February 17, 2013 – 9:58 pm
Tweet The survival of quality news calls for a new approach to writing and reporting. Inspiration could come from blogging and magazine storytelling and also bring back memories of the 70′s New Journalism movement. News reporting is aging badly. Legacy newsrooms style books look stuck in a last Century formalism (I was tempted to write [...]
February 3, 2013 – 8:43 pm
Tweet At the last minute, ending three months of tense negotiations, Google and the French Press hammered a deal. More than yet another form of subsidy, this could mark the beginning of a genuine cooperation. Thursday night, at 11:00pm Paris time, Marc Schwartz, the mediator appointed by the French government got a call from the [...]
January 20, 2013 – 8:53 pm
Tweet Google and the French press have been negotiating for almost three months now. If there is no agreement within ten days, the government is determined to intervene and pass a law instead. This would mean serious damage for both parties. An update about the new corporate tax system. Read this story in Forbes by [...]
January 6, 2013 – 11:46 pm
Tweet Irish newspapers created quite a stir when they demanded a fee for incoming links to their content. Actually, this is a mere prelude to a much more crucial debate on copyrights, robotic scraping and subsequent synthetic content re-creation from scraps. The controversy erupted on December 30th, when an attorney from the Irish law firm [...]
December 16, 2012 – 11:23 pm
Tweet Mobile audiences are large and growing. Great. But their monetization is mostly a disaster. The situation will be slow to improve, but the potential is still there — if the right conditions are met. This year, a major European newspaper expects to make around €16m in digital advertising revenue. The business is [...]
December 9, 2012 – 10:13 pm
Tweet If we factor Google geospatial applications + its unique data processing infrastructure + Android tracking, etc., we’re seeing the potential for absolute power over the economy. Large utility companies worry about Google. Why? Unlike those who mock Google for being a “one-trick pony”, with 99% of its revenue coming from Adwords, they connect the [...]
December 2, 2012 – 8:33 pm
Tweet The Nordic media giant wants to be the #1 worldwide of online classifieds by replicating its high-margin business one market after another, with great discipline. It all starts in 2005 with a Power Point presentation in Paris. At the time, Schibsted ASA, the Norwegian media group, is busy deploying its free newspapers in Switzerland, [...]
November 25, 2012 – 8:40 pm
Tweet Television and media industry are stuck in a wasteful rear-guard fight for the preservation of an analog era relic: the Release Windows system. Designed to avoid destructive competition among media, it ends up boosting piracy while frustrating honest viewers willing to pay. A couple of months ago, I purchased the first season of [...]
November 11, 2012 – 6:46 pm
Tweet Legacy media suffer from a deadly DNA mutation: they’ve lost their appetite for competition; they no longer have the will to fight the hordes of new, hungry mutants emerging from the digital world. For this week’s column, my initial idea was to write about Obama’s high tech campaign. As in 2008, his digital team [...]
November 4, 2012 – 10:15 pm
Tweet In their fight against Google, traditional media firmly believe the search engine needs them to refine (and monetize) its algorithm. Let’s explore the facts. The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs [...]
