Category: News

It breaks my heart that Salon may not make it. Salon represented the best that the commercial Web had to offer and it demonstrated that newspaper editors are capable of creating smart editorial products once the need for 60% market penetration was removed. It also showed that online-only publications could break news.
Of course, Salon was never a business. Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and the Washington Monthly aren’t businesses. Meanwhile, I (and probably a lot of other people) read it a lot less after they put their best content behind a subscription barrier and cut their staff.
I suppose they’ll have to declare bankruptcy and go dark before the remains can be salvaged. It’s also troubling that the fate of The WELL hangs in the balance here.
I kept vainly hoping one of the big newspaper corporations would buy it and repurpose Salon’s content in their papers. But the only real solution for Salon is to find an rich individual to bankroll it for personal reasons. That’s why Slate is still around.

I love Comedy Central’s Daily Show and think it’s one of the smartest things on TV. Apparently, more 18 to 49-year-olds get their news from the Daily Show than any other cable news program. They certainly could do worse. There’s probably more real information on that show than the average local news broadcast. And more truth than on the whole Fox News Channel.

Perhaps the avatars of media synergy are beginning to realize that it doesn’t work.
Disney has announced that its online sites (ESPN.com, Disney.com, ABCNews.com, GO.com, etc.) are collectively making money. After abandoning its synergy-driven GO.com strategy and giving its business units both control of and responsibility for their online divisions, they figured out a way to make a buck with online content.

“I feel good that we’ve been able to sort of figure it out,” said Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group.

Astonishingly, AOL/TW told the NY Times that Harry Potter hasn’t and isn’t going to be carrying a lot of synergistic baggage:

“The biggest advantage we have had from AOL Time Warner is the support to be able, if we chose, to say no to something even if it was in the best interest of another division,” said Diane Henry, a senior vice president for marketing at Warner Brothers Pictures. “It was always driven by what is best for Harry Potter rather than some synergistic effort.”

Most of the synergy went one way last year, with AOL/TW’s outlets carrying tons of promotion for the movie, and not receiving a lot of merchandising goodies in return.
Meanwhile, CBS MarketWatch is looking to buy Edgar Online. MarketWatch is the beneficiary of CBS’s anti-synergy approach of taking big minority stakes in Internet companies and letting them do what they do best.
It’s too soon to say whether Disney and AOL/TW are prepared to say that they lied to stockholders and themselves about the synergy in the acquisitions. It’ll probably take a real change of management before that happens.

The top online publishers have posted revenue increases of 36% for the third quarter over last year. This is a much better performance than online advertising as a whole, or the big portals.

The Register brings us a remarkable letter from EMI Germany that displays such blatant contempt for the the helpless customer that I thought it was a forgery. But after a couple of days, there has been no denial.

MSNBC is charging for video and audio. Good idea. Video and audio content on the Web will never draw a large enough audience to make economic sense on the basis of advertising. Hell, MSNBC can’t get enough volume to make money selling ads on its cable network.

The Christain Science Monitor now offers RSS feeds of its news. This is the first major news source to put its entire content in RSS format. I doubt it will be the last.
I, like a lot of other people, have found that I can scan a lot more sites for interesting information using RSS feeds. The delivery and rendering of the text is faster and being able to see all the news in a consistent format makes it much easier to scan headlines and summaries.
I have also found that I have dropped RSS sources that don’t provide a summary of their stories. For sites that aren’t in the top tier, RSS is almost guaranteed to increase the number and quality of their readers. For top tier sites, they may get fewer browsers, but should be able to increase the loyalty and frequency of their most-loyal readers.

MyWay is a portal without popups or banners. It focuses on text ads and has a prominent Google logo next to its search field.
Saul Hansell notes that it shares ownership with iWon, which he describes as “perhaps the most garish and crass of all the portals.” It’s notable that these guys also own Excite.com, once the second largest site on the net, destroyed by its management and VC’s in a fit of distribution/content integration and rich-media madness. MyWay is fallout from the CMGI meltdown.
It’s an interesting concept, but I’d like to see it executed by someone else.

Magazine publishers are unhappy that they sell their product so cheaply. The average subscription price of a magazine has dropped 17 percent in the last five years.`
The Times notes that publishers hate to lower their guaranteed circulations (the logical result of higher subscription prices) because it leads to lower ad rates.
From the article: ‘In Arizona, Ken Auletta, the media reporter for The New Yorker, was the host of a panel of chief executives who all made arguments decrying low subscription prices and suggesting that someone should do something about the problem sometime. “You all run big media companies,” he said. “You have the power to do it.’

Reuters’ recurring media revenue fell by eight per cent, due to web sites cancelling services such as news and information feeds.
This probably signals an adjustment in the online news business. General news is a commodity, and so are general news audiences. A lot of sites must be reconsidering paying for news feeds that are not perceived as exclusive.