Both Andrew Sullivan — the conservative blogger who recently announced that he is going independent — and former Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer are taking the same approach to media: connect with your fans, and then ask for help. Read more at paidContent »
Hammered by declining print advertising revenue in much the same way newspapers have been, Time Inc. announced that it is laying off about 500 of its staff. But are the cuts the end, or just the beginning? Read more at paidContent »
Are new blogging platforms like Medium, Quora, Svbtle and LinkedIn’s Influencers program an attempt to recreate the bad old days of “content farms?” Not really — their focus is much more on quality content than on direct monetization. Read more at paidContent »
Truth Teller is a prototype launched by the Washington Post — with funding from the Knight Foundation — that is designed to fact-check political speeches in real time. But can it do this? And will anyone care? Read more at paidContent »
Andrew Sullivan’s breakaway from traditional media to run his own standalone blog — for which he has raised almost $500,000 before it even launches — is a sign of that the balance of power in media is still shifting. Read more at paidContent »
Twitter has been expanding the idea of what a tweet consists of for some time now, and has just added the ability to include short video clips. But is the service at risk of losing the simplicity that once made it unique? Read more »
In a leaked internal memo, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton says that what the network describes as “a new type of service journalism” — posts filled with affiliate links — will become a major focus for the company. Read more at paidContent »
Evidence of Twitter’s ambition to become a media entity continues to accumulate, but if it wants to fulfil its role as a digital-media player, it is going to have to get a lot better at finding relevant content for its users. Read more at paidContent »
According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the past decade has seen a dramatic decline in longer stories at some of the industry’s leading newspapers. But does that mean longform journalism is dying, or just evolving? Read more at paidContent »
Journalism professor C.W. Anderson argues in a new book about the decline of traditional media outlets in Philadelphia that one of the main stumbling blocks in adapting to a digital future has been traditional journalistic culture. Read more at paidContent »
Paywalls are being erected at hundreds of newspapers around the world, but Guardian Media CEO Andrew Miller says his newspaper is still opposed to a subscription wall because it wants to expand its readership as much as possible. Read more at paidContent »
Many publishers are trying to adapt to the way media works in a digital age, but some still see Google and the web as parasites — and Harper’s publisher seems determined to stay in the latter category. Read more at paidContent »
The Atlantic caused a furore this week with a piece of sponsored content about the Church of Scientology, which raised a host of questions about the risks of “native advertising” — which many see as the future of online media. Read more at paidContent »
The Hopper from Dish Network was a finalist in CNET’s “Best of CES” awards — until parent company CBS told the tech news-and-reviews site that it couldn’t include the company because CBS is suing it. How can readers trust CNET’s journalism after such a decision? Read more at paidContent »
The debate over whether WikiLeaks should be seen as a media entity like the New York Times took on a new urgency this week after the military prosecutor in whistleblower Bradley Manning’s trial said he sees no difference between the two. Read more at paidContent »
Henry Blodget of Business Insider has opened up about his site’s growth and other metrics, but for someone who is promoting transparency, he hasn’t told us the most important things we need to know in order to tell whether BI is successful or not. Read more at paidContent »
New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan says in some cases transparency by journalists can trump the principle of objectivity, although she still argues that reporters should refrain from expressing opinions. Unfortunately for the Times, that horse has already left the barn. Read more at paidContent »
Just when many people seemed to think it was dead, new ventures like Svbtle and Medium are trying to reinvent blogging by adding curation and other elements. How they plan to monetize their content, however, remains a mystery. Read more at paidContent »
Gawker Media has embarked on an ambitious international expansion plan, including the launch of a new partnership with the Times of India. The network also has a Spanish-language site and a series of Brazilian sites, and founder Nick Denton says China is next. Read more at paidContent »
The Associated Press is running sponsored tweets as part of a deal with Samsung during the Consumer Electronics Show. While this is allowed under Twitter’s rules, it also clearly threatens the network’s future as an advertising medium. How long will it allow this to continue? Read more at paidContent »
Reddit, the online community that gained fame last year for a Q&A with President Obama, is said to be raising venture funding that could value the company at $400 million — and would give it ammunition to compete with other new-media players such as BuzzFeed and Tumblr. Read more at paidContent »
As Twitter becomes an increasingly global media entity — and one that controls its own platform — it is running into demands from governments in countries like France and Germany to censor or block access to certain kinds of speech. How will it respond? Read more at paidContent »
The body that represents Ireland’s major newspapers says a charity group’s website should pay substantial licensing fees for simply linking to its members’ content — and it is also lobbying to have the country’s copyright laws define the simple act of linking as copyright infringement. Read more at paidContent »
BuzzFeed has built the site from just a repository for animated cat GIFs into a substantial media entity, and just raised a new round of financing — and Tumblr also has a fairly deep war-chest and dreams of expansion. And both are aiming at the same targets. Read more at paidContent »
Blogging superstar Andrew Sullivan dropped a bombshell on Wednesday by saying he is leaving The Daily Beast and setting up his own subscription-based website. Can he become the first prominent success story in what some have called the move towards “post-industrial” journalism? Read more »
A New York newspaper has come under fire for publishing a map with the addresses of registered gun owners — data that is legally public, but not often published. The incident raises a number of thorny questions about what personal information should be made public and when. Read more »
A comment about a Bloomberg story on the New York Times paywall started a debate about the positive and negative effects of paywalls that included some media industry luminaries such as the former CEO of Dow Jones and the former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Read more »
The media made a terrible error in identifying Ryan Lanza as the Sandy Hook shooter — a mistake amplified by social media. But while we may not be able to prevent these blunders happening elsewhere, we have to take responsibility for our own actions. Read more »
Twitter has been lauded for its capacity to crowdsource and uncover the “Truth.” Mathias Crawford, a Fellow at Stanford University, says Twitter’s self-correcting skills are vastly overstated and flawed. The company’s influential power could stand to be regulated, he argues. Read more »
Printed newspapers may be fading as a business because of the shift to digital media, but two incidents this week show that they still have power because of the shared experience they involve. What happens when that is replaced by thousands of online sources? Read more »
In a recent “Ask Me Anything” interview with Reddit users, the Washington bureau chief for the New York Times had some refreshingly reasonable things to say about how the web has helped improve journalism, and how the practice of journalism will survive even if newspapers don’t. Read more »
Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the media. Read more »
Instagram says it is removing the ability for Twitter to embed photos because it wants users to go to its own website instead of Twitter’s to see that content. Other media companies should probably also be asking themselves similar questions about their relationship with Twitter. Read more »
Prismatic, a San Francisco-based startup that uses machine-learning algorithms to recommend news and other content to users based on their social activity, has raised a $15-million Series A round from a star-studded group of investors including Accel Partners and Russian investor Yuri Milner. Read more »
It seems that no discussion of the merits or weaknesses of newspaper paywalls is complete unless one side accuses the other of having virtually nothing intelligent to say on the topic. Is there no common ground at all between paywall advocates and paywall skeptics? Read more »
News Corp. has said it is finally shutting down The Daily, the iPad-only newspaper it launched in 2011. Although the media giant should be given some credit for experimenting with a new medium, there were obvious signs that The Daily was doomed from the start. Read more »
Many publishers seem to assume that the best way to publish their content online is to try and recreate the look and feel of the printed product they are trying to replace, but a better approach is to strip away everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Read more »
After critics accused its new Jerusalem bureau chief of making inappropriate comments about the Middle East on Twitter and Facebook, the New York Times has appointed a senior editor review her posts — but this robs social media of the power it has when used for journalism. Read more »
A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists, and existing players need to figure out how to adapt to the new realities of news, and quickly. Read more »
New forms of media are often disruptive to existing forms, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says that his network is complementary to traditional forms like television, because it adds the kind of real-time discussion we associate with the town square or the “pulse of the planet.” Read more »
