Want a media job? Dust off your resume, highlight your experience covering entertainment and Hollywood, and then give Jay Penske a call. The owner of Mail.com Media Corp. continues to make high-profile hires for his burgeoning Web publishing business. The latest: Celebrity editrix Bonnie Fuller, who will take over this Hollywood Life site.
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.
Earlier this year, an online publishing trade group promised to get its members to start running new, bigger, harder-to-ignore ads by July. So here they are: The Online Publishers Association says 37 sites, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN.com, will start selling the plus-sized ads this week. Now we’ll see if they work.
Are you one of those Kindle owners who stuffs your device with cheap e-books? Enjoy it now, say analysts at Bernstein Research. Because they’re not going to stay cheap, or at least, not quite as cheap, forever. Right now Amazon makes much more money selling you a hardcover book than a digital one. That can’t go on indefinitely.
Poor John Squires. The Time Inc. SVP seems like an affable fellow. So what has he done to deserve this impossible task–figuring out a digital strategy for Time Warner’s publishing unit? Or, to put it in Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore’s words, figuring out “how to put the genie back in the bottle”?
Time Warner has yet to dispose of AOL, but there’s lots of sotto voce chatter about CEO Jeff Bewkes’ next move. Last month, I reported that people familiar with Bewkes’ thinking believe he’s planning on selling off the company’s namesake Time Inc. publishing unit in 2010.
Today, Pali Capital analyst Rich Greenfield picks up the torch.
The traditional publishing business is grim, but if you broaden your perspective and look at the rest of the media business, things are starting to look… not horrible.
Granted, “not horrible” doesn’t equal “good times are here again.” But I keep hearing that the sickening decline in advertising spending has stopped, at least, and that some marketers are actually spending money again.
Want a big screen Kindle? You’re going to have to pay up — or get a subscription to the New York Times, the Boston Globe or the Washington Post.
Time Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?
More than you think. Or more precisely, they all have former media bank bigwig Steve Rattner in common.
Want to buy an e-book reader but can’t decide between Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s version, the Reader? Then you’re in the minority: Most folks are choosing Amazon’s device, even though Sony’s sells for $60 less. Sony’s newest gambit to change that: A tie-up with Google that will add half a million free titles to the Sony book catalog.
Remember last month, when Amazon said it planned to make its Kindle e-book titles available on other devices, but wouldn’t say what devices, or when?
Now we know. As of today, you can now read Kindle titles on your Apple iPhone.
If the Kindle is the iPod for books, do we need a Kindle for magazines and newspapers? I’d say no. But publishing heavyweight Hearst disagrees and is going to come out with an e-reader of its own, according to a published report.
Kindle fans like to describe Amazon’s e-book reader as the “iPod of the Book World.” The counter-argument is that such a thing already exists, and that Apple already makes it: the iPhone, which offers plenty of apps that let you download and read books on the go. Now the line between the two devices is about to get blurrier: Amazon, which is set to introduce a new version of the Kindle on Monday, is also preparing to sell books that will work on other, unnamed mobile phones.
Amazon is set to unveil Kindle 2.0 next Monday at a New York press event. But how many of the original e-book readers has it sold already? Don’t ask Jeff Bezos and company. But Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney figures Amazon sold 500,000 devices last year and that the Kindle will be a billion-dollar business by next year.
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 »
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