The newspaper bailout proposal you may have heard about over the last few months? The newspapers want no part of it, says an industry spokesman.
That said, the industry wouldn’t turn down some help from Congress, says John Sturm, CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. He is testifying before a joint committee this morning.
Did a federal court just give underemployed M&A guys a boost? Could be: The United States Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., has overturned a longstanding cap on cable-system ownership.
If the decision holds up, it could well start another round of dealmaking similar to the one we saw at the beginning of this decade in which the industry consolidated to about half a dozen major players.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t make it to his company’s earnings call today, but he did find time to apologize for Kindlegate–Amazon’s ham-fisted removal of George Orwell novels from his customers’ e-book readers. Great, right? Almost.
Remember last week, when President Barack Obama threw out the first pitch at baseball’s All-Star Game? And remember the ensuing fuss about his form? And remember how Jon Stewart sliced through all of the crap with his typically incisive wit?
Alas, you’ve got no choice but to remember that last part. It has disappeared from the Web, apparently at the behest of Major League Baseball.
Want to work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune? Make sure you can demonstrate mastery of Facebook and Twitter. The daily is looking for a political reporter and insists that the new hire shows up with Web 2.0 bona fides.
Vanity Fair’s prescient decision to put all of Todd Purdum’s Sarah Palin profile on the Web last week paid off big on Friday. But it would have done even better had the story featured a slideshow with photographs of attractive young women.
Want access to the Washington D.C. elite? The city’s hometown paper is happy to arrange that for you provided you’re willing to pay between $25,000 and $250,000. The caveat: That fee won’t include access to the Washington Post’s editorial staff. But I bet that will change sooner than later.
Here comes the battle the online ad business has been dreading: Congress is drawing up a bill that would require users to sign up to let advertisers track their online behavior–and, if you believe online publishers, more or less destroy the online ad business.
How do we know that Google isn’t tracking the viewing records of people who watch YouTube videos at the official White House Web site? Because Google says so. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says that’s good enough for it, but Google’s answer may not satisfy everyone.
Skeptical about the impact of Twitter on the unrest in Tehran? The State Department isn’t: It asked the service to reschedule its planned maintenance/outage so Iranians could use it to communicate in and outside of the country.
Want to watch Web clips of Barack Obama’s latest press conference (or backyard shoot-around) but worry that the Administration–or Google–is watching you? Worry no more!
Want to watch the season finale of “30 Rock” for free, whenever you want, on a big screen? Go for it, says Hulu–just don’t watch it on a TV.
Confused? Of course. So was I when I checked out Hulu’s new “Desktop” app, launched today as part of the video service’s new “Labs” collection of experimental offerings.
Basically, it’s downloadable software that makes it easier than ever to watch Hulu’s shows and clips in the same way that you’d watch TV–on your sofa, remote in hand. But Hulu wants to make sure you don’t actually think it replaces TV.
Talk to online ad folks for any amount of time and you’ll walk away thinking that behavioral targeting–whereby marketers track and chase Web surfers based on which sites they visit and what they do there–is both old hat and the wave of the future. But I’m still convinced that there’s a very big gap between the way the ad industry views this stuff and the way politicians and average Americans do. For a reminder, head on over to NebuAd’s Web site, which no longer works. That’s because the targeting firm, which once employed 60 people, closed up shop on Friday.
Many of you are just hearing Josh Marshall’s name for the first time, following the New York Times’s admission that columnist Maureen Dowd “failed to attribute” some of her column to him. But that’s a shame because Marshall’s site is noteworthy on its own merits: It’s a self-funded, profitable new-media site that does both blogging/aggregation and real reporting.
I’m still skeptical that “The Performance Rights Act,” which would require radio stations to pay musicians–or at least, music labels–whenever they play one of their recordings, will ever get through Congress. Not because it’s a bad idea, mind you, but because the music business seems like an unlikely candidate for Washington aid. The bill, however, did take one big step forward today.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
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