Guesswork

My recycling fodder from Shoppers Drug Mart features some funky technology this week - a portable stereo that plays both cassettes and CDs. Now seeing as nobody has sold cassettes for the last decade or so, I’m assuming that someone doing inventory at Shoppers’ came across a warehouse full […]

A British company is planning to launch a free men’s magazine with the unlikely name Short List. Rather than alienate their target market right from the get-go, they should consider a title like “Massive” , “Gargantua” , or “Extreme Magnum Power”. A good rule of thumb is that any name which sounds like a […]

I should have known it was too good to be true. Last week, Engadget and a few dozen other blogs reported that a Colorado man had had his thumbs surgically altered to make himself a better iPhone user. According to the story, he’d had the tips of his thumbbones cut off and then had […]

The Los Angeles Times reports that a Pasadena news website is outsourcing its local reporting to India. Pasadena Now has hired two journalists in India to watch webcasts of Pasadena City Council meetings and write the stories up for the site. The idea has raised some hackles, particularly among journalists who probably thought […]

Welcome to satire at its most sophisticated. Eat your heart out, Onion.

Advertising Age reports that the bloom may be off the rose for the booming celebrity news industry, noting that several high profile gossip vehicles are showing signs of faltering popularity after years of dizzying growth.
Of course, it’s not that the public has actually lost interest in the race and gender of Brangelinas’ latest […]

OK, the headline’s a stretch but I really think it works. The story is real anyway - American Media Inc, which owns supermarket gossip tabloids the Star and the National Enquirer, is under increasing financial pressure as circulation for their two flagship magazines continues to decline, and CEO David Pecker is running out […]

In a recent interview with Forbes, 75 year old Aussie media mogul Rupert Murdoch speculated on the possibility of Dow Jones coming up for sale in ” 5, 10, 20 years” and said “But I won’t be here.”
Whether you like Murdoch or whether the very idea of Fox News makes you want […]

Apparently the economics of newspapers are so fundamentally different from that of every other business in the world that the appropriate response to lower sales is … higher prices. Lisa Snedecker in Media Life Magazine reports that in spite of generally declining circulation, many newspapers are planning to increase the rates they charge to […]

< Europeans sure do hate Google. A lawsuit over copyright infringement with some Belgian journalists and photojournalists has been settled, but a similar suit with a group of newspapers in the same country continues to plod through the court system. At the heart of the issue is the question of whether Google web […]

From the economic juggernaut to the East comes a new business model for media. There’s a story in Poynter about street vendors in Beijing who sell newspapers which offer all original news; original because it’s made up. The stories focus on theft, rape, and murder, all illustrated with pictures of pretty […]

Newspaper circulation is falling across the US as more Americans turn to the web for their news. According to Bloomberg.Com, circulation at 770 newspapers dropped by 2.8% in the 6 months ending September 30 2006, continuing an on-going decline that started in 1985. However, traffic to newspaper websites serving the top 100 US markets […]