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
Julie Zeveloff, the editor of Business Insider’s lifestyle vertical, is going on safari to “the best hotel in the world,” as she has so often referred to it. Ms. Zeveloff has been invited to go on this safari by the Tanzania Tourist Board, the Africa Adventure Company and Singita Grumeti Group, and Coastal Aviation.
“No, I didn’t win the lottery and I’m not a lucky honeymooner,” she helpfully explained on the site. “I’ve been invited by the Tanzania Tourist Board to go on safari and visit several of the country’s best lodges, including the tented camp that Travel + Leisure has called ‘the best hotel in the world’ for the past two years.” 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
Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget has challenged journalism professor Dan Reimhold to a blog-off against BI’s pathologically prolific writer Joe Weisenthal, according to Poynter.
It all started when Mr. Reimhold, who teaches at the University of Tampa, wrote a mild blog post about how he would never teach his students to be Read More
AOL will sell more than 800 patents to Microsoft in exchange for $1.056 billion in cash, the company announced today. The dial-up giant retained patents of 300 “core and strategic” technologies, which it will non-exclusively license to Microsoft in the same deal.
The auction for the patents began last fall, part of the company’s long term plan to “unlock value” for shareholders. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2012, and the company says it plans to return a significant portion of the proceeds to shareholders.
Meanwhile, WWD caught AOL and Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington at her book party for Kathy Freston (Ms. Freston introduced Ms. Huffington to her business partner Kenneth Lerer), to find out how she felt about about her growing influence at AOL. Read More
We can’t say we envy whoever’s behind the wheel of Patch, AOL’s network of hyperlocal news sites. With a torrent of bad press; a prettier, more popular sister in The Huffington Post, and executives resorting to (allegedly) defending the company in the Business Insider comments section, it’s likely Team Patch in need of a morale boost. But it’s hard to know how to make a generous statement of your confidence in the company without awakening some sales exec’s dormant inner frat boy. Read More
Scarlett O’Hara may have dramatically vowed to herself that she’d never go hungry again, but then again she didn’t live in the era of Match.com. According to a Business Insider article today, a young woman in New York named Jessica Sporty used the dating service in order to save on her grocery bills. You see, men would buy her expensive meals and dinners, and in return, all she had to do was go on a date with them.
What a very novel transactional process. Read More
Two wildly different takes on the same Newsweek newsstand figures suggest Tina Brown is as divisive a figure as she ever was.
Business Insider said the 50,000 average for the first half of 2011 means the weekly is “turning around.” Before she started it was around 39,000, and ad pages have doubled Read More
