entrepreneurs who are developing such services for Twitter and other Web networks, is that people trust recommendations from those they know and respect, while they increasingly ignore nearly ever other kind of ad message in print, on television and online.

Even the Internet giants are warming to the idea of harnessing informal chats between friends to promote their products and services. This month, Amazon.com said it would start paying commissions to individuals who refer buyers to the site via Twitter messages. (People must first sign up for Amazon Associates, a program in which Amazon pays Web publishers for referrals to its site.)

But the bigger opportunity may be in matching advertisers with so-called influencers — the more popular users of services like Twitter. A number of start-ups, like Ad.ly, Izea and Peer2, a division of Creative Asylum, a Hollywood ad agency, are pursuing the opportunity to put persuasive messages into regular dialogue on social networks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/22ping.html

With tight ad budgets, hollywood turns to cheap PR - media buzz

2009-11-23T10:37:00.000-08:00

Universal flew reporters to Bora Bora as a promotion for the comedy “Couples Retreat.” Above, crew members prepared for a shoot during the trip.

The New York Times - Hobbled by a depressed DVD market and drooping sales of movies to foreign television networks, Hollywood studios are finally reining in runaway marketing budgets. Lionsgate, already one of the leaner operations, boasted that it cut marketing expenses by 66 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, while Disney dismissed about a dozen marketing executives early this month in an effort to shrink spending.

But don’t think that Hollywood believes it can get by with less promotion. This, after all, is the place that perfected the hard sell. As studios cut “paid media” (newspaper ads, television spots and billboards) they are leaning more heavily on armies of publicists generating what they call “earned media,” free coverage in magazines, newspapers, TV outlets and blogs.

The biggest movies are still backed by megawatt ad buys. On the other hand, Paramount Pictures did not buy a single billboard to promote “Paranormal Activity,” its recent horror film. The studio also saved tens of millions of dollars by forgoing a national television campaign. Instead, Paramount depended on its publicity arm to fan interest on blogs and in traditional media. The flack attack worked: the film, made for just $10,000, has sold $104 million in tickets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/business/media/22steal.html

GAO Reports finds Job Injuries are Habitually Under Reported

2009-11-17T06:34:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - Employers and workers routinely underreport work-related injuries and illnesses, calling into question the accuracy of nationwide data that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration compiles each year, the Government Accountability Office said Monday.

The report, by the G.A.O., the auditing arm of Congress, said many employers did not report workplace injuries and illnesses for fear of increasing their workers’ compensation costs or hurting their chances of winning contracts.

The report also said workers did not report job-related injuries because they feared being fired or disciplined and worried that their co-workers might lose rewards, like bonuses or steak dinners, as part of safety-based incentive programs.

“The widespread underreporting so clearly documented in this report is undermining the health and safety of American workers,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “If we don’t know the full extent of the workplace hazards workers face, we cannot fully address these risks.

Mr. Harkin was one of the Congressional leaders who requested the report.

In response to the report, which examined OSHA’s audits from 2005 to 2007, the safety administration said it would adopt the accountability office’s recommendations, which include requiring inspectors to interview employees during all audits to check the accuracy of employer-provided injury data. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/us/17osha.html

In Detroit, Agencies Compete to Sell City as a Creative Haven

2009-11-16T08:03:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - IT may not be the advertising version of “Mission: Impossible,” but it is certainly a challenging, if not daunting, task: produce a campaign to encourage young and creative people to consider Detroit as a place to live and work.

Cue the Lalo Schifrin theme music.

The effort, called Selling Detroit, is upfront about its intent. “America’s most struggling city needs to attract business and talent,” a description of the contest begins.

The initiative to help change what may be the most dire urban image in America is being sponsored by the Time Inc. unit of Time Warner as part of a yearlong project, Assignment Detroit, that involves reporters and editors from Essence, Fortune, Money, Sports Illustrated, Time and related Web sites.

Several advertising agencies with offices in the Detroit area were asked to develop campaigns; five agreed to take part. Their work is to appear in the Dec. 7 issue of Fortune, due Nov. 23, as well as on three Web sites: cnnmoney.com, fortune.com and time.com. (The value of the ad pages that Time Inc. is devoting to the contest in Fortune is estimated at $400,000.)

Visitors to the Web sites will be able to vote, beginning on Monday, for their favorite among the five campaigns. The winner is to be announced on Dec. 2, during an annual awards ceremony in Detroit known as the D Show.

Should the government bail out newspapers ?

2009-11-08T11:49:00.001-08:00

Conde Nast Aims to Start More Magazines in China After GQ Launch

2009-11-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal - BEIJING – Conde Nast Publications Inc. aims to continue adding more magazine titles in China, already a top-five global market for the U.S. publisher, the head of its international arm said.

"In emerging markets like China... the magazine business and magazine development continue to go very strong," even as the publishing industry suffers in America amid the rise of Web-based content, said Jonathan Newhouse, Chairman of Conde Nast International Ltd. Mr. Newhouse spoke to a small group of reporters in Beijing Saturday to mark the launch last month of the mainland China edition of GQ magazine.

Mr. Newhouse said the success of Conde Nast's magazines in China, which include Vogue, Self and Modern Bride in addition to GQ, has boosted the company's global circulation over the past five years. "We would very much like to produce new magazines in partnership with Chinese partners and we are working in that direction," he said.

Still, Mr. Newhouse warned the pace of the expansion for Conde Nast will likely be slowed by the requirement in China of having to obtain approval from the country's central government for each title it adds. Foreign publishers also can't operate here independently and have to do so with local publishing partners. Conde Nast publishes Vogue in China, for example, in cooperation with China Pictorial, a local magazine.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574523070245424220.html?mg=com-wsj

When Texting Kills, Britain Offers Path to Prison

2009-11-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

OXFORD, England — Inside the imposing British Crown Court here, Phillipa Curtis, 22, and her parents cried as she was remanded for 21 months to a high-security women’s prison, for killing someone much like herself. The victim was Victoria McBryde, an up-and-coming university-trained fashion designer.

Ms. Curtis had plowed her yellow Peugeot into the rear end of Ms. McBryde’s neon yellow Fiat, which had broken down on the A40 Motorway, killing Ms. McBryde, 24, instantly.

The crash might once have been written off as a tragic accident. Ms. Curtis’s alcohol level was zero. But her phone, which had flown onto the road and was handed to the police by a witness, told a story that — under new British sentencing guidelines — would send its owner to jail.

In the hour before the crash, she had exchanged nearly two dozen messages with at least five friends, most concerning her encounter with a celebrity singer she had served at the restaurant where she worked.

They are filled with the mangled spellings and abbreviations that typify the new lingua franca of the young. “LOL did you sing to her?” a friend asks. Ms. Curtis replies by typing in an expletive and adding, “I sang the wrong song.” A last incoming message, never opened, came in seconds before the accident.

With that as evidence, Ms. Curtis was sentenced in February under 2008 British government directives that regard prolonged texting as a serious aggravating factor in “death by dangerous driving” — just like drinking — and generally recommend four to seven years in prison.

The case reveals the tensions that arise when law enforcement and the courts begin to crack down on a dangerous habit that has become widespread and socially acceptable. Is texting while driving bad judgment, or a heinous crime? And what is the appropriate punishment?http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/technology/02texting.html

Jim O’Shea Discusses the Chicago News Cooperative

2009-11-02T05:03:00.000-08:00

After yesterday’s announcement of the Chicago News Cooperative—and of the new network’s deal to share content with The New York Times—CNC editor Jim O’Shea discusses the venture on Chicago Tonight on WTTW, Chicago’s public TV station (and a CNC partner).

A couple interesting tidbits to point out: O’Shea describes one of CNC’s goals to be the cultivation of news literacy among Chicago’s citizens—a fantastic idea, we’d say; CNC’s initial membership rate will be, O’Shea says, $2 a week (“less than people pay for a cup of Starbucks, sometimes”), with a lowered student rate of $1 a week; and one of the perks of subscription/membership will be participation in social networks that the CNC plans to establish. Oh, and: the idea for the news co-op came to O’Shea, he says, quite suddenly: “I just woke up in the middle of the night, and—I’ll never know why, but—I thought, ‘What if we created a co-op?’ So I got up and got on my computer, and started researching co-ops…and here we are.”http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/video_jim_oshea_discusses_the.php

Forbes Magazine Plans More Layoffs

2009-10-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Forbes magazine said on Monday that it planned to lay off several staff members from the editorial and business sides, a cost-cutting move in response to decreasing advertising revenue.

The announcement was made in an internal memorandum sent Monday afternoon by Steve Forbes, the company’s chief executive and editor in chief of the magazine. “We — and the entire media world — have been hit hard by both the severe recession and the seismic shifts wrought by the Web,” Mr. Forbes wrote. “Given these dramatic events, further layoffs, unfortunately, are necessary across the entire organization.”

Monie Begley, a Forbes spokeswoman, declined to specify the number of layoffs. She said that some people had been dismissed Monday, and she expected layoffs to continue throughout the week.

The layoffs came after other cuts at Forbes over the last year, including dismissing about 100 employees, having employees take five days of unpaid leave, and ceasing matching contributions to its 401(k) program.

Although circulation has been holding relatively steady at Forbes, with reported circulation at 914,000 for the first six months of this year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, ad pages have not. Ad pages dropped 32.5 percent in the third quarter, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, to just above 300 pages.

With the changes at Forbes and its competitors, the business magazine category could look significantly different after this recession.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/business/media/27mag.html

Time Inc. to Cut $100 Million; Extensive Layoffs Are Expected

2009-10-30T05:45:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Signaling that worse times are ahead for magazines, Time Inc. is expected to announce next week that it will cut $100 million from costs, including another big round of layoffs.

The timing is coordinated with the third-quarter earnings announcement from its parent company, Time Warner, sources said. That is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

Time Inc., the publisher of magazines like Time, Fortune, and People, has already cut costs drastically: a year ago, it announced it was dismissing 6 percent of its work force, or about 600 people.

But that was apparently not enough to make up for revenue declines. The $100 million in costs is expected to come largely from layoffs, said sources, who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to discuss the matter.http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/time-inc-to-cut-100-million-extensive-layoffs-are-expected/

Ads Returning, But Not At Newspaper Web Sites

2009-10-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Newspaper sites are not holding on to ad dollars, even while overall Internet advertising is creeping back. Newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear. The beneficiaries of this behavior are networks and exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.

At nonnewspaper sites like Yahoo and Google, revenue from display advertising — the image-based ads on Web pages — seems to be returning. Yahoo’s display revenue on its Web sites increased 2 percent in the third quarter, though it was down from a year earlier. Display revenue increased at Google from a year earlier.

Over all, the Internet is the only advertising medium expected to grow this year in the United States, rising 9.2 percent, to $54.1 billion, according to figures released this month by ZenithOptimedia, a media service firm.

Newspaper sites cannot seem to catch that wave. The New York Times Company reported a decline in ad revenue at its newspaper Web sites of 18.5 percent this quarter compared with the third quarter last year. Advertising revenue at Gannett’s newspaper sites also declined. The McClatchy Company was an exception, with online advertising revenue rising 3.1 percent from a year ago, though the rate of growth slowed. (Other major newspaper companies have not yet reported their revenues for the most recent quarter.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/business/media/26adco.html

Bloomberg Buys BusinessWeek From McGraw-Hill

2009-10-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Bloomberg is taking another step from the trading floor into the corner office.

The company said Tuesday that it was the winning bidder for BusinessWeek, the troubled 80-year-old title that McGraw-Hill had put on sale this summer.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the price was said to be near $5 million, plus assumption of liabilities, which were $31.9 million as of April.

The magazine will continue to be a weekly print publication, rechristened Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Decisions have not been made about BusinessWeek’s staff of more than 400 people; Bloomberg will select which of those employees it wants by the end of the year, when the deal closes. Those not selected will receive severance from McGraw-Hill, said a BusinessWeek executive.

The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

BusinessWeek was in a tough spot financially, and lost more than $800,000 dollars a week last year. Investors had pressured McGraw-Hill to get it off its books. While there was interest from parties in the private equity world, Bloomberg was seen as the preferred buyer.

“We are committed to the partnership,” said BusinessWeek president Keith Fox in an interview. “Bloomberg is acquiring a really powerful brand with strong reach among business professionals.”

Faced with slowing sales of its financial data terminals during the recession that have since improved, Bloomberg had been looking to expand its presence in consumer media. Clients for Bloomberg’s terminals are largely financial professionals, and the purchase of BusinessWeek, with its consumer and executive readers, gives the media company more access to the corporate offices as well.

With its gigantic newsroom of about 2,200 people and its aggressive reporting, Bloomberg has won a growing number of awards, but it is frustrated by its lack of cachet in the journalism world. Reporters and editors have long been frustrated by the lack of access to business executives, and they believed that limited their ability to break news and be a player in larger news coverage.

With the acquisition, Bloomberg adds name recognition and a consumer publication. The company was considering combining the Bloomberg.com and BusinessWeek.com Web sites and adding the BusinessWeek brand and journalists to Bloomberg TV. The company will continue Bloomberg Markets, a monthly magazine.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/business/media/14bizweek.html

Censorship Pressures in China May Lead to Magazine's Closure

2009-10-13T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - BEIJING—Mass resignations by business executives at China's Caijing magazine are fueling doubt over the future of the country's most influential business publication and the efforts of its pioneering editor to reshape journalism in China.

The departures stem from disagreements between the Caijing staff, led by managing editor Hu Shuli, and the company that publishes it, SEEC, over issues ranging from business strategy to editorial freedom, according to Caijing employees and others familiar with the situation.

Ms. Hu is currently negotiating with SEEC for greater control over Caijing's future, but could resign soon, likely prompting another wave of resignations, this time by the editorial staff, people close to her say. One person familiar with the situation described the negotiations with SEEC as "anything but smooth."

About two-thirds of the more than 100 business staff at Caijing tendered their resignations shortly before the Oct. 1 National Day holiday, the knowledgeable people say.

Ms. Hu declined to comment. SEEC officials couldn't be reached. The resignations were reported Monday by The South China Morning Post.

Soon Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure

2009-10-06T15:06:00.000-07:00

Katja Presnal recommends products as she blogs from her favorite coffee shop in Beacon, N.Y.

The New York Times - FOR nearly three decades, the Federal Trade Commission’s rules regarding the relationships between advertisers and product reviewers and endorsers were deemed adequate. Then came the age of blogging and social media.

On Monday, the F.T.C. said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares.

The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement.

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

“It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices at the F.T.C., said: “We were looking and seeing the significance of social media marketing in the 21st century and we thought it was time to explain the principles of transparency and truth in advertising and apply them to social media marketing. Which isn’t to say that we saw a huge problem out there that was imperative to address.”

Still, sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as blogs, have offered companies new opportunities to pitch products with endorsements that carry a veneer of authenticity because they seem to be straight from the mouth — or keyboard — of an individual consumer. In some cases, companies have set up product review blogs that appear to be independent. One such case involved Urban Nutrition, a seller of supplements, that ran Web sites like WeKnowDiets.com and GoogleDiets.com. The National Advertising Review Council, which governs the industry’s self-regulatory programs, said the sites were “formatted as independent product-review blogs.”

Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said, “the rules are looking ahead to a quite possible future when there is a market to buy ‘authentic’ public endorsements.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/media/06adco.html

FTC Says Bloggers Must Disclose Payments

2009-10-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - WASHINGTON -- Blogger or flogger? The Federal Trade Commission is taking a tougher line on bloggers who accept cash or gifts to tout a company's products or services.

Under revised rules announced Monday, the FTC will require bloggers and celebrities to clearly state when they receive cash or "payment in kind" for endorsing a company's products or services.

The changes, adopted on a 4-0 vote, are the first revisions to federal guidelines on endorsements and testimonial advertising since 1980.

Connections between advertisers and endorsers must be disclosed under the revised guidelines. The FTC said the stricter disclosure will apply to comments on talk shows, blog posts and on social media as well as in traditional advertisements.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125475547130664753.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

Letterman Extortion Raises Questions for CBS

2009-10-03T06:11:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - If this happened to anyone else, it would just be a punch line. David Letterman, who built his career skewering philandering politicians and show business “weasels” and “boneheads,” finds himself in the middle of his own celebrity scandal, after he admitted having multiple affairs with employees of his production company, Worldwide Pants.

For the intensely private Mr. Letterman, the revelations, which resulted from a bizarre extortion attempt, are sure to be extremely embarrassing, especially as he tries to extend his lead in the late-night contest. ”I have had sex with women who work for me on this show,” he told his audience on Thursday night, calling himself “creepy.” He added that he hoped “to protect my job.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/business/media/03extort.html

Comcast Offers to Buy NBC Universal

2009-10-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

New York Times & Wall Street Journal - Comcast is in negotiations with General Electric to create a separate company, merging Comcast’s programming assets with NBC Universal, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations, who requested anonymity because talks were continuing. A deal would be a landmark for both companies. Comcast's 50-year-old Chief Executive Brian Roberts has long coveted a union with a content provider despite a checkered history for big media deals

If Comcast Corp. succeeds in buying control of NBC Universal, it will represent perhaps the biggest strategic gamble for an industry that has seen more than its share of big merger bets.That's because Comcast, the nation's No. 1 cable-TV operator by subscribers, would be expanding deeply into the business of movies, televised entertainment and news at a time when the future of such traditional media content has never been so clouded.

Together, the two would create a mammoth television and movie company in an industry beset by competitive and technological upheaval. The combined entity would own more than two dozen TV networks ranging from the 83-year-old NBC, to a string of popular and profitable cable-TV networks including NBC Universal's USA and Comcast's E! entertainment channel. It would also own NBC Universal's Universal movie studio, and 10 local NBC stations from New York to San Diego.

The rising popularity of online video has cast doubt on the long-term business models of both the film and TV industries.

What's more, the deal that Comcast and NBC Universal parent General Electric Co. are considering -- according to people familiar with the matter -- runs counter to the media-industry trend in recent years of unwinding conglomerates to create simpler, more-focused companies. The plan would give Comcast a 51% stake in an expanded NBC Universal, which would likely include Comcast's cable networks.

Still, Comcast may feel it has good reason to buy a stake in more cable networks, which have been a bright spot in the media business. The company's core cable-TV distribution business is being eroded by competition from telephone and satellite companies. And, in recent years, Comcast's growth has come largely from new services, such as Internet access and digital phone service. But growth in those services is slowing.

While its Internet-access business is likely to become more valuable as the Web becomes more central to everyday life, the potential for greater oversight from Washington could undermine the attractiveness of that business in the next few years.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125444266513357981.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125438284720055575.html

Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking

2009-09-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - ABOUT two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking by advertisers — and that number rises once they learn the different ways marketers are following their online movements, according to a new survey from professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley.

The professors say they believe the study, scheduled for release on Wednesday, is the first independent, nationally representative telephone survey on behavioral advertising.

The topic may be technical, but it has become a hot political issue. Privacy advocates are telling Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that tracking of online activities by Web sites and advertisers has gone too far, and the lawmakers seem to be listening. Representative Rick Boucher, Democrat of Virginia, wrote in an article for The Hill last week that he planned to introduce privacy legislation. And David Vladeck, head of consumer protection for the F.T.C., has signaled that he will examine data privacy issues closely.

Marketers are arguing that advertising supports free online content. Major advertising trade groups proposed in Julysome measures that they hoped would fend off regulation, like a clear notice to consumers when they were being tracked.

The data in this area, however, has been largely limited to company-financed research or Internet-based research, which survey experts say they believe is not representative of all Americans. So the study — among the first independent surveys to examine this issue — has attracted widespread interest.

“This research is going to ignite an intense debate on both sides of the Atlantic on what the appropriate policy should be,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the privacy group Center for Digital Democracy, which did not work on the study. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/business/media/30adco.html

NBC Plans Special Week of Coverage on Women

2009-09-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

NBC News will devote a significant amount of time and attention next month to the changing roles of contemporary women, much of it based on a study initiated by Maria Shriver, the one-time NBC correspondent who is married to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

NBC is describing the project as an effort to “educate the public on the current state of women in America.” The news division is planning to include coverage related to the study over a full week of its evening newscast and three mornings on the “Today” show.

Ms. Shriver will be a guest on “Meet the Press” Oct. 18 to begin the reports. NBC News is calling Ms. Shriver a guest editor for the coverage. Other outlets owned by NBC Universal also will be involved, including the cable channels CNBC and MSNBC, the Spanish-language channel Telemundo and the Web site iVillage.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/business/media/29nbc.html

Conde Nast Tries to Curb its Lavish Spending.

2009-09-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - At Condé Nast, it is consultants versus car service. A three-month McKinsey & Company project advising the publisher how to reduce costs is drawing to a close, and several magazines have been told to cut about 25 percent from their budgets. The company’s editors and publishers have already been under pressure to reduce costs this year, as advertising has plunged, and Condé Nast has closed two magazines in 2009, Domino and Condé Nast Portfolio.

But cost-cutting at Condé Nast is not quite like cost-cutting at other publishers. For example, on Oct. 13, the men’s magazine GQ will host a party in Washington to promote its list of powerful capital players, to appear in its November issue. The party is upscale: it will be held at the 701 Restaurant, known for its caviar and live piano music.

That is not the only expense involved. Several editorial employees will travel from New York for the evening. And they received an e-mail message recently reminding them to limit their expenses for the night — to $1,000 a person.

That culture of spending at Condé Nast explains some of the fascination with the place, which incites a mix of envy and scorn among employees at other magazines. Condé Nast’s top editors and publishers have drivers on call, staff members can be reimbursed for $15 a day for lunches they order in, and even freelance writers stay at hotels like the W when they are on assignment.

Those perks would be unremarkable at any investment bank or law firm, at least before the recession. But magazine companies other than Condé Nast have become grim places to work in recent years.

Time Inc. outlined layoffs of 600 employees last October, almost all of which were completed by the end of last year, Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Inc., said in an e-mail message. The company has also put strict limits on expense accounts.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/business/media/28conde.html

Time Inc. to Spend Year Writing About Detroit

2009-09-21T04:51:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - As part of a companywide decision to spend a year in Detroit, Time Inc. bought the house where the forum was held and where its reporters will stay while they do stories here. The house is on a grand street flanked by huge trees in the West Village neighborhood, with six bedrooms and four bathrooms. In any other city in America, it would be worth well over half a million dollars. Mr. Tetzeli, the former managing editor at Entertainment Weekly who is leading the project, led the search, and Time Inc. bought the house for $99,000, or more than $85,000 over the current average home price in Detroit because most of the houses being sold have been foreclosed.

There are a few reasons for that. Detroit has room for two million people, but there are only about 900,000 left. Nature and entropy are having their way with vast stretches of Detroit, a city that has been punished by the implosion of the auto industry but that began failing in fundamental ways many years before that. Thousands of homes have fallen down and been hauled away, leaving behind a patchwork of empty lots.

The biggest vibe in many of these neighborhoods is not one of fear, but for a visitor, loneliness. Even in the downtown area, it’s as if a directive has gone out to flee, and the ones who remain missed the memo. Big-city worries over congestion, parking and crowding seem very far away in Detroit.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/business/media/21carr.html

Newspapers Have Not Hit Bottom, Analysts Say

2009-09-21T04:46:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010.

With 10 days left in the third quarter, analysts, publishers and ad buyers say that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less. They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak.

Ordinarily, such numbers would be seen as catastrophic, but these times are not ordinary. The drop in combined print and digital ad revenue last year, 16.6 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America, was the worst since the Depression. But it looks rosy next to 2009, when revenue fell 28.3 percent in the first quarter and 29 percent in the second.

In the last few days, signs of life have been seen from struggling retailers, and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and others have speculated that the recession has ended. Media executives, including Rupert Murdoch, have talked about advertising starting to rebound. Last week, shares in several newspaper companies, including Gannett, McClatchy and The New York Times Company, jumped 10 percent or more, to their highest prices this year.

Alexia Quadrani, an analyst at J. P. Morgan, said newspaper stocks had benefited from a trickle-down effect, as investors, hearing positive news about advertising, asked, “What stocks are still looking relatively inexpensive among media stocks?” She said ad revenue would show a percentage decline in the mid-20s for the third quarter, about 20 in the fourth quarter, and next year, “more modestly negative, but still negative.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/business/media/21papers.html

Rival Networks Fire Back Over Fox News Rally Ad

2009-09-20T06:28:00.000-07:00

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Fox News Channel's competitors fired back Friday at the network over ads in three major newspapers claiming Fox alone covered last weekend's protest in Washington, D.C.

''How Did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN Miss This Story?'' was the headline on the full-page ads that ran Friday. The headline is superimposed over photos of the rally that drew tens of thousands of anti-tax demonstrators and Obama administration opponents.

Fox's taunt drew immediate reaction from the other networks, all of whom quickly offered up descriptions, transcripts of news reports and video proof of their rally coverage. Some denounced Fox for falsehoods.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez put it even more bluntly in a heated, lengthy air-on retort that CNN, which competes directly with fellow cable channel Fox, showed repeatedly. Sanchez aired clips of CNN's coverage from last Saturday, including interviews with protesters and a wide shot of the massive rally that looked like one featured in the Fox ad -- a shot Sanchez said was aired repeatedly by CNN.http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/18/arts/AP-US-TV-Fox-Rally-Ad.html?scp=1&sq=Fox%20ads&st=cse

For Anastos and Chicken Pluckers, It’s Only Words

2009-09-20T06:22:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Ernie Anastos vaulted onto the world stage when he said a bad word on television. He apologized, his bosses said they were disappointed, and thousands of YouTube viewers watched the moment again and again. His explanation? According to news reports, he meant to say, “Keep plucking that chicken.”

We believe him — and why shouldn’t we? — but … well … his explanation kind of raises another, perhaps even more baffling question: What does “Keep plucking that chicken” mean?

And, thanks to its furious dissemination around the globe, could it or the more raw variation Mr. Anastos seemed to utter become a new New York City catchphrase, on par with “Fuggedaboutit” or Ed Koch’s “How’m I doin’?”

We set out to answer these questions.

First, the possible meaning. The four-word phrase suggests continuing with a chore that must be completed, even if the rewards are minimal. It suggests determination, willpower, an existential task with an obscure or unknown endpoint, a sense of carrying on despite odds. At the same time, it could also be an invitation to extended revelry. The use of the word “keep” implies that the task that must be completed, whatever it is, has already been started. Some possible examples:

A businessman sits at his desk at 7 p.m. contemplating the 12-inch-high pile of paperwork that must be finished by morning. He knows he’ll never make it home by dinner. He calls his wife and tells her: “I’m staying late.” She replies encouragingly, “Keep plucking that chicken.” http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/ruffling-feathers-in-the-land-of-the-chicken-pluckers/

High Stakes for Merck in Litigation on Fosamax

2009-09-15T05:16:00.000-07:00

Shirley Boles, 71, of Fort Walton Beach, Fla., claims that taking Fosamax caused her jawbone tissue to die. The jury in her case, which is being closely watched, has begun deliberations.javascript:void(0)

Editors note: How does such a drug get approved by the FDA? Make sure you read the story about ghost writers hired by the drug companies on this page.

The New York Times Drug executives, product liability lawyers and Wall Street analysts are closely watching a jury trial in New York over medical problems associated with Fosamax, a drug from Merck that has been taken by millions of women to offset the bone loss associated with menopause.

It is the first of about 900 state and federal cases pending against Merck in which plaintiffs claim that taking Fosamax caused them to develop a rare problem called osteonecrosis of the jaw. Dental surgery is one of the triggers for the condition that can break down jawbone tissue, causing the gums to fall away and expose bone that looks moth-eaten, oral surgeons said.

In the first case against Merck, which began last month in a United States District Court in Manhattan, Shirley Boles, a 71-year-old retired deputy sheriff from Fort Walton Beach, Fla., alleges that taking Fosamax from 1997 to 2006 caused her jawbone tissue to die. The problem developed after she had tooth extraction in 2002, leaving her with ongoing medical problems that include infections that drain through open wounds in her chin.

United States District Judge John F. Keenan is presiding over this case and several hundred other lawsuits from many districts, consolidated in New York to establish common issues in the litigation.

A jury of three men and five women began deliberating the case on Wednesday afternoon.

Compared with other drug product liability cases that have involved many thousands of plaintiffs, the Fosamax litigation is relatively small. But because Merck is trying to complete a $41 billion merger with Schering-Plough, industry analysts are closely watching this first trial to gauge Merck’s potential financial liability.

Merck spent $7 million in the second quarter of this year on legal expenses in the case and has set aside $42 million to defend itself in about 900 federal and state Fosamax cases brought by about 1,280 plaintijavascript:void(0)ff groups, according to a company regulatory filing at the end of June.

In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration reviewed the safety of bisphosphonates and concluded that osteonecrosis of the jaw could be a risk for the class of drugs as a whole, not just those that are administered intravenously. The agency asked manufacturers to amend drug labels to acknowledge that there have been reports of jawbone death in patients taking the drugs.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/business/03drug.html

Philadelphia’s Newspapers Up For Grabs in Bankruptcy

2009-09-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Brian Tierney, who led a local team that bought the two papers, wants to remain in control.

The New York Times - After all the dramatic turns Philadelphia’s newspapers have taken — rapid-fire ownership changes, layoffs, an advertising collapse and bankruptcy — the contest to control them and determine their future could turn on a crucial court hearing on Tuesday.

Some of the local investors who bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News in 2006, led by Brian P. Tierney, have fought to defy the odds and remain in charge after the bankruptcy, rather than turning ownership over to banks and investment firms that hold their debts. Mr. Tierney’s team wants the bankruptcy court in Philadelphia to block those creditors from using a legal tactic that would give them an insurmountable advantage in a bankruptcy auction.

The case could come down to that legal question, and also a financial one: which side is more willing to throw good money after bad? Bankruptcy has wiped out the $150 million investment made by Mr. Tierney, the former advertising executive who became chief executive of the papers, and his partners. The creditors will recover, at best, a small fraction of what Mr. Tierney’s group borrowed. And even with debt payments suspended, the papers are barely making money — they reported a cash cushion of $13 million on Aug. 2, just $2.2 million more than when they filed for bankruptcy in February.

Yet both sides are willing to offer millions more to win control of this troubled business, and each hopes to sway wavering creditors and Judge Stephen Raslavich, who is hearing the case.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/media/14philly.html

Why Journalists Love Their Jobs

2009-09-14T06:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Back in February 2008, Thomas Moran, then the politics columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, surveyed the brushfire overtaking newspapers and decided it was time to leave the building. With two children approaching college and a spouse, Mary Jo Layton, who also worked in journalism, at The Record of Hackensack, N.J., he decided to take a nice offer from PSEG, a holding company that includes the public utility Public Service Electric and Gas, as a policy director.

It made a terrific amount of sense. You can’t get more stable than a power company, and Mr. Moran’s newspaper would soon lay off 40 percent of its staff. It wasn’t that he had lost his taste for the work — his editor, Jim Willse, called New Jersey a “game preserve” of political corruption — it just seemed that after an 11-year run at the newspaper, it was time to grow up and get a real job. His friends both inside and outside the newspaper congratulated him on his good fortune, and the trouble in the business since has only reinforced the brilliance of his market timing.

Sitting at the Tick Tock Diner in Clifton, N.J., on Friday morning over an egg-white omelet — at 52, he is careful about many things, including what he eats — Mr. Moran said it seemed like a straightforward decision at the time.

“We were in our third year of pay freezes, and I have two kids who are going to want to go to college, so it seemed like a pretty clear message that it was time to move on,” he said.

But the security of a good job representing the interests of a large corporation clanked against his nature almost immediately.

“I knew after a week it wouldn’t work,” he said.

Friday was Mr. Moran’s last day at PSEG. His opinions will now be shared more broadly because he will be covering the governor’s race as, yes, the political columnist for The Star-Ledger. His first column will appear this week, he said, looking out the window of the Tick Tock, a famed diner where back in 2000 a junior Mafioso decided to cooperate with the government after he was told to step outside and wait for a van. “A van is never a good sign in this business,” he said, hinting at the mayhem that might take place in a windowless vehicle. You can’t make this stuff up, which is part of the reason Mr. Moran wants back in.

For 18 months, Mr. Moran’s nose was pressed against the glass of his nicely appointed 10th floor corporate office in Newark, watching the world go by, mostly without him. Now he is back on the street.

Many of the same friends who congratulated him on getting out of journalism now wonder if he has lost his mind. A few asked if he was joking.

“Look, I no longer have to collaborate with 15 people on a plan to go to the bathroom. PSEG is a very successful company. They know what they are doing. But big companies are by nature hierarchal and cautious. If I want to walk into my editor’s office and tell him I think he’s a bozo, I can.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/business/media/14carr.html

Ghostwriting Is Called Rife in Medical Journals

2009-09-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Six of the top medical journals published a significant number of articles in 2008 that were written by ghostwriters financed by drug companies, according to a study released Thursday by editors of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Among authors of 630 articles who responded anonymously to an online questionnaire created for the study, 7.8 percent acknowledged contributions to their articles by people whose work should have qualified them to be named as authors on the papers but who were not listed.

In the scientific literature, ghostwriting usually refers to medical writers, often sponsored by a drug or medical device company, who make major research or writing contributions to articles published under the names of academic authors.

The concern, the researchers said, is that the work of industry-sponsored writers has the potential to introduce bias, affecting treatment decisions by doctors and, ultimately, patient care.

According to the study, responding authors reported a 10.9 percent rate of ghostwriting in The New England Journal of Medicine, the highest rate among the journals.

Editors of the Boston-based journal said Thursday that they were “puzzled” and “skeptical” of the findings.

The study also reported a ghostwriting rate of 7.9 percent in JAMA, 7.6 percent in The Lancet, 7.6 percent in PLoS Medicine, 4.9 percent in The Annals of Internal Medicine, and 2 percent in Nature Medicine.

“These journals are the top of the medical field,” Joseph S. Wislar, a survey research specialist and lead author of the study, said in a phone interview. He recommended that they take more action to require that all contributors be listed in acknowledgments if they are not named as authors.

Three JAMA editors, Annette Flanagin, Phil B. Fontanarosa and Catherine D. DeAngelis, joined Mr. Wislar in the study. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/business/11ghost.html

Magazines Now Create and Customize Ads

2009-09-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - MAGAZINE publishers once ran ads. Then, they created ads for their advertisers. Now, they are making different custom ads to run in each of their publications, and sometimes even allowing the advertisers to use the ads elsewhere.

Two new ultracustomized projects from Hearst and Condé Nast are making debuts in those publishers’ October issues. The Hearst project is for the electronics brand LG. Talk about making media companies work for the money: LG’s media buyer, Mindshare, called in a group of more than 30 Internet, magazine and television companies and asked them to propose how they would advertise a new “Something better” campaign from LG.

“It had to be never been done before, not off the shelf,” said A. J. Storinge, global managing director for client leadership at Mindshare, part of the GroupM division of WPP. Condé Nast, Time Inc., Hachette Filipacchi Media, and PBS, among others, came back with ideas, he said, but Hearst’s “really rose above all.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/business/media/04adco.html

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times Plan San Francisco Editions

2009-09-05T09:38:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are planning to introduce San Francisco Bay Area editions, hoping to win new readers and advertisers there by offering more local news, in what could be the first glimpse at a new strategy by national newspapers to capitalize on the contraction of regional papers.

The Journal expects to start its San Francisco edition in November or December, adding a page or two of general-interest news from California, probably once a week, produced by the large staff it already has in the Bay Area. This is different from previous efforts by The Journal to publish regional editions, which had focused on local business news. The paper, based in New York, is also looking into creating a New York edition, with emphasis on adding coverage of the arts, but that plan is not as fully developed.

In addition to planning a San Francisco edition, The Times is exploring the prospects for regional editions based in other cities.

Over the last few years, newspapers around the country, bleeding circulation and advertising, have sharply reduced their news staffs and the amount of original content they offer, typically cutting back on national, foreign, business and arts news while trying to preserve local coverage. That may create an opening for national papers to exploit, with a marketing campaign to attract new subscribers for a regional edition, and regional advertisers who would not be interested in a nationwide buy.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/media/05journal.html

Future of Investigative Reporting ?

2009-09-05T09:31:00.000-07:00

Notice how there is no confirmation that anyone has actual seen a bear?

What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper?

2009-09-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

LAST STAND? A newspaper kiosk on Broad Street.

New York Times - On a recent trip into Philadelphia, after I exited the Interstate and coasted to a stop at the first traffic light, a man walked up to my car. He wore a black apron with a change pouch and held aloft a copy of The Philadelphia Daily News, the city’s tart, irreverent tabloid. It gave me a warm feeling. Of course it did! I’m a newspaper guy. I worked as a reporter for The Daily News in the 1980s, and later for what we called “big sister,” the sober, broadsheet Philadelphia Inquirer. Even in better times, I would have been happy to see the product being hawked, but these days any small sign of life in the newspaper industry, even just the sight of someone reading a paper, feels positively uplifting. I handed over 75 cents for my Daily News, then drove on toward the center of the city — and U.S. Bankruptcy Court, where a hearing was soon to begin, part of an ongoing process that will determine the fate of the city’s newspapers.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/magazine/09Newspaper-t.html

Did Steve Forbes Ask Employees to Buy His Book?

2009-09-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

Gawker - You'd think Steve Forbes would be content having his name slathered all over his various properties. You'd be wrong, because Forbes wants to be the author of a bestseller, too. Badly. Badly enough to spend company money buying his book.

Forbes recently authored a book on the megalomaniacs who proceeded him historically, called Power, Ambition, Glory. The book aims to teach CEOs (or CEOs-in-training) lessons drawn from history: basically, it aspires to be The Art of War For Dummies. From the tipline, Forbes is so desperate to win wars on behalf of his own ego, he had employees buy his new book en masse in order to get it on the Amazon.com bestseller list:http://gawker.com/5338092/steve-forbes-desperation-for-bestseller-credibility-having-employees-expense-his-book

CNBC Dennis Kneale Attacks Bloggers

2009-09-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

Gawker -If half the rumors about Dennis Kneale are true, the CNBC host has good reason to fear bloggers and curse them on air. So why is he telling people privately that he manufactured his feud with bloggers for buzz?

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

http://gawker.com/5320682/how-cnbc-dennis-kneale-begged-for-blogger-bile?autoplay=true

For Magazines, the Down Days Continue

2009-09-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - SO far in 2009, the magazine business looks a lot like the Jon and Kate Gosselin divorce splayed all over the supermarket tabloids: you have to look very hard to find a winner.

With already-dismal ad figures for the first half of 2009, magazine publishers turned in their circulation figures on Monday, showing that newsstand sales plummeted 12.4 percent in the first half of this year. Newsstand sales are thought to be a bellwether for the economy, or at least for how willing consumers are to fork over $5 for an impulse purchase.

The good news was that paid subscriptions actually increased a bit, meaning that over all, circulation fell 1.2 percent, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations report. Newsstand sales were down for all but one of Hearst’s magazines, although only three were down 20 percent or more: SmartMoney (down 35.1 percent), Redbook (down 23.5 percent) and Town & Country (down 20 percent). The Hearst figures exclude Food Network Magazine, which was not measured because it is a new publication.

Meredith’s mass women’s magazines suffered heavily on the newsstand, including Ladies’ Home Journal (down 46 percent), Better Homes & Gardens (down 35.5 percent), and Family Circle (down 22.5 percent). That was something of a surprise, since those magazines have been among the few to hold up on the advertising side. Family Circle, for instance, has its largest-ever issue this September.

Condé Nast, which has been hurt by the fall in luxury advertising, posted solid overall numbers on Monday. Every Condé Nast magazine except for four — Lucky, Gourmet, Bon Appétit and Modern Bride — posted an increase in overall circulation. The largest gains were claimed by Vogue (up 6.1 percent from the same period last year), Cookie (up 4.9 percent), and Wired (up 4 percent).

But Condé Nast publications had sharp newsstand declines. Only a single magazine, GQ, had a gain in newsstand sales. Most others saw double-digit declines, particularly Gourmet (down 25.4 percent), Details (down 24.6 percent), Architectural Digest and Golf Digest (both down 21.2 percent), and W (down 21.0 percent).

As the numbers show, Condé Nast has become less dependent on newsstand sales lately, said Robert A. Sauerberg Jr., its group president for consumer marketing. In the last five years, newsstand has diminished from 24 percent of total circulation for Condé Nast, to 16 percent. He added that price increases on six magazines had hurt their sales temporarily.

At Time Inc., People StyleWatch, the celebrity-inspired shopping guide spun off in 2002, continued its domination. Its September issue is its biggest in terms of advertising to date, up 14 percent from a year ago, according to the company. Though newsstand sales declined slightly, subscriptions rose 9.2 percent. Money was down 33.9 percent; Fortune, 29 percent, and Sports Illustrated, 24.8 percent.

Most business magazines have fallen in newsstand sales, too. Alongside Fortune, Harvard Business Review fell 15.7 percent, Forbes 15.3 percent, Fast Company 18 percent, and BusinessWeek — which its owner, McGraw Hill, is considering selling — fell 6.6 percent. Inc. posted a 6.9 percent gain.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/media/01adco.html

Why AT&T Killed Google Voice

2009-08-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Earlier this month, Apple rejected an application for the iPhone called Google Voice. The uproar set off a chain of events—Google's CEO Eric Schmidt resigning from Apple's board, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigating wireless open access and handset exclusivity—that may finally end the 135-year-old Alexander Graham Bell era. It's about time.

With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone—office, home or cellular—rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.

Apple has an exclusive deal with AT&T in the U.S., stirring up rumors that AT&T was the one behind Apple rejecting Google Voice. How could AT&T not object? AT&T clings to the old business of charging for voice calls in minutes. It takes not much more than 10 kilobits per second of data to handle voice. In a world of megabit per-second connections, that's nothing—hence Google's proposal to offer voice calls for no cost and heap on features galore.

What this episode really uncovers is that AT&T is dying. AT&T is dragging down the rest of us by overcharging us for voice calls and stifling innovation in a mobile data market critical to the U.S. economy.

For the latest quarter, AT&T reported local voice revenue down 12%, long distance down 15%. With customers unplugging home phones and using flat-rate Internet services for long-distance calls (again, voice is just data), AT&T's wireline operating income is down 36%. Even in the wireless segment, which grew 10% overall, per-customer voice revenue is down 7%.

Wireless data service is AT&T's only bright spot, up a whopping 26% per customer. How so? As any parent of teenagers knows, text messages are 20 cents each, or $5,000 per megabyte. After the first month and a $320 bill, we all pony up $10 a month for unlimited texting plans. Same for Internet access. With my iPhone, I pay $30 a month for unlimited data service (actually, one gigabyte per month). Is it worth that? The à la carte price for other not-so-smart phones is $5 per megabyte (one-thousandth of a gigabyte) per month. So we buy monthly plans. Margins in AT&T's Wireless segment are an embarrassingly high 25%. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204683204574358552882901262.html

Was Columnist Fired Because Advertisers Complained?

2009-08-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - The Hartford Courant and its former consumer columnist, George Gombossy, agree on one thing: that Mr. Gombossy was laid off this month. But was it because he would not stop unfavorable articles about advertisers, or because his job was simply eliminated?

The disagreement addresses a delicate area in journalism. As ad revenue drops, publishing executives are willing to go far to keep advertisers happy, running front-page ads and ads that look like news articles. Mr. Gombossy is claiming that Courant executives, under pressure from advertisers, did not want him to write critical reports about them, and fired him when he would not change his stance.

But Courant executives say that their reporters are welcome to write about advertisers, and that the separation between advertising and editorial content still stands. Mr. Gombossy’s complaints are just those of a “disgruntled employee,” Richard Graziano, the paper’s publisher, said on a voicemail message.

The argument comes at a time of upheaval for The Courant. It is owned by the Tribune Company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in December. The Courant laid off 100 employees in February as part of continued staff reductions.

In the spring, the Tribune Company merged operations of its Hartford television properties and The Courant. It replaced the paper’s publisher with Mr. Graziano, a Tribune television executive, and installed Jeff Levine as senior vice president and director of content, overseeing editorial operations. The paper’s top two editors, longtime employees, departed soon after Mr. Levine joined, and Naedine Hazell became editor and print platform manager.

The new bosses meant new rules, Mr. Gombossy said. He had been at The Courant for 40 years, and became the investigative consumer columnist three years ago, writing a watchdog column where he resolved complaints of readers and looked into unfair practices at companies.

A few months ago, Mr. Gombossy said, he was called into a meeting with Courant executives. He had written columns about a Connecticut contracting company that was also a Courant advertiser. Mr. Levine said that he had received a letter from the contractor about the columns, and asked Mr. Gombossy to meet with the company and to “be nice to them” because an advertising deal was at risk, Mr. Gombossy said.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/business/media/18courant.html

Web Sites Debate Best Values for Advertising Dollars

2009-08-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal - For a time, Internet advertising was a rising tide lifting all boats. But as ad spending ebbs, there are more arguments about where on the Web advertising is the most fruitful.

The fight over shrinking Internet ad dollars pits online publishers that offer premium content against major Web portals such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Portals and publishers, meanwhile, also have to compete with the ad brokers that sell often cut-rate leftover ad space on Web pages with less visibility.

Web publishers this week are pointing to a study -- ordered up by their trade group -- that they say presents evidence that ads on their prime pages offer more bang for the buck.

The Online Publishers Association -- which represents creators of Web content such as New York Times Co., ESPN.com, MSNBC.com and The Wall Street Journal -- on Thursday is releasing a study that finds that ads appearing on the portals and bought through ad brokers are significantly less effective than the premium ads they sell on their own sites.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125011672434227271.html

Now on YouTube, Local News

2009-08-03T10:58:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - With its ability to collect articles and sell advertisements against them, Google has already become a huge force in the news business — and the scourge of many newspapers. Now its subsidiary YouTube wants to do the same thing to local television.

YouTube, which already boasts of being “the biggest news platform in the world,” has created a News Near You feature that senses a user’s location and serves up a list of relevant videos. In time, it could essentially engineer a local newscast on the fly. It is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and it wants to add thousands more.

YouTube says it is helping TV stations and its other partners by creating a new — but so far not fiscally significant — source of revenue.

But news media companies may have reasons to be wary. Few TV stations have figured out how replicate profits on the Internet. YouTube can easily act as another competitor.

So for now, most of the YouTube videos near you come from nontraditional sources: radio stations, newspapers, colleges and, in the case of a fledgling San Francisco outfit called VidSF, three friends who despise the local TV diet of fires and homicides. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03youtube.html

Texas Monthly’s Longtime Editor Leaves the Magazine for a Local Web Start-up

2009-07-20T05:27:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - The longtime editor of Texas Monthly magazine will team with an Austin venture capitalist to form a nonprofit news Web site devoted to government and politics in the Lone Star state.

With a large bankroll, a staff at the outset of about eight journalists, and the cachet of Evan Smith, the Texas Monthly editor, the new venture, called the Texas Tribune, hopes to be an immediate force on the state’s political landscape, much as Politico became two years ago in national politics. Many local news organizations have cut back on statehouse coverage, and the creators of the Texas Tribune plan not only to post news on their own site, but also to supply it to newspapers around the state.

In the last two years, news organizations that publish solely or primarily online, most of them nonprofits, have become an important force in American journalism, growing fast while the traditional news media shrink. In addition to the local sites, there are bigger operations with a broader scope, like Politico, which is for-profit, and ProPublica, which does only investigative work.http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/texas-monthlys-longtime-editor-leaves-the-magazine-for-a-local-web-start-up/

A Quick Path to Magazine Editor and Publisher

2009-07-20T05:26:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - A start-up in Colorado has a new twist on print publishing. It lets readers pick which articles they want in their magazine and then print it themselves.

The company, Printcasting, has a Web site on which anyone can put together a magazine featuring their own blog posts or articles and items from blogs and newspapers that have registered with the site. Advertisers can place ads in the publications. Readers can print a copy of the magazine or view it online or on a mobile device.

Printcasting, which is backed by an $837,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s program to find digital models for local news, hopes to attract new readers and advertisers to print publications, The New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller writes. Dan Pacheco, the senior manager of digital products at The Bakersfield Californian newspaper, who founded the start-up, says reducing the costs of producing magazines is the way to bring them back. (He has not quit his day job and works remotely from Colorado.)

The company is taking advantage of advertisers’ willingness to pay as much as 40 times more for print ads than for online ones — while it removes the costs of paper, ink, printing presses and a pavement-pounding sales force.

Mr. Pacheco, who used to work at AOL and helped start The Washington Post’s Web site, got the idea when The Californian started a Web site about the Bakersfield music scene. Advertisers kept asking when the magazine was coming, he said, because they preferred to appear in print.http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/a-quick-path-to-magazine-editor-and-publisher/

Business Journalism: A Vanishing Necessity?

2009-07-18T15:20:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine - It's July 2009, right in the teeth of the biggest business story to come along in decades. The economy dominates the front page — that is, after a mandatory splash of Michael Jackson. There is more interest, argument and passion surrounding the condition and future of American business than there has been in several generations. And yet, in the space of three months, two business magazines — the organs that exist to offer the stuff people are clamoring for — have been abandoned. One, Portfolio, a newbie, was closed. The other, Business Week, an old stalwart, is up for sale, according to reports that caught even the magazine's own editorial staff by surprise.

Business Week is being crushed by the story it spends so much time covering. The category's core advertisers — financial services, automotive and business-to-consumer types — have borne the brunt of the recession. And all advertisers now have many more outlets in which to spread their spending. More magazines are covering business, and there are dozens of newer, cheaper digital players on the block.

All of this is bad news for business magazines. But it doesn't necessarily mean business journalism is in trouble, says Sylvia Nasar, an economist and former Fortune writer who teaches at Columbia University's J-school. There's more demand for it than ever, and more outlets providing it — also part of Business Week's problem. "This [economic crisis] is a great story," she notes. "There is — and will be — more great journalism on it." Business Journalism: A Vanishing Necessity?

The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America

2009-07-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

Time Magazine - The U.S. newspaper industry has entered a new period of decline. The parent of the papers in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register chain. The Rocky Mountain News closed, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst, will almost certainly close or only publish online. Hearst has said it will also close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot make massive cuts. The most recent rumor is that the company will lay off half the editorial staff. Still, that action may not be enough to make the property profitable.The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America

McGraw-Hill Is Said to Be Seeking a Buyer for BusinessWeek

2009-07-14T06:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - With business publications suffering from scarce advertising, McGraw-Hill has hired Evercore Partners to sell its BusinessWeek, a person briefed on the plans said on Monday, but analysts questioned how much interest there would be.

The plan to sell, rumored for months, was reported on Monday by Bloomberg News and confirmed by a person briefed on it who was not authorized to discuss the matter and insisted on anonymity. The McGraw-Hill Companies and Evercore, a boutique investment banking firm, declined to comment.

In a memo to employees Monday, Keith Fox, president of BusinessWeek wrote: “Given the current market environment, the corporation has decided to explore strategic options for BusinessWeek.”

In the 1980s and ’90s, BusinessWeek often had more advertising pages thajavascript:void(0)n any other magazine published in the United States. In the early part of this decade, it still sold more than 3,000 pages annually, about as many as Forbes or Fortune, which publish every other week. But from 2004 to 2008, ad pages in BusinessWeek fell more than 40 percent, far more than most of its rivals, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/business/media/14mag.html

Vibe Magazine, Showcase for Hip-Hop and R&B, Dies at 16

2009-07-10T05:56:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - On Tuesday an independent magazine backed by private equity owners succumbed to the punishing ad market and announced it would cease publication immediately. It was, as things go in publishing these days, a fairly routine story.

Routine except the magazine had an 800,000 circulation, was founded by the music impresario Quincy Jones and had an alluring name that came to be synonymous with hip-hop and R&B: Vibe.

Plenty of magazines have been felled by the punishing economics of print publishing, but few left the footprint that Vibe did after just 16 years. Founded with a test issue in 1992 by Time Warner and commencing regular issues in 1993, Vibe was a magazine about hip-hop, R&B and urban youth culture that brought luxe design values and major-league photography and writing to the music that dominated and shaped American pop culture in the late 1990s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/arts/music/02vibe.html

Twitter on the Barricades - Lessons Learned

2009-06-29T05:20:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Political revolutions are often closely linked to communication tools. The American Revolution wasn’t caused by the proliferation of pamphlets, written to whip colonists into a frenzy against the British. But it sure helped.

Social networking, a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon, has already been credited with aiding protests from the Republic of Georgia to Egypt to Iceland. And Twitter, the newest social-networking tool, has been identified with two mass protests in a matter of months — in Moldova in April and in Iran last week, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to oppose the official results of the presidential election.

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means — individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites — were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists’ access to events, the protesters have used Twitter’s agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21cohenweb.html

Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage From Iran

2009-06-29T05:14:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - “Check the source” may be the first rule of journalism. But in the coverage of the protests in Iran this month, some news organizations have adopted a different stance: publish first, ask questions later. If you still don’t know the answer, ask your readers.

CNN showed scores of videos submitted by Iranians, most of them presumably from protesters who took to the streets to oppose Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election on June 12. The Web sites of The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian newspaper in London and others published minute-by-minute blogs with a mix of unverified videos, anonymous Twitter messages and traditional accounts from Tehran.

The blogs tend to run on a separate track with more traditional reporting from the news organizations, intersecting when user videos and information can be confirmed. The combination amounts to the biggest embrace yet of a collaborative new style of news gathering — one that combines the contributions of ordinary citizens with the reports and analysis of journalists.

Many mainstream media sources, which have in the past been critical of the undifferentiated sources of information on the Web, had little choice but to throw open their doors in this case. As the protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad grew, the government sharply curtailed the foreign press. As visas expired, many journalists packed up, and the ones who stayed were barred from reporting on the streets.

CNN encourages viewers to upload pictures and observations to iReport.com, its Web site for citizen journalism. Every upload is posted automatically on iReport.com, but each is studied before being shown on television.

In the vetting process, CNN contacts the person who posted the material, asks questions about the content and tries to confirm its veracity. Lila King, the executive in charge of iReport, said the staff members try to “triangulate the details” of an event by corroborating stories with multiple iReport contributors in a given area. Farsi speakers at CNN sometimes listened intently to the sound from the protest videos, discerning the accents of Iranian cities and transcribing the chants and screams. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/business/media/29coverage.html

Companies Cope With Twitter Imposters

2009-06-29T05:02:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - Twitter users have caused an uproar by impersonating celebrities on the popular micro-blogging service. Businesses, too, are targets of fake Twitter profiles -- sometimes from competitors.

Exxon Mobil Corp. has found at least two unauthorized Twitter accounts under variations of its name. Twitter -- a networking service where users create profiles and send out short messages, or "tweets" to their followers -- terminated one of the profiles last summer. An Exxon spokesman says the oil company is considering what to do about the second profile, which it discovered several weeks ago. The profiles didn't appear to contain malicious content.

The incidents are reminiscent of "cybersquatting" in the early days of the Internet, when people registered Internet domains of well-known companies and sometimes demanded payments to relinquish them. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124623159206366203.html

What is the Boston Globe worth?

2009-06-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - After news came that The Boston Globe may be sold, we asked six experts in newspaper valuations what they think the newspaper is worth for a column on the subject. But each gave detailed, thoughtful answers that we thought we would share in full here.

The New York Times paid $1.4 billion for the Globe and other assets - now it is estimated to be worth $50-$100 million. How can that be?http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/expert-opinion-what-price-would-you-put-on-the-boston-globe/

Even Forbes Is Pinching Pennies

2009-06-15T08:22:00.000-07:00

NYT staffer David Carr writes an interesting piece that looks at Forbes and how tightfisted the place has become. Years ago, it had a reputation for great journalism, good pay and benefits. That's a far cry from today. Forbes is feeling the strains of the downturn in advertising. The main focus has shifted from the magazine to Forbes.com on the belief that it will some day replace the magazine as the leading source of ad revenue.

If Forbes.com doesn't fly, the family may not get much more out of the enterprise beyond the $300 million-$400 million it is estimated to have received for a 40% stake from Elevation Partners several years ago. The company is shrinking - not growing. It is probably safe to say that Forbes isn't worth what Elevation paid even several years ago. And the vote is still out on Forbes.com and whether it will ever be as successful as the magazine once was. - MT

The New York Times - The recession is testing Forbes magazine and the family behind it, long symbols of the fruits of capitalism.

Although circulation has been basically stable at about 920,000, the average price per issue on subscriptions has been dropping steadily, which means Forbes — like a lot of magazines — is fighting to hang on to its subscribers.

Ad pages are down 15 percent in the first quarter, compared with the period a year earlier. Forbes.com, one of the top five financial sites by traffic, throws off an estimated $70 million to $80 million a year in revenue, but never yielded the hoped-for public offering.

The company, historically benevolent to employees, has ceased matching contributions to its 401(k) program. Out of its 1,000 employees, it has laid off about 100 since November, including 20 people in January, and has announced an unpaid five-day furlough for employees.

In 2006, 40 percent of the enterprise was sold to Elevation Partners, a private equity firm, for a reported $300 million, setting the value of the enterprise at $750 million. According to Mark M. Edmiston of AdMedia Partners, “it’s probably not worth half of that now.”

Forbes’s misery certainly has plenty of company among its competitors. Ad pages have declined even more at Fortune and BusinessWeek. Revenue figures from the Publishers Information Bureau, a generally inflated index, listed revenue of over $338 million for Forbes, $276 million for Fortune and $236 million for BusinessWeek. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/business/media/15forbes.html

As TV Dwindles, It Still Leads

2009-06-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - At the upfront media sales, network television peddles its annual shows as its audience dwindles. But here’s the thing: network television still has a bigger audience than its media competitors.Network television advertising retains traction with both buyers and consumers because, in spite of the proliferation of screens, people are still watching more television than ever. A study done in March by Ball State University found that consumers in most age groups watch on average a little more than five hours of television a day.

And lest you think that everyone is DVR-ing and TiVo-ing their way across all that viewing untouched by ads, the study, done on behalf of the Council for Research Excellence, a forum created and financed by the Nielsen Company, found that television viewers were exposed to 72 minutes of ads and promos each day. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25carr.html

Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil

2009-05-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - SEOUL -- In the propaganda blitz that followed North Korea's missile launch last month, the country's state media released photos of leader Kim Jong Il visiting a hydroelectric dam and power station.

Images from the report showed two large pipes descending a hillside. That was enough to allow Curtis Melvin, a doctoral candidate at George Mason University in suburban Virginia, to pinpoint the installation on his online map of North Korea.

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

"It's democratized intelligence," says Mr. Melvin.

More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin's file, North Korea Uncovered. It has grown to include thousands of tags in categories such as "nuclear issues" (alleged reactors, missile storage), dams (more than 1,200 countrywide) and restaurants (47). Its Wikipedia approach to spying shows how Soviet-style secrecy is facing a new challenge from the Internet's power to unite a disparate community of busybodies.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124295017403345489.html

Death Row Foes See Newsroom Cuts as Blow

2009-05-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - Opponents of the death penalty looking to exonerate wrongly accused prisoners say their efforts have been hobbled by the dwindling size of America’s newsrooms, and particularly the disappearance of investigative reporting at many regional papers.

In the past, lawyers opposed to the death penalty often provided the broad outlines of cases to reporters, who then pursued witnesses and unearthed evidence.

Now, the lawyers complain, they have to do more of the work themselves and that means it often doesn’t get done. They say many fewer cases are being pursued by journalists, after a spate of exonerations several years ago based on the work of reporters.

The decline in newsroom resources has also hampered efforts by death-penalty opponents to search for irrefutable DNA evidence that an innocent person has been executed in America.

Because judges and prosecutors are usually reluctant to reopen cases after an execution, advocates have been seeking to enlist the media as plaintiffs, to file motions under a novel legal theory that news organizations should have access to physical evidence under the First Amendment and state sunshine laws, which establish access to government records.

And here, the worry is that weakened newspapers will be increasingly reluctant to dedicate any resources.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/business/media/21innocent.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=death%20row&st=cse

America's Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire

2009-05-14T17:05:00.001-07:00

The Wall Street Journal - In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's. And that's nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: "It's my work he'd say, I do it for pay."http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124026415808636575.html

Investors Bet on Small-Market Papers

2009-04-29T05:05:00.000-07:00

While big newspapers across the country fight for survival, the slice of the industry that serves small markets is drawing new investment from industry veterans.

Longtime newspaper executive Michael Schroeder in January bought two Connecticut dailies on the verge of closure. Pennsylvania publisher Richard Connor says he is close to acquiring a group of Maine papers, including the state's largest daily.

Last month, according to a person familiar with the matter, Tennessee Valley Printing Co., a family-owned publisher of smaller papers, agreed to buy a paper in Florence, Ala., for about $12 million, taking it off the hands of New York Times Co., which needs to raise cash.

The buyers' confidence reflects the divide between big-city papers and their relatively healthier brethren in smaller cities and towns. Advertising revenue fell just 3.6% last year for dailies with circulations under 100,000, compared to a nearly 17% decline for the industry overall, according to trade groups.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087711048861559.html

Conde Nast to Shut Portfolio Magazine

2009-04-27T18:17:00.000-07:00

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Publisher Condé Nast will shutter Portfolio and its Web site by the end of the second quarter, it said Monday, as declining advertising sales across the industry claim another casualty, this time after only 21 issues.
"The pressures and realities of the continuous deep economic slump have lowered Portfolio's revenue projections below what is needed to continue publication," said Charles Townsend, president and chief executive of Condé Nast, in a statement. "Portfolio was an ambitious and innovative magazine and Web site, and we were proud to publish them. The challenges facing this launch however proved too great."
Portfolio staffers received the news Monday morning from Editor-in-Chief Joanne Lipman.
Condé Nast had previously decided to scale back Portfolio to 10 issues a year from 12.
Last October, Condé Nast, whose other titles include the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired, informed top executives at all 26 of its magazines to make two separate 5% cuts within its budget, reducing both payroll and nonpayroll expenses.
It also said it would fold Men's Vogue into Vogue, the long-running women's magazine, and cut it to two issues a year from a previous 10.
Portfolio, launched in May 2007, centers on the business of media, and as such has chronicled the painful decline of newspapers and magazines as a consumer shift to online readership and a devastating recession have combined to endanger the model that sustained such publications for generations. See First Take item on Portfolio's shutdown.
While newspapers and magazines have tried to create strong presences online, the money they receive for digital ads is not enough to sustain both Web-based and print versions.
Even without the overhead of printing presses and other costs related to the delivery of a print product, an online-only entity could struggle to maintain a newsgathering organization large and experienced enough to do battle amid ever-growing competition. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cond-nast-shut-portfolio-magazine/story.aspx?guid={1DCD02AC-32E9-4BDD-A8C2-6FDE32A41330}&dist=msr_1&print=true&dist=printMidSection

J-Schools Play Catchup

2009-04-20T05:44:00.000-07:00

THE NEW JOURNALISM Arizona State has invested heavily in its mass communication program, including a new building. A revised curriculum stresses vocational skills and an entrepreneurial spirit (that is, learn to invent your own jobs, because you may have to).

The New York Times - In his second month as a professor at Arizona State University, Tim McGuire was standing in front of 13 students teaching “The Business of Journalism” when his inner voice interrupted. “You dummy,” he recalls thinking, “you are teaching a history course.” It was fall 2006, and he was talking about the production of a daily newspaper, but not about the parallel production of a 24-hour-a-day Web site. He was explaining the collapse of the print classified advertising market, but not the striking success of Google search advertisements.

The course, new to the curriculum, was in desperate need of a revision already. Mr. McGuire, a 23-year veteran of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, was in need of a re-education himself.

At the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, on Arizona State’s Phoenix campus, and across the country, professors are hustling to figure out how to teach journalism at a time when the field is undergoing a sweeping transformation.

The American Journalism Review estimates that 15 percent of the nation’s newspaper newsroom jobs were lost in 2008 as news consumers continued to gravitate to online sources and as traditional revenue streams dried up; so far this year, major newspapers in Denver and Seattle have folded altogether. At the same time, the shift from a print-based, scheduled world of media to a digital, on-demand world of options is changing how journalists do their jobs. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/education/edlife/journ-t.html

'Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers

2009-04-14T05:40:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - If your local newspaper shuts down, what will take the place of its coverage? Perhaps a package of information about your neighborhood, or even your block, assembled by a computer.A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists.

The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.

Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web. But the notion of customized news has taken on greater urgency as some newspapers, like The Rocky Mountain News and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have stopped printing. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/technology/start-ups/13hyperlocal.html

In Switch, Magazines Think About Raising Prices

2009-04-14T05:37:00.000-07:00

Fifty-eight cents.

For that, you could get one-eighth of a Starbucks latte.

It is also what subscribers paid, on average, for each issue of Time magazine last year. This is the Time magazine that sends foreign correspondents into Zimbabwe, assigns photographers to capture the war in Afghanistan, and fact-checks and edits every word before issues are printed. And that is before its costs for ink, paper and postage.

The New York Times - Time is in good company — most big magazines’ subscriptions cost on average little more than a dollar an issue. But now, as they consider the decline in advertising and the success of magazines that have increased prices recently, some publishers are wondering whether they can raise their prices without losing subscribers.

“We’re realizing that the product is undervalued,” said Michael A. Clinton, the chief marketing officer of Hearst Magazines, which raised cover prices on more than half of its magazines last year and plans to raise subscription prices this year.

Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy.

In the last six months of 2008, subscribers paid an average of 47 cents an issue for Newsweek, 77 cents an issue for BusinessWeek and 89 cents an issue for Fortune, according to an analysis of their filings with the Audit Bureau of Circulations. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/business/media/13circ.html

LA Times Blurs Advertising WIth News

2009-04-10T05:57:00.000-07:00

The New York Times - In a move that raised questions about how far newspapers would go to please advertisers, The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page ad on Thursday that resembled a news column. The ad, for the new NBC show “Southland,” was written and designed to look like a news article, chronicling the “Southland” protagonist’s patrol in Los Angeles. The promotion ran on the lower half of the paper’s left column, with the headline, “Southland’s Rookie Hero.” Forming an L, a horizontal ad for the show ran across the bottom of the page. The top of the column was labeled “Advertisement,” and included NBC’s peacock logo.

It is the first time the newspaper has run a mock news column on its front page as an ad, although the paper has been running front-page ads since 2007.

The newspaper business is in trouble — the Tribune Company, which owns The Los Angeles Times, filed for bankruptcy in December, and newspapers including The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocky Mountain News have stopped printing in the last few months.

Even against the backdrop of severe problems for the industry, the advertisement provoked debate about whether The Los Angeles Times had gone too far to attract advertising revenue.

The idea for the imitation article came from The Los Angeles Times’s advertising department, said Adam Stotsky, the president of entertainment marketing for NBC.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/10/business/media/10adco.html

Mother Jones Tests Non-Profit Model

2009-03-07T04:32:00.001-08:00

The New York Times - In its beginning Mother Jones, the leftist magazine founded in 1976 in San Francisco, viewed itself as a defender of independent journalism free from corporate meddling.

Today it sees itself as a defender of journalism itself.

As such, Mother Jones has become a real-life laboratory for whether nonprofit journalism — a topic of the moment in mainstream news media circles — can withstand a deep recession.

Mother Jones, named for the early-20th-century radical labor organizer Mary Harris Jones, is a nonprofit bimonthly that has long sponsored investigative journalism in the tradition of Upton Sinclair. It cemented its reputation with a famous piece in 1977 on the Ford Motor Company’s indifference toward a fuel tank design flaw; the article has come to be known as the “exploding Pinto” story.

Back in the fall, when the economic downturn intensified, and the plight of print publications became more dire, Mother Jones suffered, despite its position of not being in it for the money. Advertising plummeted, down 23 percent in 2008, and some of the big donations the magazine depends on didn’t come through.

While it is not a new idea, the future possibilities of nonprofit, endowed journalism as a cure for the economic problems facing the print industry have recently engendered a lively debate within journalistic circles, in blogs and in articles in The New Yorker and on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

“We’ve been hearing from more and more people, ‘How does that work?’ ” Ms. Bauerlein said. “ ‘What’s it like being a nonprofit?’ ”

But as Mother Jones’s example shows, nonprofit publications, while they may initially be more durable in a down economy, are far from impervious to market forces. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/arts/07jones.html

Prominent Magazines Lose Weight, Shedding Nearly Half Their Ads

2009-01-05T06:19:00.000-08:00

The New York Times - AT a glance, the covers of Allure magazine from January 2008 and January 2009 do not look very different from each other. The 2008 issue trumpeted headlines like “Mega Makeover Issue” and “Insanely Flawless Skin,” and 2009 has “Big Makeover Issue” and “Powerful Skin Care.”

Inside the magazine it was a different story: the January 2008 issue had almost 70 pages of ads, while the January 2009 issue had 41, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, a decline of 41 percent.

It was an ugly January not just for Allure, but also for Condé Nast magazines in general.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/05/business/media/05adco.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

CNN pitches a cheaper alternative to the AP

2008-12-15T17:12:00.001-08:00

CNN, in the afterglow of an election season of record ratings for cable news, is elbowing in on a new line of business: catering to financially strained newspapers looking for an alternative to The Associated Press.

For nearly a month, a trial version of CNN’s wire service has been on display in some newspapers. But this week editors from about 30 papers will visit Atlanta to hear CNN’s plans to broaden a service to provide coverage of big national and international events — and maybe local ones — on a smaller scale and at a lower cost than The A.P.

“The reality is we don’t have a lot of relationships with newspapers,” said Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide. “We have relationships with TV stations around the world.” Mr. Walton said the meeting this week, which CNN has billed the “CNN Newspaper Summit,” is “kind of a get-to-know-you.”

With its CNN Wire, the company is going up against the largest news-gathering operation in the world in The A.P., and it must convince editors that it can offer something that is well outside its broadcast expertise — which may not be a tough task given the dire circumstances newspapers face. In addition, a number of newspapers are unhappy with the cost of The A.P., a nonprofit corporation that is owned by the 1,400 papers that are its members. Some newspapers have even given notice that they intend to leave The A.P. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/01cnn.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink