The patent troll problem is spreading from the tech sector to media companies. Rather than paying off the trolls, the New York Times is holding its ground in two major patent cases. Read more at paidContent »
Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive will buy the New York Times’ About Group in a $300 million cash deal. Peter Horan’s Answers.com had been set to buy About.com for $270 million before Diller got in a late-stage bid last week. Read more at paidContent »
The New York Times is in discussions to sell information site About.com to Answers.com for a reported $270 million. 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 »
Tech blogger Ben Brooks was tired of running an ad-supported site. So he decided to add a modified paywall to his website, The Brooks Review. For inspiration, he looked to the New York Times. Read more at paidContent »
Beneath the furor over Twitter’s clampdown on its API is the same dilemma that many traditional media companies like the New York Times are also confronting — namely, how much should you be an open platform, and how much should you be a destination? Read more »
News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the company is considering splitting itself in two, with the newspaper assets spun off as a separate entity. What would — or could — the digital future look like for that standalone newspaper unit? Here are a few ideas. Read more »
It’s like getting dumped on the day of your big promotion. That’s how Flipboard must have felt after two prominent magazines said they were leaving just hours after the popular news aggregator announced a groundbreaking partnership with the New York Times. Read more at paidContent »
Newly appointed New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer — author of the bestselling books “Imagine,” “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and a former editor at Wired — has been discovered recycling his own material for different publications. It isn’t that surprising. Read more at paidContent »
Venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers filed a response in California state court on Wednesday, “vigorously” denying partner Ellen Pao’s allegations of sexual discrimination by the company, and requesting Pao’s lawsuit be dismissed. The company said Pao’s failure to advance in the company wasn’t gender discrimination. Read more »
Twitter’s deal with SoundCloud to embed audio in tweets isn’t just a deal that gives the Berlin music startup a ton of exposure: it’s a signal that while Twitter may carry a threat for media companies, it could be a serious alternative to Facebook. Read more »
Twitter announced today that it will partner with a variety of online media companies to provide enhanced versions of “expanded Tweets,” giving users more in-depth previews of content without leaving Twitter’s site. The change comes as Twitter blurs the line between content provider and producer. Read more »
New York magazine set the media world a-chatter this weekend with a swirling tale of intrigue and in-fighting at the New York Times.The article is plump with gossip but also drives home the crucial business challenges the Times must address sooner than later. Read more at paidContent »
Amazon.com is making a move into high fashion business, the New York Times reports. And in order to get profits from this high margin business, the company is willing to lose a ton of money. And that is bad news for the traditional retailers. 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 »
UPDATED: The tragic story, reported by The New York Times’s Ron Lieber last month, in which a man rented a car in Boston via peer-to-peer car sharing company RelayRides and wound up seriously injuring four people while losing his life raised a familiar question for the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Data is absolutely crucial for the business of online advertising, and thanks to a new ecosystem designed to serve the sell-and-buy side, it can now be leveraged. But it also makes online advertising a far more complex space than it was even a few years ago. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And the current management mania for collaboration may be making matters worse for quiet ruminators. Is remote working the solution to the problem, or does it bring its own issues? Read more »
According to the latest U.S.circulation numbers, more than 14% of U..S. newspaper circulation is digital — up 63% over last year. How did the top 25 papers fare? Read more at paidContent »
Cisco in an internal memo outlined its plans for the changing nature of networking. It also acknowledged a $100 million investment in Insieme, a company started by three Cisco executives and that it can buy it for upto $750 million. Read the memo & what it means. Read more »
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo, one of the newest additions to the PaidContent 2012 lineup, will talk about the changing publishing landscape, including how authors are affected by the battle over e-book pricing, Read more at paidContent »
What we know about Bilton’s new book deal. Read more »
If you are in business, it is always about the customer. Simple as that message is, it is something of a forgotten lesson in modern times. Companies keep confusing who they serve and why they are in business, as an outgoing Goldman Sachs banker reminds us. Read more »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Often we only learn to value something when we feel its absence, so perhaps it makes sense that perpetually roaming travel writer Pico Iyer is a powerful advocate for stillness. In a recent interview he discusses the value of quiet for the perpetually plugged-in. Read more »
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 »
A new survey funded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark looked at public attitudes toward the news media and found that only a tiny fraction of those surveyed care whether a news source is the first to report something. The most important quality by far was trustworthiness. Read more »
The New York Times has signed up over 300,000 people to its digital subscription plan, but that doesn’t even come close to making up for continued declines in ad revenue. A new CEO is going to have to think creatively about where the paper goes now. Read more »
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 »
Too many media giants are happy to have a little disruption, provided it doesn’t change the supply-demand equation they have always relied on. But the reality is that this equation has already been blown to smithereens, and they had better figure out how to adapt. Read more »
A spokesman for the board that oversees the Pulitzer Prize awards for journalism says live reporting of a news event using Twitter would not qualify for a Pulitzer unless it also appeared on a traditional news website. But does that definition fit how journalism works now? Read more »
Contrary to the concerns expressed by the Washington Post’s ombudsman, the last thing the Post — or any newspaper — needs to worry about is whether it’s moving too quickly. If anything, the pace of change in media is speeding up rather than slowing down. Read more »
Updated. On Wednesday morning, the New York Times sent a number of emails urging customers to call a toll-free number to renew their subscriptions. They seem to have been sent by Epsilon Data Management, an email marketing firm which had a major data breach in March. Read more »
TV viewership is still on the rise, with the typical American watching five hours a day now, according to research by Nielsen. That hasn’t slowed the growth of online video: In fact, the amount of content streamed is accelerating, too. While it hasn’t yet made a ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Martin Nisenholtz, one of the most respected executives in the online media is leaving the New York Times, where he has been senior vice president of digital operations for quite a while and has helped oversee the Times digital efforts move into new directions. Read more »
Microsoft can’t give up on search. Though it’s been losing money forever, Microsoft needs search to defend its core platforms, compete with Google and solidify its ad business while opening emerging revenue ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Consumers are increasingly using their tablets as shopping tools at home and on the go. So retailers and other advertisers who want to reach that lucrative market must address a few key ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The publishing world continues to expand, with high-end group shopping service Gilt Groupe launching its own cooking magazine and the New York Times Library releasing a magazine-style iPad app. As the tools to publish become cheaper and cheaper, brands are becoming publishers in their own right. Read more »
From Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, it seems more and more newspapers are turning to tablets in an effort to capture a fraction of our daily attention. As this graphic illustrates, iPad is well on its way. Read more »
Business and IT leaders now face significant opportunities and challenges with big data — that is data sets that are so large they are difficult to store, manage and analyze. This report explores the rapidly evolving big data business and technology ecosystem. It examines big data in the context of several different industries: financial services, health care, sports, travel and media. We explore the different big data technologies — from Hadoop and NoSQL derivatives to cloud-based collaboration tools — and their various benefits for enterprises. And we examine some of the existing challenges big data poses, and what enterprise IT leaders can do to overcome them. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon Web Services, Google, Teradata, IBM and Cloudera. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
