I suppose dinosaurs were pretty disoriented in their final years roaming the earth so maybe we shouldn’t be too critical of the newspaper industry today.
Still the fact that the WSJ publisher is lashing out at Google as the cause of the newspaper death spiral is unsettling. Sure, Google has been a prominent player in […]

Here’s my take on Chris Anderson’s forthcoming Future of Free.
First, the notion that businesses can make money by giving something away for free isn’t new by any stroke of the imagination. It is also a pretty well studied phenomenon by economists. I think the earliest mathematical treatment I saw was in R.G.D. Allen’s excellent […]

This is the first of several posts I’ll do on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency that the Obama Administration has proposed to protect consumers and investors from financial abuse.
The Administration released an 88 page white paper on financial services reform on June 17th. The CFPA is a major new proposed agency and accounts for a […]

Well, depends on who you ask. The New York Times seems to think it has a shot at drawing eyeballs away from traditional television. But, I am not so sure. So, in service to all you readers of the Catalyst Code Blog, I took time out of my busy afternoon to check out nextnewnetwork. […]

I figured I’d take the Twitter plunge despite my skepticism. I’ve been at it a week to help promote FinReg21.com our new media property on financial services regulation and its reform. Here’s a preliminary report. The good news is that it is fun and easy. Knocking out 140 character comments is pretty easy and the […]

The financial services industry will be more closely monitored if much of President Obama’s regulatory plan that was released today gets enacted.
The White House team obviously put a great deal of work and thought into this plan. Congress, industry and the public will now need to go over it carefully. Here are four questions […]

The populist bandwagon to whack the credit card companies for a financial crisis they didn’t cause is still going on. The latest is proposed legislation —really a revival of stuff that’s been floating around—to help the merchants reduce the fees they pay to the card companies. You don’t need an advanced degree in economics—just […]

Hearst Magazines is following a ‘contrarian strategy’ when it comes to its online strategy and pricing its print magazines according to an article in Monday’s New York Times. Hearst has raised newsstand prices for most of its magazines, sometimes significantly. And rather than sticking all of its content online it has been pretty coy. Online […]

The cable industry appears to be struggling to come up with a targeted advertising platform to compete with the internet according to an article in the Wall St. Journal on the 27th of May, Cable Industry Weighs Its Approach to Targeted Ads.
Here’s why this is important. The online advertising industry has demonstrated the […]

Positive feedback effects are one of the most important sources of growth for businesses in many industries from new ones like social networking to old ones like telephones. It turns out that, like leverage, what’s really good on the upside is also quite bad on the downside. Malls and newspapers are two interesting recent […]