I’m not a fan of gossip sites, but Perez Hilton is a force of nature to be reckoned with. Yesterday, Perez Hilton (Mario Armando Lavandeira) announced that his site had its busiest day ever – getting an astounding 13.9 million page views in one day. Meanwhile, the Hearst corporation announced huge layoffs at the San […]

Tim O’Reilly has published an opinion piece today saying that the Kindle must open up or die: Unless Amazon embraces open e-book standards like epub, which allow readers to read books on a variety of devices, the Kindle will be gone within two or three years. In developing the business plan for the Kindle, Amazon was no […]

When tragedy strikes, the 24-hour news networks are there, to bring you the catastrophe in immediate, agonizing detail. But Thursday night, when a Continental Airlines commuter plane crashed near Buffalo, NY, the major networks’ coverage didn’t come from a local affiliate camera crew dispatched to the scene. News networks, including Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and […]

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?

Venerable newspaper The New York Times is considering charging readers for access to its website, less than two years after discontinuing an earlier Times Select online-subscription service. In an online question-and-answer session, Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, discussed how the newspaper has been debating whether to charge for online access to the newspaper’s content: […]

Time magazine has published an article today about podcasting novelists. In the article, they note that podcasting could be publishing’s next wave: Scott Sigler of San Francisco missed out on getting his first novel published, with a deal collapsing in late 2001. But he built a big Internet fan base on novel podcasting, which led to […]

This video captures a KRON news report about The San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle’s forays into online news – in 1981. It’s an amazing look back at the technology that was high-tech in 1981, but it also foreshadows the current state of online newspapers when the Examiner’s David Cole explains, “We’re not in it to make […]

TechMeme has announced that it is officially incorporating Twitter into its process for gathering and publishing news. According to TechMeme’s Gabe Rivera: Often there are Techmeme readers aware of great stories that have fallen through the cracks, or are taking too long to appear on Techmeme. So I’ve long wanted to enable news tips, but […]

Despite the fact that we’ve seen the death of traditional newspapers coming for a long time, actually seeing it happen is still pretty shocking. The Seattle PI has announced that its days are numbered – at 60: After 146 years of delivering news, the Seattle P-I faces becoming what it has chronicled: history. Economic reasons […]

There’s an interesting article about Internet analyst Clay Shirky and his ideas for the future of traditional media at the Guardian today. In the article, Shirky paints a dim picture for the future of newspapers: Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I […]