by Martin Langeveld, Contributor, Nieman Journalism Lab
Yet another stage of the New York Times’s exploration of paid content options has come to light via Gawker, which has posted the text of two potential content packages, labeled “Silver” and “Gold.”
Everyone’s coverage of the uprising in Iran has been Twitter-centric, for obvious reasons. But CNN, in an apparent attempt to look like they have real, non-Twitter newsgathering capabilities, has been regurgitating Twitter posts and attributing them to unnamed “sources.”
Nick Denton is sitting amid the rows of screen-staring digital workers in the fourth-floor walkup that serves as Gawker headquarters, having neglected to build himself a private office.
by Michael Learmonth, Senior Editor, Advertising Age
Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton, one of the more vocal Cassandras of media collapse last fall, got a surprise this spring when things turned out to be, well, not so bad.
When I read the news on TechCrunch that Valleywag’s longtime editor, Owen Thomas, was leaving the gossip site, I wondered whether there was a bit of schadenfreude in this reporting.
For the Web’s cognoscenti, the lolcats fad is so over. I Can Has Cheezburger, the site that sparked captioned-cat-picture mania, launched in January 2007. The online world’s early adopters learned about the phenomenon that February, when Boing Boing first linked to the site. Over the next few months, lolcats showed up in Gawker, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Time. Last October, Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, the site’s founders, published “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun,” a book that spent 13 weeks on the New York Times paperback best-seller list.
by Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content for Guardian News and Media
Bear with me as we recap last week’s 100-yard dash of media industry financial woe before breasting the tape of eternal doom. First comes ITV with its 40 percent profit decline, 600 redundancies and regional closures, then Channel Five making one in four people redundant–saving almost as much money as Channel 4 will gain from Kevin Lygo halving his £1m pay package. In print, things are no less unappealing.
The news that Google is placing ads on Google News has sent a renewed wave of hand-wringing through the newspaper industry. How dare those Googlers make online news a profitable business! Of course, Google is planning to keep most of that profit. Good on them!
The Internet of 1996 is almost unrecognizable compared with what we have today: It’s 1996, and you’re bored. What do you do? If you’re one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you’d do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you are–”Welcome.”
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. After hackers took down SoapBlox, a one-man blog-hosting company which runs local political Web sites, a silenced liberal commentariat found out how true that was.
by Chris Gaither, Assistant Business Editor, Los Angeles Times
It’s more than a rumor: The great Silicon Valley gossip rag experiment has come to a humbling conclusion.
Two and a half years after launching Valleywag, blog magnate Nick Denton has decided to fold the site into Gawker, which covers the media business. For the past month, Denton has been saying to everyone who will listen that online advertising is undergoing a sharp slowdown as the economy continues to tank, and Web publishers are going to get nailed.
by Kevin Maney, Blogger, Tech Observer, Portfolio.com
Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”
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