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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Varieties of Facebook Revolt

Facebook has gone and done it again. Yet another round of changes has sparked a wave of revulsion that hasn’t been seen since, well, the last time Mark Zuckerberg altered the way you and your information are used by the massively popular social network. To an increasing number of people who think about the Internet, […]