Yesterday, Viacom told Wall Street that its third quarter had been better than most analysts expected. Today Time Warner delivered a similar report: Revenue was on track, but cost savings improved the bottom line. That won’t help hundreds of Time Inc. employees who face job cuts this quarter. Meanwhile, the company can’t ditch AOL soon enough: It has already spent $100 million prepping it for a spinoff this year.

Read More »

The New York Times announced plans to cut eight percent of its newsroom payroll this week, citing “economic thunderstorms,” which suggested that this morning’s earnings results were going to be particularly unpleasant. Surprise! They’re not that awful, at least by the diminished standards of the newspaper industry.

Read More »

Maybe this is why Comcast rushed to knock down a story that said it bought NBC Universal from GE: It knew Wall Street would hate the idea.

Read More »

Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.

A survey of some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, concludes that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent. Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.

Read More »

Remember when the analysts at Credit Suisse decided that YouTube was losing close to half a billion dollars a year? That was then–five months ago, to be precise–and this is now: Those same analysts estimate that Google’s video site is losing a mere…$410 million a year.

Read More »

Google famously doesn’t give “guidance” to Wall Street analysts. But starting next month, the company will be giving them lessons via a series of “educational webcasts for investors and financial analysts.”

Best case scenario: This could be a huge help to people who pay attention to the search giant for a living but who remain baffled about some of the most basic parts of its business. So if you know anyone like that (ahem), make sure he tunes in.

Read More »

This is now an Apple earnings-call tradition: Analysts try their hardest to convince Apple executives to express interest in the booming market for cheap netbooks and Apple executives make it perfectly clear how much disdain they have for netbooks. But an $800 iTablet? That’s something else altogether…

Read More »

Twitter has weighed in on the hacker who rooted through the company’s files and on the Web sites that published some of the stolen info. The short version: Don’t blame Google for our security problems; we need to use better passwords. But do be careful about publishing hacked data; we’re talking to our lawyers. “Bring it on,” says Gawker.

Read More »

Amazon won’t come out and say exactly what happened to it sales-ranking system over the past few days. But it is sorry, and it would like the Web and its customers to know that it wasn’t singling out books aimed at gays and lesbians.

Read More »