By Megan Garber Some of the most exciting work taking place in The New York Times building is being done on the 28th floor, in the paper’s Research and Development Lab. The group serves essentially as a skunkworks project for a news institution that stands to benefit, financially and otherwise, from creative thinking; as Michael Zimbalist, the Times’ [...]

By Andrew Phelps Can a single app please both casual news readers and news junkies? That’s the question I found myself asking upon rereading that report from a couple weeks ago on iPad users’ reactions to The Daily. The report was put together by knowDigital, a division of market-research firm Coleman Insights, which asked more than 40 iPad owners [...]

Apr 7, 2011 So, it looks like an intriguing deal. Ford Motors’ Lincoln is subsidizing 100,000 new NYT digital subscriptions. Well, it is an intriguing deal, but it’s more nuanced than it seems, and in that nuance, we see some of the next models for how the digital circulation business and the digital ad business [...]

By Ken Doctor Here’s how newspapers sell what they do to would-be readers. You can get the whole paper, now sometimes including digital access. We’ll sell you Sunday only, or the weekend, or 7-day, but you have to take our whole paper. That’s what we sell; that’s our one-size-fits-all product. It fit your grandparents and your parents, [...]

by Damon KiesowPublished Apr. 11, 2011 Updated Apr. 12, 2011 Microsoft’s new Bing iPad app, released Thursday, does more than search — it begins to remake the newspaper experience in digital form. The app is not being marketed as a news platform, but journalists should consider it one because it offers a great local information utility for the [...]

Joe Mullin @joemullin Apr 8, 2011 The Limewire file-sharing service was shut down last year, and the only thing left now is to figure out how much money the now-illegal service owes the record labels that first sued it back in 2006. The judge overseeing the case made two key rulings this week that strongly [...]

By Ken Doctor Don’t call them pageviews— call them pages read. Don’t call them unique visitors — call them readers. Welcome to The Washington Post’s new foray into understanding — and acting on — how readers actually consume digital news. I wouldn’t quite call it a revolution. But it’s a firing shot in an effort to bring a modicum [...]

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO Hulu LLC’s subscription video service will surpass one million subscribers in 2011, chief executive Jason Kilar said in a blog post Monday. Mr. Kilar also reiterated that the company is on track to approach $500 million in revenue in 2011, up from $263 million in 2010. Its first-quarter revenue grew 90% from [...]

By Jim O’Sullivan Thursday, March 31, 2011 Reports of the demise of newspapers may be greatly exaggerated. According to a new Harvard study, the denizens of the digital age — 18-to-29-year-olds — would prefer to get most of their political news about the next presidential campaign from — believe it or not — major national newspapers….more [...]

By Ed Bott | March 30, 2011, 2:21pm PDT What Apple took away, Amazon has restored. I’m talking, of course, about Lala, the pioneering digital music service that Apple purchased in December 2009 and shut down more than a year ago. The first thing Apple did, almost immediately after purchasing the company, was to disable its Music [...]

Only Apple Knows Who’s Subscribing, but They’re Paying for Digital Content By: Nat Ives Published: March 29, 2011 Popular Science magazine sold the 10,000th subscription to its iPad edition sometime on Sunday, nearly six weeks after accepting Apple’s terms for selling subs on its tablet. That’s a speck compared to the title’s nearly 1.2 million print subscriptions, [...]

by Helen Lambourne A regional publisher which has scrapped the printing of most of its weekly freesheets and transformed them into e-editions says it has seen a 50pc increase in web traffic in three months.…more

Staci D. Kramer Mar 27, 2011 By now, we were supposed to have clarity about how The New York Times will use a meter to create a digital subscription revenue stream. After all, the plan went into effect in Canada March 17 and is supposed to start rolling out in the United States and globally Monday [...]

MARCH 21, 2011 by Nicholas Carr “If you look at the history of the world, up until 1700 nothing much happened.” That’s what Karl Marx said to Friedrich Engels when the two first met, at a cafe in Paris, in 1844. No, I’m kidding. The guy who actually spoke those words is Hal Varian, Google’s [...]

By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent Published: March 23 2011 Digital media companies will soon find it easier to clear content rights for new online services, under recommendations from the Hargreaves review into intellectual property. The review is part of a wider package of proposals around IP in Wednesday’s Budget, including the creation of new diplomatic posts in [...]

Peter Preston The Observer, Sunday 20 March 2011 The New York Times’s model for online charging will no doubt be widely copied. But according to one analyst, print will still be providing 86% of UK newspapers’ revenues even in 2017. So, at long, long last, we have the paywall policy all Americannewspapers – and many [...]

by Lauren Indvik EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors. “We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to [...]

Nick Thomas Forrester ResearchMar 22, 2011 I’m often asked to name companies with a successful paid digital content strategy. It’s harder than it should be to answer that question, especially in Europe. In news, the FT still heads a small field, along with some B2B publishers while, in music, despite some innovative companies, the digital revenues [...]

Citizenside, other websites collect and syndicate amateur videos to professional news groups By MAX COLCHESTER PARIS—French website Citizenside recently sold a grainy video of British fashion designer John Galliano conducting an anti-Semitic rant to news organizations around the world. Mr. Galliano lost his job, and Citizenside pocketed a six-figure bounty. This was just the latest scoop [...]

David Kaplan @davidaKaplanMar 18, 2011 11:15 AM ET Media buyers don’t expect the New York Times’ online ad revenue, which was up double digits last year, to take a hit from the company’s new digital subscription plans. Some even see a scenario where the NYT will be able to charge higher rates—if the newspaper hits the expected number of [...]

By Ben Fenton, Chief Media Correspondent Published: March 18 2011 RTL and ProSiebenSat.1 said on Friday they were considering legal action against the German cartel office after it blocked their plans to establish an online video-on-demand service. The Bundeskartellamt confirmed on Friday its initial opinion from last month that the venture planned by Germany’s two largest commercial broadcasters [...]

By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson in New York Published: March 17 2011 The New York Times has launched its long-awaited model for charging for news online, with a “metered” subscription approach that will charge more than some analysts had expected, but ensure that most readers never encounter the paywall. NYTimes.com will become the largest non-financial newspaper to charge at [...]

by Mallary Jean Tenore Published Mar. 15, 2011 6:34 pm Updated Mar. 16, 2011 9:56 am During a visit to Poynter on Tuesday, Bob Woodward talked about Watergate’s original code name, why he likes his iPad, and the best time of day to access hard-to-reach sources. Below, I’ve highlighted his thoughts on these topics and others. The quotes are drawn [...]

Rental giant is bidding on a series starring Kevin Spacey By Bill Cromwell  Mar 16, 2011 Netflix has already revolutionized the home video business, crushing all rivals while introducing an entirely new and now widely imitated model in content distribution via the postal service and later the internet. Now Netflix is now looking to revolutionize the content [...]

By Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell of the Project for Excellence in Journalism By several measures, the state of the American news media improved in 2010. After two dreadful years, most sectors of the industry saw revenue begin to recover. With some notable exceptions, cutbacks in newsrooms eased. And while still more talk than action, [...]

By Charlotte Clarke Published: March 14 2011 When I was at school, mobile phones and MP3 players were banned from the classroom. In no way were they considered to be an aid to education. The same went for downloads. If pupils were to download anything, it would be their favourite piece of music in their free [...]

by Erik Sass One of the big promises of the digital age was that journalism would be transformed by an army of amateur videographers – namely, all of us regular citizens – who might just happen to be nearby when something important goes down. And it’s true this kind of user-generate content has provided some pretty [...]

By APARAJITA SAHA-BUBNA The Wall Street Journal has added 200,000 paying subscribers who access the newspaper via mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s iPad and Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle. Les Hinton, head of the newspaper’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., which is owned by News Corp., said Thursday that about 150,000 of the new subscribers were added in the last [...]

By Richard J. Tofel Editor’s Note: Richard J. Tofel is general manager at ProPublica, a Wall Street Journal veteran, and author of a number of books, most recently Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition. Here he looks toward a future when search engine optimization has been rendered obsolete by advancing technology — [...]

CP&B Now Using the Research to Develop Tablet Ad Formats By: Nat Ives Published: March 09, 2011 Readers have more trouble focusing on magazines’ iPad editions than publishers initially predicted, according to the latest study in a growing effort to figure out tablet computers. “We thought that of course there’s a lot of activity going on on [...]

By Richard Waters Published: March 9 2011 For media companies, when and how to tap into the new mobile and social platforms on the web is as much a question of timing and technological tactics as of business strategy. But make no mistake: as the platforms quickly evolve, most companies have little choice but to engage [...]

By Tim Bradshaw Published: March 8 2011 Spotify is this week celebrating signing up its millionth subscriber – but only quietly. Staff at the digital music service’s offices in London have not been treated to a big party, slap-up feast or cracked open the champagne. Spotify says there will be a few pats on backs, then it’s [...]

Folks are watching but revenues remain stagnant By Diego Vasquez  Mar 8, 2011 There’s no denying that mobile video viewing took off in 2010, with more people than ever before using their phones to watch video, according to Nielsen. But the dollars seem to be lagging the eyeballs. A new report from analysis firm SNL [...]

Axel Springer again experienced dynamic growth in the Digital Mediasegment. Segment revenues jumped 51.3 percent to EUR 711.8 million (PY: EUR 470.4 million). With a share of 24.6 percent Digital Media was the Group’s second-largest contributor to consolidated revenues. The acquisitions of StepStone and Digital Window (including buy.at) accounted for a significant share of this growth. [...]

Here is a stunning visualization of the collapse of the music industry from Bain. As you can see, the growth of digital sales is not doing enough to offset the death of the CD. (Chart via Peter Kafka, who spotted it on Flickr.)..more

By DAVID CARR Published: February 13, 2011 Some of the fizz, if not a great big bubble, seems to have returned to media, depending on how you define “media.” There have been reports in The New York Times and elsewhere thatFacebook is now valued at $50 billion, and The Wall Street Journal reportedthat Twitter had been in low-level talks [...]

By DAVID SEGAL Published: February 12, 201 PRETEND for a moment that you are Google’s search engine. Someone types the word “dresses” and hits enter. What will be the very first result? There are, of course, a lot of possibilities. Macy’s comes to mind. Maybe a specialty chain, like J. Crew or the Gap. Perhaps a Wikipedia [...]

by Damon KiesowPublished Feb. 4, 2011 10:50 amUpdated Feb. 4, 2011 11:01 am With the unveiling of The Daily, we got our first look at Apple’s new iTunes-based periodical subscription service. The feature has been long awaited by publishers, but its implementation is likely to leave many unsatisfied. To its credit, Apple has made it as easy [...]

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 [...]

by Erik Sass, July 9th 2010, 4:49 PM Although Facebook’s growth appears to be slowing in the United States (the site added a mere 320,800 new users in June, down from 7.8 million new users in May), the U.S. is only half the story. Or actually, significantly less than half the story. Indeed, one of the most [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Posted 8 Feb 2010 by Tony O’Driscoll So, how does an unknown anthropology professor from Kansas make a home movie on a “cheap computer” in his basement that beats out all the $3.6 million Super Bowl ads and transforms him into a Web 2.0 rock star? This story begins and ends with the free and open [...]

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 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 [...]