Posts under ‘Business Models’

I have an op-ed piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle urging the nation’s community foundations — which are holding a conference this week in San Francisco — to play a growing role in keeping local journalism vibrant. It starts: As America wakes up to the crumbling of basic infrastructure, with Minnesota’s bridge collapse the most […]

Ken Doctor asks if MinnPost.com is A Broadside of Next Wave Journalism. He observes that the local daily papers have been laying off scores of journalists, for one thing: All publishers like the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press have done is create a small opening. Yes, they are reeling, but they are still taking […]

Scott Karp reports “The Huffington Post Allows Top Commenters To Become Bloggers.” I wish he’d asked the obvious question: Will any of these people get paid? As far as I know, Huffington doesn’t pay her bloggers, even the well-known ones. Apparently the topic didn’t come up. Karp defends Huffingon’s no-pay approach in the comments. This […]

CNET: TreeHugger acquisition confirmed. A representative for eco-blog TreeHugger has confirmed that the site has been acquired by Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, Animal Planet, and several other properties. A report of the deal initially surfaced in the New York Post today. A press release from Discovery and TreeHugger […]

Globe and Mail (Toronto): NowPublic nixes takeover bids, lands financing. NowPublic.com, a leading “citizen journalism” site based in Vancouver announced today that it has closed a $10.6-million (U.S.) round of financing from venture capital groups in the U.S. and Canada, after turning down several offers to acquire the company outright Yes, there have been setbacks […]

Mike Orren reports, in “Domesticated but not fixed“: We’ve just sold Pegasus News to Fisher Communications (NASDAQ: FSCI), a publicly-traded TV and radio broadcasting company based in Seattle. While sales of companies are sometimes viewed as endings, this should be looked upon as a beginning — hopefully the beginning of a lot of cool things […]

Backfence.com, a pioneering hyperlocal media company, is shutting down. Terry Heaton, pulling together Web commentary on what he calls some important lessons, says: The announced closing of Backfence has brought about some refreshing and much-needed discussion on the subject of hyperlocal news and the web. This is an important discussion, because a lot of companies […]

Dave Winer: It’s one thing to let Microsoft buy space on your site (it’s called advertising) and quite another to accept Microsoft money for words coming out of your mouth. Next month when we read something positive on these sites about Microsoft, how are we supposed to know if it’s an opinion, or just another […]

The advertisement at the top of a story this morning on TPMmuckraker.com held out the promise of a “Free Apple iPhone.” I had to turn off the audio come-on that launched when I loaded the page, which was annoying enough. But that’s not why I note this ad, or why Joshua Micah Marshall, proprietor of […]

At Poynter.org, Steve Klein discusses deals by niche sports sites YourMTB.com and YourCycling.com, which “have developed an innovative program to provide coverage for cycling races and events that allows competitors and/or spectators to blog, take photograph and shoot video.” Klein calls this “yet another lost opportunity for mainstream media, which simply lacks the resources to […]