After I filed my piece detailing my experience as a Demand Studios writer, I was discouraged that I had to leave the reader hanging as I had yet to get my story approved and published.

I’ve been in journalism for close to 30 years. As one would expect, my skills, the tools of the trade and the state of the industry itself have evolved dramatically over that time.

Newsrooms that once functioned under a cloud of cigarette smoke now work in a cloud computing environment. Writers who once tucked a reporter’s notebook in their back pocket now wield a digital voice recorder or a Flip camcorder. Editors who once redlined copy and haggled over how headlines matched the lead art now stress over Web analytics and keyword selection.

 The Columbia Journalism Review just released a report called "Magazines and Their Web Sites".  It's possible to draw a conclusion from the findings that magazine websites are more likely to be profitable if they put "web guys" in charge and don't worry much about things like copy editing or fact checking.  Well, you might think that if you confused correlation with causality.

Does your sales forecast call for clouds? Cloud computing – in which hosted services are delivered over the Internet – is gaining traction in many industries as companies look for cost-effective ways to manage IT infrastructures and applications such as customer relationship management (CRM). For media companies looking for cost-effective ways to upgrade their aging tech systems, the cloud may hold at least part of the answer.

"Media has become a platform of services," said David Liu, CEO of The Knot, during day one of Federation of International Periodical Publishers (FIPP) Digital Innovators Summit yesterday. During a session named, "Digital revenues: beyond the banner," Liu laid out how The Knot transformed itself from a handful of websites relying on national display advertisers for well over 50 percent of its revenues in the early 2000's to a network of over 280 sites with less than 20% reliance on display today.

There’s plenty of talk, most of it negative, about the “content factory” model that’s gaining traction on the Web. Media companies including Demand Media, Associated Content and About.com have created high-volume, commodity editorial businesses, relying on a network of freelancers who are compensated solely on how many page views their articles generate.

UPDATE: Citibank has apologized to Fabulis. Here's the email here.

Citibank froze the bank account of the media startup Fabulis on Monday, due to "objectionable content" on Fabulis.com, according to Fabulis' CEO Jason Goldberg. 

It’s not easy being in ad sales these days. We bear the responsibility of generating the majority of revenue associated with our publication(s) but have almost no decision-making authority when it comes to the tools, technology and training we need to gain a competitive edge.  

I hear more and more media executives lament how their salespeople can’t sell digital or that they’re not using a consultative sales approach. There’s a remedy for this: Train your sales team to use web analytics platforms.