We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) to share their highlights and takeaways from the conference, which wrapped up earlier this week. Today we share the third part (of four) by guest correspondent Susan Bratton: Social networks & online communities Some […]

We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) to share their highlights and takeaways from the conference, which wrapped up earlier this week. Today we share the second part (of four) by guest correspondent Susan Bratton: Blogging and Reputation Tracking: Blogging was […]

We have asked some of our friends and colleagues who attended technology and new media conference South By Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) to share their highlights and takeaways from the conference, which wrapped up earlier this week. Today we share the first part (of four) by guest correspondent Susan Bratton: Susan says: SXSW is “old home […]

Publishers Weekly magazine reports today what may be the first offer of its kind from traditional publishing. Book publisher Thomas Nelson has launched “NelsonFree,” a program which gives readers their content in several different formats – as a hardcover book, an e-book, and an audiobook, all for the purchase price of a single volume. Thomas […]

In a bid to stay afloat in an industry in crisis, magazine and newspaper publishing giant Hearst Corp. is getting set to launch an “electronic reader” later this year, a device designed with periodical-reading in mind. Hearst publishes a number of titles, including magazines Seventeen, Cosmopolitan and Esquire, and newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle. Fortune […]

Consumer information company Knowledge Networks released a study this week that examines how the U.S. TV-viewing audience consumes and interacts with offerings on TV networks’ websites, such as blogs, games, voting, podcasts, and, of course, video. “How People Use TV’s Web Connections 2009” found that one in five (21%) Internet users ages 13 to 54 […]

Blog search widget Lijit has launched a new Content Networks service to let content publishers band together and create a network. Lijit is an interesting and useful search tool in that, when installed on your website, readers can search not just for relevant blog posts, but also for other related things you’ve bookmarked, put on […]

Google today launched an official blog about the social web. Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager for Google Friend Connect, writes: “We think the web is better when it’s social. …[W]e are developing tools to make ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality…. “We will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend […]

It was a nice surprise last week to hear podcasting event pioneer Brian Russell being interviewed on American Public Media’s Marketplace program. As you may remember, Russell organized one of the first “open space” podcasting conferences, PodcasterCon, back in January 2006 (about 8 months before the first of dozens of PodCamps debuted). He was also […]

Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce considered news publications that relied on ad revenue as “morally abhorrent”. If a publication was dependent on advertisers to survive, it could not cover news, independent of its advertisers.

As people move their attention online, fewer and fewer people are paying for newspapers and news magazines and more and more news publications are relying on ads for their revenue.

Can ad supported news sites cover news as effectively and independently as traditional news sources – or is the future of news doomed to be “morally abhorrent?