Of all the jobs I’ve had in the past 20-odd years, I’m pretty sure the one that pleased my parents the most was my brief stint as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, my family’s local paper of record. My mother in particular seemed quite proud to see her son’s work land on her breakfast table each morning.
by John Battelle, Founder and CEO, Federated Media
After a funny film featuring nearly every luminary under the sun giving Yang and Decker advice (Buffet, Stringer, Zuckerberg, etc) Yang and Decker took the stage and Walt immediately asked them about the MSFT deal. Yang agreed that they could not get to a price, but that there were other issues as well, regulatory is one that came up, but I can imagine others (ie, approach to open source, total installs of Outlook at Yahoo, etc.!).
Back a year ago, I wrote a three-part series on the future of the media business. It began as an attempt to think out loud about a topic with which I had become obsessed, and it ended up becoming a manifesto of sorts about conversational media and marketing.
As you may recall, I started that last set of posts with the observation that major media companies–Time Warner, News Corp., CBS–had all fired or parted ways with the longtime managers of their digital assets, opting instead for insiders or traditional media folks with whom they were more comfortable.
Well, the time has come to review my predictions of a year ago. Overall, I think I did pretty well, but I’ve had to interpret a few liberally to give myself extra credit in a few cases.
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