Interesting footnote in AT&T’s earnings this morning: The carrier everyone loves to hate has quietly become the carrier of choice for e-book readers from Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble. They generated a million new subscriptions last quarter, and now the iPad will bring more.
After much consideration, the New York Times has finally decided to start charging readers for access to its Web site. But not for a while: The Times says it will introduce a “metered model” for NYT.com in 2011.
Has the New York Times finally started charging people to read its news online? Not yet. But people who aren’t the New York Times are using the paper’s name and charging iPhone users to read the paper’s stuff–with Apple’s blessing. What gives?
Want to sell a book to readers who own one of Amazon’s Kindles? Better make sure the price is very, very low. As in zero dollars and zero cents.
Here’s yet another content creator that’s convinced Apple has a tablet device in the works: Condé Nast says it will have a digital version of Wired magazine ready for the purported gadget by the middle of next year and will eventually create similar versions for all of its 18 titles.
But Condé, like other publishers, says Apple won’t actually talk to the company about its plans for the device–or even acknowledge that it has plans.
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
No surprise that Americans are dropping their newspaper subscriptions, as a new batch of numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed yesterday. But before you file this under “death of newspapers,” something to ponder for a second: This might not be the worst news in the world.
Condé Nast is still in layoff mode, but that hasn’t stopped the publisher from putting together an app worth writing about. It’s part of a digital magazine strategy that actually makes some sense.
What’s one of the biggest names in magazine publishing worth? These days, maybe $5 million.
That’s the high end of the range Bloomberg will be paying for BusinessWeek, reports BusinessWeek. Next question: How many of the magazine’s employees stay on once the deal closes later this year? BusinessWeek publisher Keith Fox can’t make any assurances. But he does call the deal “exciting.”
Just in case anyone thought Time Warner had any lingering interest in NBC Universal, this ought to put it to rest: Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes just compared the proposed Comcast/NBCU deal with the disastrous one his company made with AOL nearly a decade ago.
Time Inc. has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet. Publishers like the idea. What will Apple and Amazon say?
How did the New York Times end up serving a fake–and potentially dangerous–ad from its NYTimes.com site over the weekend? It got paid to do it by someone masquerading as a legitimate ad buyer.
Here’s a front-page story the New York Times would rather not be running: The paper is warning readers to be aware of bogus ads running on its Web site.
The paper says “some readers” have seen unauthorized pop-up ads promoting antivirus software on NYTimes.com, and warns visitors who see the ad not to click on it but to restart their browsers instead. While the Times doesn’t spell this out, it has likely had its site hijacked by a “malware” scammer who is trying to trick visitors into installing pernicious software onto their hard drives.
Buy an e-book for Amazon’s Kindle recently? You might want to check to see if it’s still on your device. Kindle users are complaining that the e-commerce giant has removed titles from their machines this week and given them refunds in their place.
What happened? The details are fuzzy, but apparently, a publisher that supplied Amazon with two George Orwell titles has decided that it doesn’t want to sell them via Amazon anymore. So away they went. Have at it, DRM-haters.
Funny because it’s true, almost: “For just pennies a day, you can clothe, feed, and shelter newspaper professionals.” Meanwhile, this one’s for real: The New York Times asks subscribers what they’d think about paying $5 for Web access to the paper.
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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