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 addition to “a reduction in agency fees currently paid” and “a minimum 10% saving through consolidated media buying”...more

By Richard Waters

Published: July 12 2010 18:51 | Last updated: July 12 2010 18:51

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 interesting things about the site’s explosive growth over the last few years has been how much of this expansion took place outside the U.S. This is in marked contrast to its predecessor and rival MySpace...more

By Peter Willis 5/07/2010

My audience with Prince has taken a bizarre downward turn.

I’m trying to interview the rock legend but he’s more interested in an impromptu jam session on the stage of his private concert hall – with me on drums.

We’re two minutes into Beatles classic Come Together and I’m getting into my stride when I become aware that Prince is staring across at me and wincing...more

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 from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won’t exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you’re probably already reading this on your computer screen. “And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”..more

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 will take a long time to match the scale that comes from 10 million people buying a newspaper every day, as happens in the UK. Here’s why…

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 levels and analysts were seriously asking whether some venerable publications — including this one — might soon cease to exist. The recession was only worsening a fundamental problem: the industry’s physical product, printed paper, was going the way of the rotary phone, and no one had yet figured out how to generate comparable revenues online. But Apple, a 34-year-old writer, wasn’t ready to give up on journalism as a profit-making enterprise. He began telling friends about his plans to start a Web publication called.…more

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 equals free” mindset has come under considerable scrutiny, with reports suggesting consumers simply won’t pay for online content in a world where the BBC offers it for free.

Kantar Media’s Futureproof study, which was conducted in August last year among a panel of 2,400 adults in Great Britain, considered willingness to pay across a variety of media. Television emerged as the medium most respondents are willing to pay for (23% of the panel agreed they would pay), although things looked less profitable for online newspapers...more

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 trial. Now, as that month ends, we can click for a log-on that never closes. And, very soon, jovial, kindly Mr M will be asking us for our credit card details (just in case we see something we really want to read). …more

By Tim Bradshaw in Cannes

Published: June 25 2010 14:53 | Last updated: June 25 2010 14:53

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.

Meanwhile, TV ad spending fell 10%, as cable outperformed network TV, and spot spending fell dramatically, as political ads from 2008 weren’t around in 2009. Magazines dropped 17%, newspapers and radio each dropped 20%, and outdoor fell 13%...more

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 to be outdone, the Federal Communications Commission also has a project studying pretty much the same thing.)

Here’s the slide deck from Varian’s presentation, entitled “Newspaper Economics, Online and Offline”:…more

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 last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena. The rise of “cloud computing” will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view...more

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 custom publishing, email, social media and mobile campaigns for major marketers, including Kraft Foods, Chrysler and Wells Fargo. It recently recruited digital-ad veteran Martin Reidy to lead its marketing arm, and says it is on the prowl for more acquisitions...more

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 user-generated media-scape...more

Feb 4 2010, 10:40 am by Derek Thompson

Facebook’s page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America’s leading information hub. To me the issue boils down to a question: should we get our news from our friends, or from the news?..more

By JAVIER ESPINOZA

LONDON—Last month, citizenrobert was enjoying “the pleasures of slow cooking.” The month before, he was battling with “brutal” winds in Suffolk.

Citizenrobert, it turns out, is Robert Phillips, the U.K. chief executive of public-relations firm Edelman, and he has been using the microblogging site Twitter to share his views and anecdotes with his 815 “followers.”

Mr. Phillips is part of the small but growing community of senior executives using the short-messaging site as a business tool to engage with customers…more

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 little sense if the basic math doesn’t work out. Making money would seem to be the most basic marker of a paywall’s success.

Unfortunately, no one knows for sure whether it will. It’s all estimates, assumption, and guesswork — even if it’s relatively well informed, carefully researched guesswork. We just don’t know how readers and advertisers will react...more

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 Breakingviews financial commentary site toThomson Reuters, Hugo Dixon is well placed to offer some advice. Out of the £12m-plus Reuters is paying for the 10-year-old business, Dixon gets more than £3m for his shares and options, with a further retention bonus to keep the former Financial Times journalist there for another three years…more

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 the role the gadget could play in homes and in classrooms, say people familiar with the situation. The company envisions that the tablet can be shared by multiple family members to read news and check email in homes, these people say.

For classrooms, Apple has been exploring electronic-textbook technology. Apple also has been looking at how content from newspapers and magazines can be presented differently on the tablet, according to the people familiar with the situation. Other people briefed on the device say the tablet will come with a virtual keyboard...more

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 of the online world, spoken of but never glimpsed.

In fact, they’re all over the place – and working well for their owners, though hardly any are simple, “pay to get in” walls. In fact, that’s the least common of paywalls. Far more common are forms of the “freemium” model, where some content is free but others items are walled away for premium subscribers...more

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 for less than $50 or are given away with a two-year service contract…more

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 a close. ..more

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 Google’s conflicts with European governments. ..read more

Let me just say right up front: I did not volunteer to reinvent myself. I was drafted.

I wasn’t interested in being another me; I was cool with the me that I was. I was a reporter for  The Washington Post, one of the most respected newspapers in the world. To add icing to my cake, I was also J’s wife, Z’s mom, a sister and a friend. Life was good. …read more

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, who bought The Times in 1896 and turned it into a colossus of journalism, “always liked to have enough people around to cover the story when the Titanic sinks,” said Meyer Berger, a legendary Times reporter.

The era of playing cards and reading Dostoyevsky while waiting for the big assignment is long gone. Today’s Times is a 24-hour operation producing a printed newspaper and a rapidly growing Web site — all while cutting staff and costs in the face of a deep recession and a revolution transforming the news business. …Read more

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 advertising. The small daily, which has a circulation of about 8,000, now prints Tuesday through Saturday. Although he wouldn’t share financial details, Whitaker said that eliminating one day of production expenses has improved the newspaper’s bottom line…

Read more

There are a lot of new technologies which already affect news consumption and future business models. As a nerd, I’m excited by the new tech, particularly mobile, including new display systems and pervasive connectivity.

However, the tech is secondary, not nearly as important as repairing some current issues with trust and curation.

As a news media guy, I’m an amateur, relying on large part on people who really know the business. Frequent engagement in social media helps, and most importantly, 14 years in online customer service gives me a good feel for the ground truth and attitude online.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-newmark/a-nerds-take-on-the-futur_b_325544.html

14.10.09 Catherine Neilan (Bookseller.com)

Google is poised to launch its “buy anywhere, read anywhere” digital books programme Google Editions simultaneously in the US, UK and Europe within the first half of next year.

Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out by June. Edmonds said one of the strengths of Google’s offering was that once bought, the e-book would exist in a “cloud library”, which could be accessed from potentially any device, including laptops, “smart phones” or e-readers. “As long as you can get onto the library, you can access it,” Edmonds said. “All books will live in the same library, so it doesn’t matter where you buy it or where you read it.” .. read more

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 readers to pay for it. The Coffee House blog, well respected in Westminster, remains free as do blogsfrom star contributors. ..read more

The Associated Press
Friday, September 18, 2009; 4:28 AM

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. is counting on the crown jewel of its online advertising empire to burnish a diamond in the rough.

Hoping to take an even bigger bite out of ad budgets, Google has melded the technology powering its lucrative search marketing network with a system that it bought 18 months ago to sell online billboards and other more visual commercials, including video …more

TechCrunch.com
Wednesday, September 9, 2009; 3:04 AM

Twitter has been growing so fast this year, they’re getting more attention than they probably know what to do with.

And that presents a problem of sorts. The company has to decide whether or not to turn revenue on. It sounds ridiculous, but it is a real decision. Once revenue is on, how the company is valued by the market can change dramatically. …more

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 its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s cofounders. By the time it went public just five years later, “Google” was a verb. Today it is the dominant force in what has turned out to be the central organizing principle of the Internet’s impact on our lives: the search function and the accompanying links, keywords, and advertising that make sense and commerce out of the vast universe of information and entertainment on the Web. Google is as important today as were Microsoft, IBM, and the original AT&T, linchpins of our culture and economy, in the development of modern computation and communications. ..Read more

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 is now publishing on a four day schedule (Monday, Wednesday-Friday)...Read more

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is expanding its real estate listings on Google Maps in a move that could pit it against existing listing sites and could also create additional tension with listing services. Starting Monday, users in Australia and New Zealand can search for available properties on Google Maps, according to the Google Australia blog. Two listing services in Australia are contributing the initial listings. A third group said it would not provide listings, telling Australian newspaperThe Age, “We are quite confident that we provide a better service than Google is offering.”..more

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 teeth building up over-the-air and cable TV networks: a good billing system, akin to Amazon’s “one-click” button or the Apple iPhone’s slick downloading of paid applications. .. read more

By STEVEN JOHNSON Friday, Jun. 05, 2009

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom ’90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? ..read more

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 few weeks, I have heard the question from a conservative magazine owner, a congressman and a filmmaker, so it’s beyond inside baseball… read more

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 for the Digital Future.

In questions about reading online and print newspapers — key elements of the eighth annual comprehensive study of the impact of online technology on America — the Digital Future Project  found that Internet users read online newspapers for 53 minutes per week, the highest level thus far in the Digital Future studies.

In contrast, Internet users in 2007 reported 41 minutes per week reading online newspapers.

The project also found that 22 percent of users said they stopped their subscription to a printed newspaper or magazine because they could access the same content while online.

“The most significant trend about how Americans are changing their news reading habits may be found in comparing the use of online media by light users vs. heavy users,” Center for the Digital Future director and communication professor Jeffrey I. Cole said. “Heavy Internet users spent 65 more minutes per week reading online newspapers than do light users. This raises the question: how will the media habits of the current generation of light users change as online content continues to expand? What ramifications will these changes have for the newspapers of America?   … read more

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. The population was growing faster than newspapers were adding circulation, a trend that executives saw would spell slow death for the industry. .. read more

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 from one of the most ambitious projects on Madison Avenue — an effort to eliminate turf wars by housing many different marketing disciplines within a single firm. The structure was one of WPP’s key selling points when it landed Dell’s advertising and marketing business in December 2007. ..more

By MIGUEL HELFT

Published: April 7, 2009

SAN DIEGO — It had the makings of a high-tension face-off: Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, spoke Tuesday at a convention of newspaper executives at a time when a growing chorus in the struggling industry is accusing Google of succeeding, in part, at their expense. ..more

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon – a diagnosis confirmed by my children and my way cooler friends – I find Twitter and Facebook annoying. Social media is an unavoidable reality for publishers, as we have often reported in these pages. It may even be profitable, and not just to Web 2.0 developers and venture capitalists. ..more

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 models vulnerable to today’s environment, and are unused to competitive profit margins.

No matter how unbiased or agnostic we try to be, we are all creatures of what we read and what surrounds us.

Being based in the United States, I am surrounded by extraordinary negativity. Not just talk about advertising declines, classified migration to the internet, and circulation woes. The talk in the States is about the death of newspapers, the death of the traditional print business model, and the death of companies that own today’s newspapers.

Recently, I decided to reach out to INMA members worldwide to understand the precise colour and tenor of this downturn.

Is the extreme negativity justified? ..more

Written by Richard MacManus / January 6, 2009 6:30 PM 

A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!’s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What’s more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services – even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below. ..more