The Catalyst Code

Last week, The Capital Times, Madison Wisconsin’s 90-year old daily newspaper, stopped publishing the print version of its newspaper and announced that it will instead publish all of its news to the web. This move was made after it watched its circulation dwindle by more than half over recent years and its advertising revenue shrink […]

The New York Times surprised analysts Thursday with a small loss instead of the anticipated roughly $24 million in quarterly profits. Today’s Wall St. Journal paints a miserable picture for the graying lady as well Media General and the Tribune on Page B1 (subscription only, see http://online.wsj.com for related news).
For anyone, including the billionaires […]

It used to be when you opened the New York Times to pages 2 and 3 there were a couple of things you could be certain of. There’d be the lead news articles on international events, and there’d be a Tiffany’s ad on the right hand side of page 3. This was a great […]

The latest WeMedia/Zogby poll citing that most people use the internet for their primary source of news and information is hardly a newsflash. We’ve been reading about the newspaper industry’s demise now for a couple of years as a result of fewer people reading the paper and therefore fewer advertisers using it to reach the […]

A recent blog post ponders the future of Amazon’s Unbox video service given its reported inability to “make a dent in Amazon’s business.” This service, which was launched nearly 18 months ago, is a movie download service that allows movies to be downloaded right to set-top boxes (thanks to a partnership with Tivo). Recently, Amazon […]

Industries like people sometimes do not live forever. The whaling industry was the major source of fuel for Americans in the 19th century. Great fortunes were made and Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world. It died as people switched to gas and electricity. The typewriter industry had an almost century run […]

U.S. media employment in December fell to a 15-year low (886,900), slammed by the slumping newspaper industry. But employment in advertising/marketing-services — agencies and other firms that provide marketing and communications services to marketers — broke a record in November (769,000). Marketing consulting powered that growth. (Data from Advertising Age)
Now here’s an interesting trend. As […]

I picked up the New York Times two days ago and I could have told you that there were major cutbacks in its news department before ever reading the story that confirmed my suspicions. The paper isn’t as thick, the stories aren’t as rich and frankly, even the Style section seems a bit anemic of […]

Randall Stross’s comments on the Kindle in today’s New York Times reminded me that I’ve been meaning to review the Kindle which I bought myself as a pre-Christmas present in early December. Unlike Randall, I kept my wife’s paws off of mine and I’ve been happily using it for about six weeks. It is a […]

Now that the barrage of 2008 predictions are behind us, we thought we’d take the next couple of weeks to focus on the “realities” behind what some pundits have predicted. This week, we’ll tackle mobile, advertising, and publishing.
Advertising
Predictions: Online advertising will be resilient in 2008, with growth in online video ads, social networks and […]