by Ian Darby, 08 July 2010, 08:00am Thomas Cook is demanding a “signing-on fee”, thought to be approaching £1m, from the agency it appoints at the conclusion of its ongoing £30m media pitch. The travel company’s initial RFI to media agencies outlines demands for a “substantial signing-on fee in return for a three-year contract award” in [...]

By Richard Waters Published: July 12 2010 18:51 | Last updated: July 12 2010 18:51 In an office in Santa Monica, wedged between downtown Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, the future of the media industry is being drawn up. Demand Media is a company created specifically for the Google Age. It tracks the queries entered [...]

The internet guru on the death of newspapers, why paywall will fail and how the internet has brought out our creativity – and generosity Decca Aitkenhead The Guardian, Monday 5 July 2010 If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years [...]

Benedict Evans, Enders Analysis Apr 18, 2010 12:00 AM ET The iPad is a beautiful device that offers new ways to consume and interact with content. Newspapers are piling in with paid services that some – like Rupert Murdoch - hope will offset the decline of their print businesses. But, while there is real money to be made here, it [...]

By ANDREW RICE Published: May 10, 2010 Last year, Sam Apple got the idea into his head that what the world needed was a new kind of newspaper. This was, to put it mildly, at odds with the consensus of the marketplace. At the time, several large media companies were in bankruptcy, others were trading at penny-stock [...]

Kantar Media’s Futureproof study of 2,400 adults reveals consumers are more willing to pay one-off charges for digital content than micropayments Rupert Murdoch has put an end to the culture of free by closing News International’s online content behind a paywall, believed to go live within days. The media mogul’s attempt to change consumers’ “online [...]

Lots of papers on a platform would mean lots more traffic – and income. But can we break the dish-the-opposition habit? Peter Preston The Observer, Sunday 27 June 2010 Those of us following the yellow brick road through Mr Murdoch’s imminent Times paywall know exactly what’s coming next. First we signed up for a free month’s [...]

Posted by Robert Eisenhart on March 22, 2010 at 6:18 PM A new website discovered by The Guardian‘s Digital Content Blog, BreakthePaywall!, has arisen to counter the paywalls that news organisations are investigating to increase their revenue from online news…more

Dan Frommer Sillicon Alley Insider Media industry ad revenue declined 12% year-over-year to $125.3 billion in 2009, according to a report issued by Kantar Media, the WPP-owned research firm formerly known as TNS. The only major growth area: Online ad spending. Internet ads — display only — increased 7% in 2009, according to the report. [...]

By Martin Langeveld /  March 9  /  12:37 p.m. Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. (The study is entitled “How will journalism survive the internet age?” Round 1 was held in December; transcripts and other material are linked here — scroll down. Not [...]

Before our digital lives disappear too far into ‘the cloud’, we must wrest it from corporate and governmental control Charles Leadbeater guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 January 2010 09.00 GMT The internet, our relationship with it, and our culture are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the [...]

By EMILY STEEL Meredith, the Iowa-based owner of Better Homes & Gardens, Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle magazines, is building a presence on Madison Avenue. Over the past few years, the magazine publisher has bought up a series of digital-ad agencies to create a full-service marketing shop. Called Meredith Integrated Marketing, the operation has created [...]

By Jonathan Stray /  Jan. 26  /  10 a.m. It’s entirely possible that The New York Times will net a profit from their newly announced paywall, set to debut in a year’s time. But it’s by no means guaranteed. Even (momentarily) setting aside the journalistic or civic-minded concerns about shutting some readers out of the news, the whole idea makes [...]

Chris Tryhorn - The Guardian, Monday 25 January 2010 How can you make the internet pay? It’s the number one question being asked by all media groups, with Rupert Murdoch poised to put his papers behind a paywall and the New York Times announcing it will do the same in 2011. Fresh from the sale of his [...]

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE And ETHAN SMITH With the new tablet device that is debuting next week, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs is betting he can reshape businesses like textbooks, newspapers and television much the way his iPod revamped the music industry—and expand Apple’s influence and revenue as a content middleman. In developing the device, Apple focused on [...]

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA Taking a step that has tempted and terrified much of the newspaper industry, The New York Times announced on Wednesday that it would charge some frequent readers for access to its Web site — news that drew ample reaction from media analysts and consumers, ranging from enthusiastic to withering…more

Many websites already offer charging options – but few, as Rupert Murdoch seems to suggest, simply lock browsers out Charles Arthur, guardian.co.uk - Wednesday 2 December 2009 23.59 GMT From the hands thrown to cheeks at Rupert Murdoch‘s announcement that he’s looking to put paywalls up around his newspaper properties online, you might think that they’re the unicorns [...]

By JENNA WORTHAM Published: January 3, 2010 Given the craze around the iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Nexus One, it might seem that nearly everyone has a smartphone. But most consumers use simpler, much cheaper phones. According to data from the Nielsen Company, roughly 82 percent of cellphones in use are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell [...]

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and TIM ARANGO Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free. Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to [...]

By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT Published: November 13, 2009 SAN FRANCISCO — Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve [...]

The New York Times - By CLARK HOYT Published: October 31, 2009 IN his autobiography “The Good Times,” Russell Baker described the Times newsroom he joined in 1954 as “comically overstaffed.” Baker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington reporter and columnist, quoted a colleague’s explanation for all the idle reporters playing bridge and working crossword puzzles: Adolph Ochs, [...]

BY JIM SALTER, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS THURSDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2009 ST. LOUIS — The Hannibal Courier-Post proclaims that it is “Missouri’s oldest daily newspaper, serving since 1838.” But it isn’t quite as daily as it used to be. In February, publisher Jack Whitaker decided to stop printing on Mondays, the day that had the least [...]

Patrick Smith – @psmith - Sep 21, 2009 4:13 AM ET While some continue to talk about charging for online news content, others are busy doing it. The latest member of the paid content club is weekly public affairs magazine The Spectator, which on Thursday removed all current and archive magazine content from its website and launched a campaign to get [...]

How to think about news in the link economy By Peter Osnos The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received [...]

By E&P Staff Published: July 15, 2009 5:02 PM ET NEW YORK Two newspapers in upstate New York have eliminated one day each from their daily production schedules. On July 6, the Tonawanda News eliminated its Monday edition, moving to a Tuesday-Saturday schedule. The next day, The Journal-Register, of Medina, dropped its Tuesday edition, and [...]

The days of the free Internet will draw to a close over the next five years, according to the chairman and chief executive of IAC, the interactive services company which operates a collection of more than 30 Internet sites which produce $1.5 billion a year in revenue. The only missing link, according to Barry Diller, who cut his [...]

By DAVID CARR Published: May 17, 2009 Write about the media long enough and eventually you type your way to your own doorstep. Lately, when I finish an interview, most subjects have a question of their own. “What’s going to happen to The New York Times?” they ask, some plaintively, others pruriently. In the last [...]

In a year when newspaper cutbacks have made their own headlines, strong evidence of the changing nature of media use in America may be found in a single statistic: Internet users report a large increase in time reading online newspapers, according to the eighth annual Surveying the Digital Future projected conducted by USC Annenberg’s Center [...]

In 1992, the oracle of Omaha predicted the decline of newspapers, magazines, and TV. By Jack Shafer In our Web-obsessed era, some folks—especially folks in the newspaper newsrooms—regard newspapers as victims of the new technology. But back in the mid-1960s, well before the first big Internet pipes were laid, the newspaper was already in crisis. [...]

Enfatico, Designed to Prevent Marketing Turf Wars, Will Be Folded Into Y&R By SUZANNE VRANICA WPP is folding Enfatico, the agency it built as a one-stop shop for all of Dell’s advertising and marketing business, into its Young & Rubicam Brands ad firm, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is a retreat [...]

By Earl J. Wilkinson – INMA The death of the newspaper is one of the great exaggerations of today’s economic downturn. It is a myth being perpetuated by people, companies, and the trade press that serve them that are in seeming cardiac arrest — many of whom have amassed debt beyond their means, possess business [...]

(SeyboldOnline) LOS ANGELES, CA (Press Release) Mar 09, 2009 the Rubicon Project, an advertising technology company focused on global ad network optimization, reveals specific insights into the huge revenue opportunity for Premium News publishers online with ad networks. This knowledge comes from optimizing more than 150 billion impressions, 18 billion of which have been for [...]

New York Times considers charging for its website Feb. 3 (Bloomberg) – New York Times Co. may charge for access to its flagship newspaper’s Web site less than two years after terminating an earlier online-subscription service ..more

Newspaper shuns web and thrives With 2008 drawing to a brutal close on the media beat — bankruptcies, daily newspapers that are no longer daily, magazines that are downsizing into brochures — a little ray of light appeared in my e-mail inbox. It was from a newspaper owner, of all people… more

The Future of Newspapers It has been a hellish week for the newspaper industry. Tribune, owner of the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, filed for bankruptcy, while The New York Times Company hocked its new Renzo Piano-designed skyscraper. Worse still was the… more

Reluctantly, A Daily Stops It’s Presses, Living Online With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in … more

A Medical Publisher’s Unusual Prescription: Online Ads By some measures, the medical publishing world has met the advent of the Internet with a shrug, sticking to its time-honored revenue model of charging high subscription fees for specialized journals that often attract few, if any, advertisements…more