The layoff ax swings close to home today: The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau, which will result in up to nine job losses. News Corp. which owns the Journal as well as this site, has been pouring resources into the paper, but the Journal certainly isn’t immune to the pressures that all print publishers are under these days
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.
Web advertisers are trying hard to create ads you can’t look away from. But they can get a little too disruptive.
Rupert Murdoch has been pushing The Wall Street Journal to raise its prices. Here’s one way to try it: Levy an additional fee for subscribers who want to use the paper’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.
Even when the M&A market was shut down, Wall Street couldn’t stop speculating about GE’s intentions for its NBC Universal unit. And now that it’s deal-making time again, the chatter is getting very noisy.
Hence the flurry of coverage over yesterday’s remarks by Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, in which he said…not very much.
The Financial Times’s pay wall for its FT.com site has been a success. So what’s with the note warning wayward emailers?
The owner of The Wall Street Journal tries to convince other publishers join up and charge readers for online news. Tough job! Even tougher: Creating news worth paying for.
Every year, media moguls gather at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley conference to listen to each other gab, parade around in casual wear and occasionally make deals. And for the last several years, the New York Times has provided excellent on-the-ground coverage, usually via Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin. Not this year.
You’ll be hearing about this most of the day, so best to take five minutes and watch it now: “The Daily Show” visits the New York Times.
After years of training people to expect that whatever you can find on the Web will be free, media companies are trying — desperately — to reverse the trend, and figure out how to get people to pay up. Or at least some of the people, some of the time, for some stuff. This assumes that there’s unique stuff that people are willing to pay for, and I don’t know about that thesis. But if it does pan out, the guys behind Journalism Online want to handle the backend.
So what exactly were the 24 newspaper publishers who gathered in suburban Chicago yesterday talking about? We don’t know, because the meeting was held off the record and participants like the New York Times, Gannett and Hearst aren’t talking about it. Except we do know, sort of.
The New York Times turned down a chance to borrow money from Hollywood mogul David Geffen last winter and went with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim instead. So says the New Yorker, which also reports that Geffen tried to buy the paper outright in September.
Here’s the newest twist in the Facebook valuation/funding saga: Russian investors have reportedly offered to sink up to $350 million in Mark Zuckerberg’s social network–at two different valuations. The Wall Street Journal says investment group Digital Sky Technologies has offered to spend $200 million on a chunk of the company’s preferred stock at a $10 billion valuation, and is also offering to buy up to $150 million worth of the company’s common stock at a $6.5 billion valuation.
A new series of reports argues that billionaire David Geffen doesn’t want to make money by investing in the New York Times–he wants to save it. Fair enough. But how exactly does he plan to do that?
File this one under “hard to say it’s news”: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company would consider more layoffs–if the economy falls off another cliff. Gotta credit him with consistency: He said the exact same thing a week ago.
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.
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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