Category Archives: media

WSJ owners get a whopper of an offer

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. made a $5 billion offer for Dow Jones, representing an eye-popping 67% premium above the company’s recent market value. Shares of Dow Jones quickly shot up to near the value of the News Corp offer, indicating … Continue reading →

Posted in journalism, media, newspapers, publishing | Comments Off

Who reads the front page?

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

I was trying to determine how profitable Tribune’s online operations would be if they blocked sites from displaying links to their stories. The answer: “Not very.” The stats for washingtonpost.com and nytimes.com (which have much stronger online operations than Tribune) … Continue reading →

Posted in journalism, media, newspapers, publishing | 4 Comments

Advertisers disintermediating newspapers, too

Posted on April 8, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

I wrote yesterday about content providers disintermediating newspapers. Advertisers are doing the same. We’ve all heard about the effects that craigslist has had on the three pillars of the classified business: real estate, automotive and recruitment. Direct-to-consumer email poses a … Continue reading →

Posted in advertising, local search, media, newspapers, publishing | 3 Comments

Disintermediating newspapers (and the most useless RSS feed ever)

Posted on April 7, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

I mentioned earlier that one of the big challenges facing newspapers is that much of what they do is unoriginal; many newspapers are just aggregators. Comics are an example of content that many people looked to newspaper for. Mislead the … Continue reading →

Posted in media, newspapers, publishing | 4 Comments

Newspapers vs. search engines

Posted on April 7, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

The Tribune company’s soon-to-be owner, Sam Zell doesn’t like search engines. From the Washington Post: In conversations before and after a speech Zell delivered Thursday night at Stanford Law School in Palo Alto, Calif., the billionaire said newspapers could not … Continue reading →

Posted in google, media, newspapers, publishing, web 2, web 2.0 | 7 Comments

A new local platform from Topix

Posted on April 2, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

I’ve written before about the need for newspapers to go hyperlocal — allow readers to get ultra-targetted news about where they live from their neighbors. Topix, a company owned by newspaper companies, is offering a platform to do that. Topix … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, journalism, media, newspapers, web 2, web 2.0 | 1 Comment

NewsCorpNBCYahooMSNMySpaceAOLTube vs. GooTube

Posted on March 23, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

NBC and News Corp announced a broad-reaching partnership this week that will feature shows from NBC and Fox on AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! — all the major Internet players except Google, the owner of YouTube. The major television networks … Continue reading →

Posted in aol, apple, google, media, microsoft, television, video, yahoo, YouTube | 1 Comment

Blogging from a coffee shop

Posted on March 17, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

It may be cliche, but this is my first time. As I sit here on a Saturday morning, I see more bad news for the newspaper industry: the ratio of laptop users to newspaper readers here is 2:1. And I’m … Continue reading →

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Journalists, bloggers and parasites

Posted on March 6, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

There’s an interesting discussion at the Online Journalism Review about whether bloggers are parasites: Over the past months, I’ve heard several journalists make the same comment at various industry forums: That blogs are a “parasitic” medium that wouldn’t be able … Continue reading →

Posted in blogs, journalism, media, newspapers | 2 Comments

USA Today goes community crazy

Posted on March 5, 2007 by Rakesh Agrawal

USA Today got a facelift over the weekend, with heaping doses of community thrown in. The new site allows you to vote stories up, comment on stories and vote on comments. Selected quotes from user comments are displayed on the … Continue reading →