Traffic Alone is Not a Business: Reddit-Conde Nast Edition

It’s easy to hate on deals of the Conde Nast-Reddit variety. When a big traditional publisher snaps up a website with no clear strategy in mind — or at least no strategy made public — it begs more questions than it answers. What does an old-line company who excels at matching blue-chip advertisers with its […]

The Squid and the Fail: What’s Wrong ‘The Social Network”s Trailer

I’m necessarily fascinated by Facebook. I adore the movies of David Fincher. I can tolerate Aaron Sorkin’s schtickiness. Jesse Eisenberg did young neurotic well in “The Squid and the Whale.” So why am I not excited about “The Social Network,” the forthcoming fil-um about the shady-to-the-max early days of the social network? Probably because the […]

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 […]

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 […]

Testing a Truncated RSS Feed on Above the Law: The Results Are In

It’s time to wrap up the month-long trial of truncated RSS feeds on Above the Law. I had somewhat put the conclusion cart before the research horse, in that I marked the last day of this experiment in my calendar with the phrase “eat humble pie re. RSS.” And if you wait just a minute […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Best Recent Writing (and Ranting) About the Media Business

The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far […]

Was Gawker’s Decision to Identify the ‘Racist’ Harvard Emailer Unethical? We Say Yes.

The notion of online privacy may be nothing more than a “fallacy,” as one New York judge recently opined, but anyone concerned with both the free-flow of information and with being fair to the subjects of news coverage will confront this question:  Do bloggers and journalists have a responsibility to protect the identities of the […]