Apple’s new in-app subscription policy has drawn the attention of U.S. regulatory bodies, just as many suspected. Both the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are reportedly examining the new App Store rules with the aim of determining whether they violate antitrust laws. Read more »
Google has gotten a lot of attention for One Pass, the all-in-one subscription plan for publishers that the search giant revealed earlier today — mostly because it’s a contrast to Apple’s new subscription system. But does that mean publishers should sign up with Google? Not necessarily. Read more »
Apple today introduced in-app subscriptions in the iOS App Store, and there’s reason to believe the new revenue model could extend beyond publishers of periodicals like magazines and digital newspapers. Here are just a few of the other possible applications of subscription pricing. Read more »
Apple has finally launched its subscription option for publishers with iOS apps, and it offers magazines and newspapers the ability to charge readers easily, as well as some other concessions from Apple — but in order to get those benefits, publishers have to pay a hefty price. Read more »
The sale of The Huffington Post has some concerned we are entering an age of digital sharecropping, in which writers toil for nothing while landowners get rich. But all the web has really done is accelerate a phenomenon that has long existed in the media game. Read more »
Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said in a recent interview that he sees the news business as the next industry that the social network can help to disrupt — but that goal could see Facebook clash with Twitter, which is busy doing the same thing. Read more »
Twitter has been having talks about a possible acquisition by either Google or Facebook, according to a WSJ report — and both companies could probably benefit from such a deal. But would an acquisition by either one be good for the service or its users? Read more »
One of the more high-profile experiments in hyper-local news, a Washington, D.C.-based startup with the unlikely name TBD, has had a somewhat troubled history — losing its general manager just months after launch — and now the site has been restructured, raising fears about its future. Read more »
In less than six years, Arianna Huffington and her team built a media operation second only to the New York Times in terms of traffic, and almost as valuable, while traditional news organizations have struggled to grow online. Why? Because they have too much to lose. Read more »
Traditional media get a lot of flak for not being more forward-thinking about the web. Now the Knight Foundation and Mozilla have joined forces to try and give them some help, by setting up a $2.5-million fellowship that will “embed” developers and programmers in newsrooms. Read more »
Does The Daily live up to its billing? Is it the future of newspapers? Not really. It does some interesting things, but it also does some very confusing things. And much of it consists of fairly humdrum stories that you might read in, well… a newspaper. Read more »
Apple is cracking down on apps that try to avoid doing transactions through the app store. The news caused a minor firestorm, but the lesson for media companies is clear: if you want to use Apple as your distribution platform, you have to pay the piper. Read more »
The New York startup behind the ad-free browsing feature Readability has launched a new paid version of the service that gives publishers a share of the proceeds from users. But is that a tradeoff websites are willing to make? Read more »
In another attempt to undo the Internet, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Gannett chain today launched a new service that they hope will convince readers to pay for their content, even though much of it is already available online for free. Read more »
The New York Times is working on a digital tip-line that will allow leakers of confidential documents to deal directly with the newspaper rather than having to use WikiLeaks, said executive editor Bill Keller, and Arab news service Al-Jazeera just launched a similar tip-line project. Read more »
Techmeme, the news aggregator that is like CNN for geeks, says individual tweets will now be highlighted on the site if they are newsworthy enough. But will this new feature give the site more news to choose from, or just more produce more noise? Read more »
The way that NPR uses its Facebook page to connect with listeners and build community around its content has a number of lessons for other media entities, including the fact that they should focus more on engaging with their users and less time worrying about ads. Read more »
Thanks to incidents like the revolution in Tunisia and the recent shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, most people have come to grips with the fact that Twitter is effectively a real-time news network. But what happens when that real-time news network is spreading mis-information? Read more »
Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group of venture capital firms including Foundry Group and SoftBank Capital. Read more »
Even as protesters were still cheering the downfall of the government in Tunisia on Friday, the debate had already begun over what role social media had played in the event. Was it the first real Twitter revolution? The correct answer is probably yes and no. Read more »
The web continues to disrupt the media business, both in terms of distribution and monetization, and publishers are desperately trying paywalls, iPad apps and anything else they can think of to cope. Bradford Cross wants to help change all that with his new startup, Woven. Read more »
The story of homeless radio announcer Ted Williams became an Internet sensation this week. But the video that started it all is no longer available on YouTube, in yet another example of a newspaper that can’t see the forest for the dead trees. Read more »
The enthusiasm iPad users had for magazine apps seems to be waning, according to some recent numbers that show sales of many apps slipping. Hopefully some publishers are starting to realize that simply having an iPad app doesn’t qualify as a digital content strategy. Read more »
Here are some of the best and worst iPad apps from media companies and publishers, including some of the familiar names — Wired, The New Yorker, Esquire — as well as some less familiar ones, with what they are doing right and what still needs work. Read more »
The fact that even journalists and media professors can’t seem to agree on whether what WikiLeaks does is journalism emphasizes just how deeply the media and journalism have been disrupted by the web, to the point where we aren’t even sure what they are any more. Read more »
Fans of Groupon note that it has more than 100 writers, editors and fact-checkers on staff — more than a lot of medium-sized newspapers — and is continuing to hire and train writers, many of whom are (or were) journalists. But is that really something worth celebrating? Read more »
Facebook may become more directly engaged in your television consumption, thanks to a new press to media companies for greater integration. With Clicker already using Facebook to power its recommendation engine, the social network’s abilities to suggest what to watch may grow further. Read more »
Media analyst Clay Shirky says that the list of things that the Internet has killed — or is in the process of killing — includes media syndication of the kind that the Associated Press is built on, which he says is next in line for widespread disruption. Read more »
The Atlantic magazine took a radical approach to surviving in the web era: It set out to deliberately disrupt its own business, rather than letting someone else do it. Traffic has climbed, revenues have almost doubled and it is profitable for the first time in years. Read more »
Visa, MasterCard and PayPal have all cut off support for payments to WikiLeaks, saying the organization has been involved in illegal acts — but is there any real justification for this? Not really. In fact, it’s not clear that what WikiLeaks is doing is even illegal. Read more »
We may not like its methods or its leader, but WikiLeaks is a publisher — a new kind of publisher, but a publisher nonetheless — and as such it deserves to be protected from government interference, just like any other member of the traditional or mainstream media. Read more »
As newspapers struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many debate how much emphasis they should put on digital vs. their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over. Read more »
A 17-year-old resident of one of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest slums has become a quasi-celebrity reporter in Brazil and elsewhere after using Twitter and a network of friends to do real-time live reporting on the drug raids by police in the city and the resulting violence. Read more »
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone caused a stir when he mused during an interview about the company helping to create a “Twitter News Service” for major news organizations. But the reality is that Twitter is already a distributed news network — it just needs better filters. Read more »
During an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, former CEO and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams said that the network "lowers the barriers to publishing about as far as they can go." Not everyone sees this as a good thing, but the impact of it is enormous. Read more »
NewsTrust, a non-profit startup aimed at improving the credibility of media, ran a week-long project called Truthsquad earlier this year that crowdsourced fact-checking of political statements, and founder Fabrice Florin says while the effort was a success, it was also a lot of work. Read more »
The Texas Tribune, a non-profit media startup focused on public-service and investigative journalism, turned one year old this week and co-founder and CEO Evan Smith says the company has exceeded most of its growth targets and is still seeing “hockey-stick” increases in traffic and readers. Read more »
News Corp. has finally released official figures on the effect of paywalls at two of its British newspapers, which show that the two papers have lost a huge proportion of their previous readership, and only a tiny fraction of those readers have chosen to pay. Read more »
Despite the fact that the Internet is the most frequently measured medium in history, it’s almost impossible for publishers to get a straight answer about who’s consuming their content — and that can cause some significant problems, says a new report on digital media. Read more »
It took BlackBerry a long, long time to release a proper media sync app for Mac. It took less than a month for Microsoft to release Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, which allows you to sync media from iTunes to your Windows Phone 7 device. Read more »
