The NYT’s multimedia project Snow Fall was a huge success, attracting big audiences and lots of plaudits. But the paper can do even better — it can build a new business from this type of project, and change the definition of journalism in the new century. Read more »
The Huffington Post will launch in Germany this fall. The company has already expanded to Canada, the U.K., France, Spain and Italy, and a Japanese edition will roll out May 7. Read more at paidContent »
New media incubator and venture firm Betaworks is increasingly morphing into an operating company and it’s got a new rapid development launch approach that will deliver five social media products in five weeks. What’ll stick? 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 government of Malaysia paid 10 media columnists to smear its political opponents on American media sites. It was able to pull this off, in part, because of online publications’ insatiable appetite for content. Read more at paidContent »
The Huffington Post’s new Conversations feature rounds up individual discussions taking place within comment sections and gives them a webpage of their own. It’s an attempt to fix comment chaos and could be an ad goldmine for AOL. 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 »
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 »
BuzzFeed became a disruptive media force in 2012 by adding serious news to the silly and sleazy stuff it’s long produced. Here are some questions that will determine whether BuzzFeed can shape news in the long run. Read more at paidContent »
HuffPost Live’s new app could help usher in an era where content producers seek to dominate not just our TV but our tablet devices — at the same time. Read more »
Like the auto and steel industries before it, the media business is on the horns of the innovators dilemma — threatened by disruptive new technologies but unsure how to embrace them. A Harvard Business School prof has some advice. Read more at paidContent »
The Commission on Presidential Debates is partnering with three online media companies to stream debates and educate voters. The platforms will also give the companies a way to showcase their other content. Read more »
While many still associate BuzzFeed with photo galleries of kittens and other web ephemera, the network has grown into a substantial digital-media entity, and an internal memo from founder Jonah Peretti has some lessons that other media outlets would be wise to pay attention to. Read more »
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 »
Forbes has been reinventing itself ever since it acquired Lewis DVorkin’s media startup in 2010 — and while there have been some stumbles, the magazine has shown how a traditional media entity can take advantage of the social web and the way that content works online. Read more »
As part of paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads on May 23 in New York, I’ll be talking with venture capitalist Fred Wilson about the future of media and with Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Vivian Schiller of NBC News about real-time politics. Read more »
Just as the New York Times can decide “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” search engines have a free speech right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings. Read more at paidContent »
The Huffington Post won a Pulitzer Prize Monday, an important prize from a group that not too long ago thought the medium was the message — and has since learned that the work is the message. Read more at paidContent »
New tools like the Kindle have led to an explosion of self-published books, but that has meant more competition for existing authors. How do they make money now? Writer Seth Godin says they first have to give up the idea that they deserve to be paid. Read more »
There’s been a lot of debate about whether a Forbes blog post that excerpted and summarized a New York Times story qualifies as journalism or not — but to some extent that’s a red herring. The only question that matters is whether the reader is served. Read more »
Media industry executives love to talk about the “original sin” that newspapers supposedly committed, by not charging for content when the web was young — but this theory misses the point that the media game as a whole is being played according to fundamentally different rules. 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 »
There’s been a lot of journalistic finger-wagging over a student website that filed an erroneous report on the weekend saying Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. But that student site behaved better than some other traditional news sources, both before and after the report. Read more »
The Huffington Post is facing new accusations that its writers “steal” content from other media outlets by aggregating it. Not only are these charges argubly untrue, but content companies that complain about this kind of “over-aggregation” are missing the point about how news works now. Read more »
Web 2.0 has grown up and is calling in the lawyers. A blogger for The Huffington Post has launched a class-action arguing that writers — who agreed to provide content without pay — should get a share of the $315 million it got from AOL. Read more »
AOL’s recent acquisition of the Huffington Post for $315 million has centered a lot of attention on its content strategy — big part of which is automating and standardizing content that attracts search-related advertising. While there are some clear benefits to this “content farm” approach to content, there are also some significant disadvantages. Here we look at some of the leaders in this sector and their histories, as well as the key risks and benefits of the content farm strategy. Companies mentioned in this report include AOL, The Huffington Post, MySpace, Demand Media, Google and Associated Content. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
AOL dropped a late night bomb – it bought The Huffington Post for $315 million – of which $300 million is in cash. But when you get over the initial ka-pow reaction, and start thinking about the deal, not everything adds-up. Here is my breakdown of the deal. Read more »
The Huffington Post has acquired IAC’s stake in 236.com, the comedy blog and video site it had co-launched with IAC in November 2007, according to a memo issued today. 23/6, which wasn’t much of a brand on its own, will now become HuffPo’s comedy section. What […] Read more »
