by Ben Worthen and Jessica A. Vascellaro, Reporters, The Wall Street Journal
Technology companies are launching big advertising campaigns as they wager on a pickup in business spending and jockey to have their products stand apart in an environment where new customers are hard to find and competition is intensifying.
by Sarah McBride, Reporter, The Wall Street Journal
Radio programmers are now able to collect so much data about listener habits that some have begun fine-tuning their shows down to the second–to the dismay of on-air personalities like Ryan Seacrest.
by Claire Cain Miller, Staff Writer, New York Times
The next generation of radio listeners might not remember the olden days of scrolling through stations. Instead, the radio they listen to could very well be on their mobile phones.
by Eric Savitz, Blogger and Columnist, Barron's, Tech Trader Daily
There’s an old debate in the Valley about whether Google is really a media company or a technology company. In a sense, it is a silly debate, which is mostly a matter of semantics. A better question is this: Now that Google has become one of the world’s largest media companies, at least as measured by advertising dollars, what does it do next?
The government’s stimulus plan won’t work as planned if we don’t get consumers spending again. But in the nearly $800 billion package, there is one thing missing that would surely help accomplish this: advertising. To get people spending again, and the economy moving, the government needs to provide help for businesses in America to advertise their products and services.
The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the Internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.
Like Napoleon marching into an abandoned Moscow, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have led Google’s advance into traditional advertising only to find nothing to loot. Now begins Google’s long imperial retreat, starting with 40 layoffs. But the real cut here is to Google’s ambitions.
by Therese Poletti, Senior Columnist, MarketWatch, Tech Tales
Pandora, a private company that has created the most popular Internet-based radio service in the U.S., has a lot of zealous fans. In fact, they are a bit like the fanatics who love Apple Inc. and its well-designed products.
The younger generation will be our future leaders. We hear that a lot in politics, but it also applies to media companies wondering who will be leading them into a digital future. National Public Radio has two programs–Next Generation Radio and Intern Edition–aimed at training young folks to do quality radio reporting the NPR way. Not surprisingly, those twentysomethings have also pushed NPR further into the digital realm, creating an eye-catching blog and using Public Radio Exchange, an online marketplace for radio reports, to get wider distribution for their work.
The bell is tolling for Webcasting in the U.S. after the Copyright Review Board refused to alter the new proposed royalty rates, which represent an enormous hike in the money online radio stations must pay. The new rates take effect July 16, and a coalition of Webcasters led by the popular Pandora are pleading that their business will go away with these new payment obligations.
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