Can the Washington Post survive?

Newspapers are dying. At the Washington Post Co., CEO Donald Graham is banking on the Internet to save serious journalism. If he can't figure this out, nobody can.

FORTUNE, August 6, 2007 — Barry Svrluga, a 36-year-old baseball writer for The Washington Post, was on his way to the barber when an e-mail pinged his BlackBerry telling him that the Washington Nationals had sent two struggling pitchers to the minor leagues. Svrluga detoured to Starbucks, wrote a 572-word commentary on his laptop and posted it to his blog, Nationals Journal at washingtonpost.com. After his haircut he swung by the Post's newsroom to do a live question-and-answer session online with fans. That night, after filing a story for the newspaper, which he calls the "$0.35 edition" in his blog, Svrluga recorded a ten-minute podcast for the Web site, with sound bites from team officials and players.

Like most reporters at the Post, Svrluga has become platform-agnostic,... continue reading

IHOP Buys Applebee's for $2.1 Billion†

Pancake Giant Looks to Right Floundering Brand Through Franchising

Advertising Age, July 17, 2007 — Pancake-flipping IHOP Corp. has purchased the struggling Applebee's restaurant chain for $2.1 billion, the company announced today.

Announcing the deal, IHOP said it intended to convert the bulk of Applebee's 508 company-owned stores to franchises, mirroring a transition IHOP itself employed to improve its own business in recent years.

Apple Seeks a Deal to Make Movies Available for Rent Via iTunes Service†

Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2007 — Apple Inc. is in talks with the Hollywood studios to make new movies available for rental for its iTunes service, according to two studio executives familiar with the matter.

Listen to Music Free, but Pay to Carry†

Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2007 — The music industry is so desperate for new ways to make money that a Silicon Valley start-up is trying a counterintuitive approach: giving the music away as a way to jump-start sales

Bright Ideas†

Brandweek, May 16, 2007 — The findings of a new study reinforce what many in the marketing world have been suspecting—or, in some cases, already experiencing firsthand—for several years: The traditional, static model of a single ad agency or a fixed roster of agencies working on a brand is being supplanted by an open-source model. The report, titled Deeper Consumer Resonance: Architecting an Open-Source Agency Partnership Model, was released last month by the Marketing Communications Roundtable of the Washington-based Corporate Executive Board, a professional network that counts 3,700 executives from the country's leading corporations as its members.

Industry Fixates on Plummeting Live Audiences†

As Ratings Wither in Face of DVRs and New Nielsen Methodology, Broadcasters Pursue Other Metrics

Advertising Age, May 11, 2007 — Climate change is wreaking havoc on the airwaves. Everywhere marketers look, they see network prime-time ratings melting away — huge blocks of audiences simply snapping off, top-rated shows sinking to record lows. Digital video recorders and Nielsen Media Research's ability to track users have become to TV what global warming is to planet Earth.

Contributors on YouTube May Share Advertising Revenue

New York Times, May 4, 2007 — Some of the amateur video producers who put clips on YouTube are turning pro. YouTube, the video-sharing site purchased last year by Google, said on Friday that it would begin placing ads alongside clips from some of its most popular contributors and share revenue from those ads with them. The program is small for now. Only 20 to 30 video producers, including YouTube celebrities like Lonelygirl15, HappySlip and smosh, have been invited to join.

MySpace hunts revenue in the ecosystem†

Financial Times, April 30, 2007 — Peter Levinsohn, the new head of News Corp’s digital division, has every reason to be in a good mood, having just watched a presentation in which online social networking was heralded as the advertising medium of the future. The presentation, by Marketing Evolution, a market research firm, extolled social networking’s ability to create a viral “momentum effect” for brands. It suggested social networking was more effective for advertisers than television as it creates more engagement between individual brands and consumers.

Cold Cash From A Hot Site

Can MySpace pull in revenue fast enough for Rupert?

BusinessWeek, April 9, 2007 — As numbers go, this one's a whopper. Last year MySpace users called up an average of 31.5 billion unique page views per month. That's as though everyone on the planet visited the site once a week. And yet, the big kahuna of social networking racked up a paltry $90 million in ad sales. Not exactly what Rupert Murdoch had in mind when his News Corp. paid $580 million for MySpace nearly two years ago.

Is Google Too Powerful?

As the Web giant tears through media, software, and telecom, rivals fear its growing influence. Now they're fighting back

BusinessWeek, April 9, 2007 — It's the year 2014, and Googlezon, a fearsomely powerful combination of search engine Google Inc. (GOOG ) and online store Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ), has crushed traditional media to bits. Taking its place is the computer-generated Evolving Personalized Information Construct—an online package of news, entertainment, blogs, and services drawn from all the world's up-to-the-minute knowledge and customized to match your preferences. And it's all collected, packaged, and controlled by Googlezon.