This week, at TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re announcing the launch of Publish2 News Exchange, a platform aimed at disrupting the Associated Press monopoly over content distribution to newspapers. With Publish2 News Exchange, newspapers can replace the AP’s obsolete cooperative with direct content sharing and replace the AP’s commodity »
Entering 2009, the future of media is undoubtedly a quandary, with no end of head-scratching across the industry. As with everything these days, it seems that it all comes down to radically changing economics. There are way too many conversations about the future of media, news, journalism, etc. going on »
With all the debate over the future of newspapers, here’s a question I haven’t heard anybody ask (much less answer): If a metropolitan newspaper suddenly ceased to publish, leaving the city with no newspaper, what would happen to all of that newspaper’s ad dollars? Most newspaper companies’ »
Newspaper brands like the NEW YORK Times, WASHINGTON Post, BOSTON Globe, etc. face a unique challenge in the online media age — how to value non-local readers. I received this offer in the snail mail this week from the New York Times: As I observed previously with my critique of the »
Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 »
Nick Denton and Gawker Media are wrestling with the problem of content quality on the web — specifically, how to give bloggers incentives to create content that drives traffic based on quality rather than quantity. Gawker has announced that incentive pay for its bloggers will now be based entirely on the »
The maxim goes that new technologies don’t kill off old media — radio didn’t kill newspapers, TV didn’t kill radio, etc. But it’s not clear this maxim will hold true in the digital age. The first industry to suffer the slings and arrows of digital technology was »
Photographer Lane Hartwell, by making all of her Flickr photos private to prevent uncredited use, and by forcing the take down of a parody video containing one of her photos, has shined a spotlight on the question of content owner’s rights on the web. Mathew Ingram and Mike Arrington »
The case for why publishers should be able to charge for content on the web always revolves around the exceptions that prove the rule, e.g. Consumer Report and WSJ — which, let’s be honest, are the same examples everyone was using back in 1998. The problem with paid content »
Publishers trying to manage rising online ad revenue against declining print ad revenue are looking at the wrong metrics. Instead of looking at the advertising trends in silos and comparing percentage increases and decreases, they should be looking at the relationship between absolute increases and decreases in ad revenue over »
I’ve been pondering this quote from Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons, dismissing rumors that Time Warner is considering selling off Time Inc.: “I like our publishing business, I like the magazine business and I like the fact that it’s portable and can be moved into digital,” he said. »
