AOL continues its surprising turnaround with another quarter of growth in its content and advertising segment. The company is still, however, depending on its legacy business for all its profit. Read more at paidContent »
The Huffington Post rolled out its first Asian edition in Japan on Tuesday. Read more at paidContent »
For online media companies, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter bring many opportunities as well as risks. An intelligent and proactive social media strategy can expand a brand’s reach. But the more heavily a media company relies upon a social media platform the more it relinquishes control over the customer experience. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The controversy over writer Nate Thayer’s failure to credit his sources, which some alleged amounted to plagiarism, is just part of an ongoing debate over how we use — and give credit for — information in a digital age. Read more at paidContent »
Freelance writer Nate Thayer touched off a debate this week about media outlets wanting to publish content for free — but the reality is that the economics of content have changed forever, and the supply of free content is almost infinite. Read more at paidContent »
A bitter fight over who started the Huffington Post took a major twist today after a judge not only refused for the second time to dismiss the case, but also expanded it. Read more at paidContent »
Looking for the turnaround story of 2013? Stop looking at Yahoo — it’s AOL that’s the real deal. The company has quietly put in place a powerful strategy based on media, technology and advertising. And investors like what they see. Read more at paidContent »
Huffington Post has a new CEO who will be tasked with building traffic and revenue and continuing the brand’s international expansion. The move comes at a time when parent company AOL appears to have figured out how to manage its media properties. Read more at paidContent »
Hurricane Sandy’s impact made itself felt on major media properties including the Huffington Post, Gawker, and Buzzfeed. All of those sites reported outages around 7 p.m. EDT. Read more »
Critics say user-generated networks like Bleacher Report are just SEO-driven content farms that generate “clickbait” posts designed to drive low-quality traffic — but they also provide the opportunity for writers to show their abilities without having to work their way through the traditional media ecosystem. Read more »
The new “public editor” for the New York Times has been getting good reviews for the way she is handling the job of being a go-between for readers and editors. But wouldn’t it be better if every NYT writer and editor did that for themselves? Read more »
The Huffington Post is holding virtual political conventions during the DNC and RNC in order to promote its new video streaming network and call attention to issues like drugs and poverty. Read more at paidContent »
Men’s lifestyle site Thrillist Media Group, which includes daily email newsletters and group-buying site JackThreads, has raised $13.1 million in Series A funding. The company plans to use the new funding to build out content and expand its presence in mobile and e-commerce. Read more at paidContent »
AOL is hoping that the Huffington Posts’s new streaming video network, HuffPost Live, will set itself apart from competitors because of its focus on user participation, twelve hours of live programming daily from New York and LA, and a varied group of hosts. Read more at paidContent »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more »
The Huffington Post has dropped the price of its iPad magazine to zero, and News Corp.’s The Daily has chopped almost a third of its staff — more evidence that the dream many publishers had about the iPad being their savior is still far from reality. Read more »
Facebook Stories, a new original content site that will focus on a different theme each month, is intended to highlight Facebook users’ stories. But with a former Time magazine reporter overseeing an editorial team, does the company have something bigger in mind for Facebook Stories? Read more at paidContent »
Remember when Friendster was the hot social network, publishers doubted that ebooks would ever sell, and Netflix thought DVDs in red envelopes was the future? We do — that was that state of digital media when paidContent launched in 2002. Read more »
Aol has been in turnaround mode for years — this time, it looks like the turns are in the right direction. Advertising up, revenue decline almost flat, subscription churn lowest in a decade, latest re-org underway. Read more at paidContent »
Personalized reading app Zite is adding additional publishers to its three-month-old publisher program. New additions include The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hearst’s “Harper’s Bazaar,” the International Business Times and others. All will have their own sections within Zite. Read more at paidContent »
Huffington Post now looks less like a blog network and more like a traditional media entity, having launched its own weekly digital magazine for the iPad — but is launching a subscription app a smart way of branching out, or a sign of old-media thinking? Read more »
The deal that Twitter announced on Thursday with NASCAR will see an editor employed by the network curating and highlighting tweets and other content, a deal that takes Twitter even further into the realm of being a media entity. Should traditional media players be concerned? Read more »
As more newspapers confront the same reality as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and have to stop printing and go digital only to cut costs, what happens to the public role that a newspaper plays in a community? Can a digital-only media entity fulfil the same purpose? Read more »
A series of emails between Arianna Huffington, her partners and the late conservative activist Andrew Breitbart shed new light about the early days of popular liberal news site Huffington Post. Read more at paidContent »
Former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry is leading a HuffPo reunion at SoHo Tech Labs, an incubator that draw support from half a dozen former fellow execs. The team is trying to apply the best practices of the Huffington Post to help create successful start-ups. Read more »
Arianna Huffington says everything is fine at AOL and she doesn’t mind having her power reduced, but she also admits that private-equity firms have raised the idea of a spin-off of Huffington Post. Could this be the beginning of the end for the faded former portal? Read more »
The details are still fuzzy on the new stealth video startup Planet Daily Networks, founded by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and former CEO Eric Hippeau, but it appears that the company has nabbed $5 million in funding. Read more »
The Pulitzer Prize win by the Huffington Post has been hailed by some as the first win by a “blog,” but the reality is such terms have become increasingly meaningless. All we have now is media, some of which is journalism and some of which isn’t. Read more »
As author Clay Shirky points out, the simple act of publishing something — whether it’s a book or a news article — doesn’t require an industry any more, just a button. So what do the traditional content-publishing industries do now to justify their continued existence? Read more »
Just over a year after AOL acquired the Huffington Post, much of the integration between the two is being unwound, and control over key elements of the business are reverting to founder Arianna Huffington. Should AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong be watching his back? Read more »
There’s been a lot of criticism of Readability for collecting money from readers who use its ad-stripping service. But its approach is actually better than some others — and that desire on the part of readers is something publishers need to figure out how to accommodate. Read more »
One thing that becomes clear from the latest Pew report on the state of media is just how big a role aggregators — both human and machine-powered — are playing in news consumption. That is both a danger and an opportunity for mainstream media players. Read more »
When there are so many social media avenues to present yourself, how do you maintain authenticity and manage your identity? Maybe you don’t. At SXSW Interactive this year, the age-old debate over authenticity and anonymity raised voices as identity and privacy took center stage. Read more »
Attempts to impose a “code of conduct” for curators and aggregators or promote the use of special symbols for giving credit may be well-intentioned, but they are also misguided and likely doomed, just as every other attempt to control the Internet or the blogosphere has been. Read more »
AOL (NYSE: AOL) has hired a new Chief Content Officer in its latest attempt to reboot Patch, the network of hundreds of sites that offer “hy… Read more at paidContent »
In addition to some eye-popping figures for page views and unique visitors, the latest Huffington Post statistics show that if there’s one thing the site knows how to do, it’s how to get reader engagement that other news sites and publishers can only dream of. Read more »
Twitter on Wednesday switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, and others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December. Read more »
Huffington Post today took one more step in its ongoing march for a wider international reach: it has now officially opened Le Huffington Po… Read more at paidContent »
Can BuzzFeed turn itself from a silly meme-generator into a serious media outlet by hiring journalists like Politico writer Ben Smith? If the meteoric rise of the Huffington Post has shown us anything, it’s that new media entities can spring from the most unlikely of sources. Read more »
The news aggregating behemoth Huffington Post is continuing its march into new markets: the next stop is Spain, where the site will partner… Read more at paidContent »
