It’s only a few days since Alan Rusbridger gave his lecture on libel and privacy at City University, but a lot has changed. The tabloid kiss-and-tell business model that seemed to be on its knees last week has suddenly found its legs again. 1) Twitter has blown the gaff on CTB (an event which presumably [...]
Associated & Northcliffe Media, the consumer arm of Daily Mail & General Trust, is preparing to launch a competitor to US-based discount voucher site Groupon. According to a source familiar with the project, DMGT is currently working on final builds of its “daily deals” platform. DMGT is expected to acquire what’s described as “a very [...]
Is there something wrong with the way the media talks about online publishing? In the real world, people search for the term “online display” far more frequently than they search for “paywall” (see search volume index in chart above). Yet Google Trends tell us that the popularity of these terms is reversed in media coverage [...]
The sight of Arianna Huffington selling out to AOL prompted scorn in some quarters. Nick Denton of Gawker was predictably caustic. “I thought Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer were reinventing news, rather than simply flipping to a flailing conglomerate,” said Denton. He went on to ask whether AOL is becoming “a roach hotel for once [...]
Recently, I’ve been working on a big research project. Yesterday, I had Delicious links, PDFs, spreadsheets and Word documents open on my desktop when I came across a couple of useful presentations on Scribd. I’ll have them, I thought. So I clicked. What happened next surprised me: I was given the choice of logging in [...]
In one vision of the future, the question is not if, but when, content gets revolutionised. Viewed from this perspective, the contemporary history of Big Media is a sequence of car crashes involving first the music business, then newspapers, followed by the book industry, Hollywood, magazines and television. But what if technology affects content not [...]
Judged by its own high standards, The Sun had a poor election. Yes, we got the UK Debt Clock, The Dossier That Shames Labour and the argument that readers should vote Tory in order to save Page 3. On the eve of polling day, however, the Sun invited Simon Cowell to share his vision for a [...]
Microsoft went public in 1986. Less than a decade later, the company found itself on the wrong end of a US Justice Department consent decree forbidding it to bundle new products with Windows. Undaunted, the company went on to plough $300m into a mind-bogglingly ambitious marketing campaign for Windows 95. Microsoft’s competitive mantra — embrace, [...]
The company that makes Monopoly has a problem. Back in September, Hasbro launched Monopoly City Streets, a massive multiplayer online game that transforms Google Maps into a globalised version of the well-known board game. In the run-up to Christmas, the online game was supposed to promote a boxed version of the game that Hasbro sells [...]