Gourmet: The Newest Zombie Media Brand

Earlier this week there was a bit of hubub around Gourmet magazine, the beloved foodie bible tossed out with the fish guts last year by its cost-chopping publisher, Conde Nast, under the guidance of its knife-sharpener McKinsey. Yesterday morning, Ruth Reichl, the Gourmet editor at the time of its demise, used her Twitter account to […]

Is the FCC’s Consideration of Media Ownership Laws a Waste of Time?

When I first started writing about media seven years ago, the biggest public-policy question was this: How many media outlets should one company be allowed to own in a given market? In those pre-Google IPO, pre-Facebook days, there was a very real concern that big, publicly-owned media companies, like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. or Clear […]

The Best Media Writing of the Week: Ebert, Cheezburger, Gillmor and More

The amazing Robert Ebert details his Twitter addiction and lays down some smart rules for how to use the tool. I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I […]

McKinsey Gets Social. Maybe Now CEOs Will Start Listening

I was initially unmoved by the news earlier this week that McKinsey is doing a joint venture with Nielsen leading the management consultancy to take over BuzzMetrics, one of the many firms out there that analyze what people are saying about companies online. There’s been so much acquisition action in that monitoring space over the […]

Some Suggested Taglines for MySpace’s New Ad Campaign

Ad Age has the scoop that MySpace is poking — hahahaha- wrong network — around for an ad agency to do a branding blitz in support of it oh-so-hotly anticipated relaunch. The News Corp.-owned property has been getting pounded by Facebook, even with its big-time PR screw-ups. Global users, according to Ad Age, has dropped […]

A Corporate Website That Doesn’t Suck, Courtesy of Crispin Porter and Bogusky

I never thought I’d say this, but I just saw a corporate website from an ad holding company that doesn’t completely suck. For the uninitiated, the lion’s share of the largest ad agencies are owned by a handful of publicly-traded conglomerates with names like Omnicom, Interpublic and WPP that function largely as financial institutions. They’re […]

What the FTC Doesn’t Understand About Journalism

The FTC probably isn’t going to save journalism, you won’t be shocked to hear. The agency recently dropped a set of potential policy recommendations resulting from its yearlong investigation into the news business’ commercial woes. It’s a 47-page (with footnotes) round-up of the problems facing news organizations with some surface-level thinking on how to remedy […]

The Best Media Writing of the Week: Libel, Newsweek, Remnick and Shirky

Our weekly round-up of the strongest thinking and writing on the media business that you might not have seen. Clay Shirky tells us to stop worrying and learn to love the fact that any moron can produce content. The past was not as golden, nor is the present as tawdry, as the pessimists suggest, but […]

GM’s ‘Chevy’ Screw-Up: A New Coke for the Twitter Age

For years now and despite all its woes, General Motors has been one of the more aggressive adopters of social marketing tactics among the big old American corporations. It has a social media team that pushes its products and fields complaints, using platforms from Twitter and Facebook down to Gowalla. Social’s been a big at […]

Finally, a Smart Alternative to the AP

The maturation of the digital news business hasn’t been kind to the Associated Press. In addition to fighting a pointless battle with Google over the distribution of AP articles in its news channel and taking potshots at aggregators, the iconic news association has been dumped by CNN, as the network pushes its own newswire offering. […]