Betty White Hosted an SNL Episode; Now We Need @BPGlobalPR to Write One

As much damage as has been done to BP—its market cap slashed by more than a third, its image decimated, its executives shown to be rich bumblers—you could pretty easily argue it’s only gotten a fraction of the pain it deserves. It hasn’t even been able to stop the flow of oil, let alone begin […]

What Would William Randolph Hearst Say About the iCrossing Deal?

When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a […]

The Media Business Might Need a Savior, but Steve Jobs Isn’t It

When Steve Jobs speaks, people listen. Not only do they listen, but their jaws drop slack, a droplet of saliva drools to the chin to dry and the head nods in happy obedience. That’s all well and good when you’re talking about hordes of mindless fanboys who have given over their souls to the Apple […]

The Big Lesson From the Facebook Flap: The Digital Ad Business Needs to Regulate Itself

If you were Mark Zuckerberg today, you’d be forgiven for extending your Memorial Day vacation an extra 24 hours and do whatever it is you would do for fun if you were Mark Zuckerberg Weeks of getting pounded in the media over your company’s approach to privacy had amounted to nothing more a particularly pesky […]

Newsflash: Newsweek.com’s Minimalist Redesign Isn’t Bloggy

When major news organizations born in print revamp their digital homes, more is generally regarded as more. With its new look website this week, Newsweek has bucked that trend, going for a clean look and feel that stands in sharp contrast to the feature jumble you get from Time.com, The New York Times and other […]

Publishers, Follow The New Yorker on iPad Pricing. Please.

I currently pay $2.99 a month for access to the The New Yorker on my Kindle. It’s actually a great way to read the magazine’s almost entirely text-driven content. And it’s probably an improvement on print when you consider how hard copies of the New Yorker tend to pile up. With the Kindle subscription, you […]

An Imaginary(ish) Conversation Between Carol Bartz and Mark Zuckerberg

Yesterday was a big day, PR-wise, for Mark Zuckerberg and Carol Bartz. Zuck used the austere pages of the Washington Post to soothe concerns about Facebook’s will to invade privacy, while Bartz showed up on stage at a TechCrunch conference to defend Yahoo against one of its loudest critics, TechCrunch founder, Michael Arrington. Both CEOs […]

In Deal for Associated Content, Yahoo Buys the Farm

Earlier this week, Yahoo purchased Associated Content for about $100 million, giving Yahoo an enormous library of inexpensive, search-engine optimized content and the means to produce much more of it. Associated Content is usually described as a content farm or content mill, but you could certainly pick many other descriptors for its model: the mass […]

5 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About the Online Porn Business

Ever dream of building a porn website? Then you should have become an academic. Maybe you would have been one of the five “security researchers” from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and University of California- Santa Barbara who set out to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do […]

The Facebook Exodus Will be Small — And Very Canadian

When May 31 rolls around, I’ll do what I do on the last day of every other month: Pay my rent and some other bills, go to work and come home. What I won’t be doing is quitting Facebook, despite the best efforts of some to turn the day into a mass rejection of the […]