Newspaper online advertising has not benefited greatly from the recent upswing in online ad spending, according to the New York Times and most of the recent newspaper company quarterly results. This is no surprise because most newspaper websites sell SPACE for commodity advertising — display ads and classifieds — and thus are hard pressed to [...]

For several days my brain has been connecting the blogstorm over AP trying to dictate how much of their content can be quoted on the web with the “quote” that Nick Carr lifted from one of my blog posts in his Atlantic article — I finally figured out why. The problem with the AP isn’t [...]

Microsoft withdrawing its offer to buy Yahoo is a sufficiently large story to demonstrate the problem of redundant news content on the web. Google News is currently tracking about 2,000 versions of this story. To get a better sense of why it’s a problem to have 2,000 stories about the SAME THING, I’ve reproduced about [...]

Facebook Beacon, currently in the process of going down in flames, is a classic case of overreaching. So much has been written about what’s wrong with Beacon — blatant privacy violation, lack of blanket opt-out, failure to make it opt-in, gathering data from non-Facebook users — but I haven’t seen much about WHY they got [...]

One of the many reasons why Techmeme is the leading tech news aggregator among tech insiders is that it aggregates traditional media brands alongside new media brands. No place is this more evident than the new Techmeme Leaderboard — the top 25 is a near perfect mix of media brands that are 2 years old, [...]

The Federal Election Commission reaffirmed a decision from March of last year that blogs are media entities and are therefore exempt from FEC oversight, like other media. The exemption applies to blogs that are not “owned or controlled by a political party, committee, or candidate.” But here’s the problem with that — since publishing a [...]

Two reports out today illustrate how the traditional media industry is working hard to prop up their declining business. First, as evidence of the decline, IBM released a study that says that the Internet is about to overtake TV as the principal medium in most households (via MediaPost):

It’s not surprising that someone finally unmasked the author of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs AKA Fake Steve Jobs. It’s not really that surprising either that Fake Steve turned out to be an “old media” journalist who’s been fooling all the “new media” geeks. It’s not even that surprising that a journalist at an [...]

Nielsen took a big step towards accelerating the death of the page view by announcing it would rank websites by time spend on the site instead. But time spent is an equally problematic metric that assumes that more is better, which isn’t the case with web applications designed for efficiency, like Google search.

Blogs and other new media upstarts have taken a big bite out of the media attention pie, particularly in categories like tech, politics, and celebrity gossip. But People Magazine is a venerable media brand that appears not to be taking the threat lying down, according to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore:

When I read about the private equity buyout of the ailing Chrysler group from DaimlerChrysler, it immediately reminded me of another buyout of an ailing legacy player in a fast changing industry being driven by successful upstarts — Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune.
Thinking about it, I realized there are many analogues between what upstarts [...]

So here’s my perspective on the Calacanis/Winer/Jarvis v. Vogelstein/Wired debate on how journalist interviews should be conducted — both sides are right and also wrong.
Blogging is conversation, yeah, blah, blah, but what’s so unsatisfying about these “conversations” is that too often they turn into linked monologues. Nobody actually TALKS to each other. Everyone just [...]

Did NBC Universal and News Corp cut a deal to create content for the web? New production capabilities? New armies of web-only content creators? No. This is about creating a platform for aggregating and distributing existing content, which they already have too much of.
You’re looking at the new media business. It’s not longer about creating [...]

We’ve all heard that page views are dying. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed pointed out a few weeks ago the problem with scaling an online advertising business based on revenue per thousand page views, an analysis which has now been picked up by the Dan Mitchell at the NYT. Jeremy’s analysis is correct, on one level, [...]

The once monolithic media industry is undergoing a radical schism, dividing itself into content creation, on the one hand, and content aggregation and distribution on the other.
The nature of this transformation suddenly crystallized for me when I read Tom Foremski’s piece on the new West Coast/East Coast media industry divide. Tom seems to be focused [...]

A backlash against “new media” ideology and disingenuousness seems to be simmering at this year’s We Media conference. From Mark Glaser at MediasShift:
My personal definition of “we media” is the movement toward an empowered audience, who can customize their media experience and create their own media, leaving behind the old model of the mainstream media [...]

According to SEO Todd Mailcoat, getting three stories to the homepage of Digg puts you in the top 1% of Digg users, and it takes “months” to build up a what Todd calls a “reputable” Digg account. Those statistics struck me as stunning, so I decided to dig into Digg’s top user data (which loads [...]

I just got my hands on the new version of the Wall Street Journal, which is one column inch smaller — seeing the physically shrunk paper is jarring — it’s tangible evidence that newspapers are slowly fading into history. Much as I wanted to assess the new design — and I’m sure there is real [...]

The much anticipated news site Daylife has launched — there has been much critique and analysis, which I won’t repeat — most of it has focused on Daylife’s functionality (including a harsh critique from investor Mike Arrington). Instead, I’m going to take a look at the content. Here are the top 10 stories:
1. Dems Take [...]

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:
I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See [...]

Chris Anderson of Wired has written what may be the most sober and balanced (i.e. ideology-free) assessment I’ve ever read of the upside and downside of 2.0 openness in publishing, or what he calls “radical transparency.” Here’s a sample:
3) “Process as Content”*. Why not share the reporting as it happens, uploading the text of each [...]

Has anyone noticed that the New York Times is completely dominating the tech blogosphere today? Five of the top eight stories on Techmeme today are from the NYT — and the #1 story is ABOUT the NYT:

All of the stories are indeed notable for one reason or another — here’s my .02 cents:

In Web Traffic [...]

Has there ever been an industry that faced as much uncertainty and such low visibility as the media industry? Media executives have lately taken to throwing up their hands and declaring their uncertainty in public (all emphasis is mine):

In the next year or two the media world will begin to figure out what consumers really [...]

Can anyone think of a content business — meaning a company that produces original content — that has scaled dramatically in recent years? I can’t. Look at the businesses that have scaled — Google, MySpace, YouTube — all platforms for content, but not producers of content. Compare those to original content businesses like Weblogs, Inc., [...]

In the continuing (and, I predict, growing) audience measurement saga, Fred Wilson chastises Mike Arrington for calling comScore’s audience metrics “flaky” vis-a-vis Digg’s audience:

My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors.
Perhaps a better question [...]

I was struck by this comment from a session on audience measurement at the Business Blog Summit (via conversationrater):

I don’t care about how many page views or visitors I really get. I care about getting the right visitors, the influential visitors, or the potential customer visitors. How can I tell who’s who?
Duh! But this truism [...]

What’s more amusing? Scoble and New Media folks discover “engagement,” a term that the old advertising establishment has been “engaged” with for quite some time. Or, that hot and utterly hip video blogging has been caught up in a he said, he said spat over audience measurement. Welcome to media! These guys sound like a [...]

Isn’t there an odd contradiction in all the thinking about new media? Individuals are now empowered to create content, to publish and have a voice without going through the old corporate hierarchy. You can blog and be heard, all for free, without asking permission. But what about brands? The assumption that online advertising will finance [...]

There is now macroeconomic data to support the theory that Media 2.0 won’t be as profitable as Media 1.0 (from MediaPost):
In a break from historical patterns, the equities research team at Merrill Lynch says the rate of advertising price inflation now trails the overall rate of economic inflation. “Interestingly, advertising growth seems to be tracking [...]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems [...]

A eulogy is a speech of praise, typically — although not necessarily — for the dead, which seems fitting for a post about the lingering charms and strengths of Old Media.
According to a recent survey, New Media still has a long way to go to earn the public’s trust, at least in the UK:
Respondents were [...]