Last week, as the media blogosphere analyzed the announcement of a paywall at the New York Times, I was more fascinated with another recent obsession of mine: Foursquare.
To find its way out of the red, the New York Times must begin acknowledging its strengths sincerely. There is no success in uninspired subscription models that already failed years ago. Sean Blanda is right, the Grey Lady no longer commands any loyalty, but that should not be confused with a lack of brand recognition — the Times, like many other large newspapers, still retains a high level of trust and prestige that can be leveraged without erosion of the brand.
When posting the obituary of late author J.D. Salinger, the New York Times forgot to give the story one last proofreading:
Journalists need to learn to tell a good story without monopolizing it.
Sites targeting local communities gained momentum, and some big investors.
There was plenty of talk - but less action - around how paid content models will save journalism.
No issue divided the media world in 2009 quite like paid content. While some people are convinced that pay walls are the worst idea in the history of business, some believe they are digital media's last chance.
Industry pundits and CEOs have waffled about pay walls as a business model and have given us plenty of sound bite-worthy assessments on this complex issue. Here are some of our favorites:
The Boston Globe has launched the GlobeReader, an Adobe Air software package that promises to let the weberati recreate the "newspaper experience" online. They launched it with a two-page spread in the A section of last Sunday's edition. Apparently they think this is only of interest to their dead tree readers, as there is no mention of it WHATSOEVER on the home page of Boston.com.
The news that Microsoft is offering to pay News Corp. and possibly other publishers to remove their content from Google’s search engine in favor of Microsoft’s Bing (first reported by FT.com) shows more than anything that Microsoft is happy to assist Rupert Murdoch in his holy war against free content and Google.
A panel of media heavyweights discussed at ad:tech in New York today the future of the news business and the transformation taking place within the industry.
The key message, delivered by Denise Warren, senior vice president and chief advertising officer for the New York Times: Transformation begins with process innovation.
© 2010 Vital Business Media, Inc.
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