EACH DAY, the Washington Post's closely guarded news budget is e-mailed across country at 2 p.m. EST to three editors at MSNBC.com's headquarters within the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. The Post sends not only a rundown of what's slated for the following day's edition, but also a list of other Post stories ready to go or in the works. The Washington Post sharing its trade secrets with...
LIKE EVERY would-be entrepreneur, Nick Denton had an idea that kept him up late at night. Finally, tired of the usual 9-to-5, Denton quit his job two years ago and followed the herds into cyberspace. At 33, he's not looking back. "I only wish I had done this sooner, says Denton, an affable Brit. Of course he does. By the time you read this, Denton expects to have sold another chunk of his San...
One of the dreams of the Internet was that it would allow almost anyone to become a publisher. It's debatable whether or not that dream will ever be meaningfully realized, but it certainly seems that anyone who ever wanted to be a media critic can now do it easily online. There are hundreds, and probably thousands of sites on the Internet that republish mainstream media snippets, often with...
Ten years to the day after Time and Warner merged and shocked corporate America, Steve Case, head of AOL, and Gerald Levin, head of Time Warner, announced a blockbuster plan to join forces. Their new corporate title--AOL Time Warner--truly reflects the ascendancy of the Internet and the beginning of a new economic era for the TV industry. Less than two weeks into the new millennium, AOL bet its...
Walter Isaacson awoke early at his home in Bronxville, New York, fifteen miles north of Manhattan in Westchester County. Idly, the editor of Time flipped on an all-news radio station. That's when he learned that his seventy-seven-year-old magazine, and indeed all of Time Warner -- the world's biggest media company -- was being enfolded in the embrace of fifteen-year-old America Online, the...
During the first half of the century just ended, criticism of journalism was relatively simple and well-defined. It meant taking on the newspapers, which in those days presented a fat, inviting target, burdened as many of them were with sensationalism and sacred cows. Will Irwin muckraked the newspaper press as early as 1911. Upton Sinclair used an artifact of prostitution, The Brass Check, as the...
CPJ is deeply concerned about the actions taken last week by a customs official in Calcutta to censor the 21 February 2000 edition of "Time", an international weekly newsmagazine. On 16 February, customs agents at the Calcutta airport blocked the distribution of 3,000 issues of "Time" magazine because they contained a one-page interview with Gopal Godse, the brother of Mohandas Gandhi's assassin...
EVERY MORNING CHARLIE Meyerson gets on the 5:30 train for his early commute into Chicago. He takes a seat, whips out his yellow highlighter and dives into the Chicago Tribune. Meyerson, a breaking news columnist with the Tribune's online edition, sifts through the paper looking for stories that can be updated during the day. By the time he gets to his desk on the fourth floor of the Tribune Tower...
TO SOME IT'S A convergence of shared interests, to others it opens the door to rampant conflicts of interest. But to all, I suspect, it is viewed as inevitable. The subject is alliances between news operations owned by separate and often competing entities. The driving force behind the alliances, as in so many other aspects of the media business, is the Internet. Based on recent agreements, the...
