When people hear the traffic figures for big blogs and blog networks, they assume the sites must be swimming in money. How could they not be? With hundreds of millions, if not billions, of impressions annually, one would think that revenue would automatically follow.
But it doesn’t.
At the time of its acquisition in February Read More
As a business, the journalism industry is bipolar. For basically all of its history, it’s been bouncing between two opposing revenue models.
Though many were shocked at the news last week that uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan would be leaving The Daily Beast, opting out of the endless chase for pageviews and switching Read More
I’ll be the bearer of bad news: the press that most publicists chase for clients isn’t really worth anything. There’s a good chance no one will actually see it. Except the client, that is. The flack will make damn sure of that.
But other than that, the assumptions of publicists, clients and journalists—that being featured Read More
That sure worked out nicely didn’t it? If you were in the news business, this election could not have gone better for you.
Flashback to 2010 and the prospects were rather dim. By tradition (three decades of it), the Republican nomination was essentially assured to Mitt Romney. And he was basically boring and unelectable. Barack Obama’s Presidency wasn’t exciting, but it lacked any major disasters—no riots in the street, no drastic plunge into a depression or embarrassing failures—and he was generally well liked. Historically, for an incumbent, this means almost certain victory.
Why do you think both Michael Bloomberg and Sarah Palin stayed out of the race? Because they understood these facts.
What it really added up to was a potentially nightmarish situation for the media: a dull election with a very predictable outcome.
But somehow that’s not how it ended up. Read More
You know something has gone terribly wrong when Goldman Sachs is complaining about fair play.
But when it comes to Greg Smith and the “Why I’m Leaving Goldman Sachs” meme started by The New York Times in March, the investment bank has got plenty to gripe about. According to the Times’s own research, almost all Read More
Allow me to resolve the the recent debate over “quote approval” with a single word: email. Everyone needs to start doing interviews over email. Whether you’re a journalist or a spokesperson speaking to the media, you’re better off communicating questions, statements or inquiries via email.
By using it when they speak to sources, journalists Read More
Last month, America’s reigning (self-appointed, mind you) journalism expert Jeff Jarvis had some harsh words for the 16,000 reporters who traveled to Tampa to cover the Republican National convention.
“What actual reporting can you possibly do that delivers anything of value more than the infomercial—light on the info, heavy on the ’mercial—that Read More
Many of us managing Facebook fan pages have noticed something strange over the last year: how our reach has gotten increasingly ineffective. How the messages we post seem to get fewer clicks, how each message is seen by only a fraction of our total “fans.”
It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last Read More
The state of journalism is bad. Of course, Jonah Lehrer and Fareed Zakaria—high-profile writers at The New Yorker and Time, respectively—were recently exposed as frauds and plagiarists, but that’s not the worst of it. Not even close. The phone-tapping scandal that nearly imploded NewsCorp’s news division last year? Nope.
In fact, nothing illustrates the distressing state of affairs more clearly than the reaction to Judge William Alsup’s recent order that Google and Oracle turn over the names of the reporters and bloggers whom the two companies had paid for potentially positive coverage supporting their case in a high-stakes copyright lawsuit.
Wait, what reaction? Oh, you didn’t even hear about this? Read More
