Magazine — The Wall Street Journal to launch a glossy
Rupert Murdoch is joining the pursuit: big ad dollars in glossies. The Anglo-Saxon market is crammed with such magazines (Condé Nast’s Portfolio, Robb Report, FT’s How to Spend it, The Economist’s Intelligent Life, etc.). For the Wall Street Journal, it is a logical step : the average household income of a WSJ subscriber is $253,000.
> this story in the Washington Post explains Murdoch’s strategy about synergies. His message to the Journal: We don’t want to cheapen your brand.
Social Networks — FT courts students via Facebook
The Financial Times is launching a new application that will give student access to FT.com. They will be able to apply for a free subscription for a maximum of four times. Nice bargain. (FT.com has claimed an average of 5.7m unique visitors a month in 2007, a jump of 30% from the previous year).
> story in Press Gazette{/content}
classifieds — Craigslist’s traffic still growing
The overall traffic of the free classifieds website is still growing at full throttle : +93% year-to-year, for the first week of March, according to Hitwise. Measured in the classifieds category, the growth is even better.
> details on Hitwise
monopoly — Google to get EU approval for DoubleClick acquistion
Good week ahead for Google : according to Bloomberg, it will get the approval from European regulators for the planned $3.1bn acquisition of the main ad serving company DoubleClick. Ruling could come as early as March 11. This green light was critical for the takeover. Google was always clear: if the deal is blocked by EU, it will be dropped. This gets Google to an absolute dominant position in the ad display business. > story in Bloomberg
Yahoo/microsoft — Waging the war from the inside
Microsoft is contemplating the idea of reshaping Yahoo’s board from the inside through a proxy fight, rather than launching an all-out war. According to Business Week, a proxy action would cost Microsoft $20m to $30m. In contrast, each dollar-per-share increase in Microsoft’s bid would add $1.4 billion to the takeover tab.
> story in BW
Microcredit — In New York, the sub-sub prime lender
{What sort of sign is that ? As America is on the verge of a recession thanks to a bitter credit-crunch, the global role-model of microcredit, Muhammad Yunus has launched in January Grameen America. Grameen lends money to the poorest tier of the American population, those with no credit, and no collateral. And thanks to the peculiar way in which Yunus handles credit, these borrowers are not the last ones to repay the loan. Last week, the Wall Street Journal devoted an entire page to a Muhammad Yunus interview.
> story here
User-generated-content — The tyranny of the minority
The online magazine Slate (build in 1996 on old but reliable principles of journalism), is bashing up the illusion of a Web 2.0 “democracy”. In users generated sites like Digg or Wikipedia, a tiny fraction of users are actually creating most of the edits.
> story in Slate{/content}
French press — Sarkozy boosts magazines sales
In 2007, French magazines published 252 cover stories about Nicolas Sarkozy, as candidate or new president, on both the political as well as the people angles. A real boost for the industry: sales increased 6.77% last year. The biggest gain (+34%) was for Marianne, the most “anti-Sarko” newsmagazine.
> story in Le Monde
Journalism — 10 trends that transformed the job
From “the rise of the amateur”, to measurability of websites, or the use of databases in reporting, the editor of the Online Journalism Blog (OBJ) Paul Bradshaw outlined ten trends that changed news gathering.
> story on the OBJ
Newsroom — The World Editors Forum launches a global barometer
How do editors feels those days ? Together with Reuters and Zogby International, the WEF began collecting data for the second annual Newsroom Barometer, a global survey of chief editors about their attitudes and strategies in the multimedia age.
> details on the World Association of Newspapers
> More infos about the barometer at this email
> And on the Editors Weblog, read the updated series of analysis about the future of journalism.
Internet programming — Did Michael Eisner found the right algorithm?
When he left the chairmanship of Disney in 2005, nobody was ready to bet a red cent on Michael Eisner’s new whim : Internet content. Now, he’s currently producing his second Web show. And it works.
> story in The New York Times
Intercept — Skype : too hard do break
Skype, the free phone service, is driving crazy cybercops all over the world. One, there is the volume of data its 275m users are generating ; two, the digital packets it uses are encrypted ; three, the network is used in 28 countries on a P2P architecture (no servers farms). All combined, it makes the most privacy-friendly network ever built. No wonder why the FBI, the British MI5 and the German secret services are asking Skype to figure out some back door to allow legal intercepts. So far, the network is not complying.
> story in The Economist
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