Media - Internet

It has happened before, and it will happen again. I was reading a story on the San Jose Mercury News' Web site about federal agents arresting people for running a sex-trafficking ring out of massage parlors. And when I saw the text ads below the story served through Google AdSense, they were for day spas and massage services in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ads are deemed relevant by the...

The US government wants to keep ICANN on a tight leash. After all, it paid for a lot of the research and development of the Internet. It undoubtedly feels generous in creating ICANN in the place, rather than just letting the Departments of Defense or Commerce run the Internet. ICANN will never please all of the people all of the time. Quite the opposite. It would displease all of the people, if it...

The bias and political spin of mainstream news has alienated younger readers and contributed to the popularity of mix and match internet news, says Yahoo! UK editor Simon Hinde. Speaking at City University's Cass Business School last night, Mr Hinde defended the credibility of news aggregation. Discussion followed a screening of EPIC 2014, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson's project exploring a future...

Back in the old days - pre-2005 - community activist Amy Gahran had three ways to reach readers of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo.: She could persuade a reporter to quote her, write a letter to the editor, or buy an ad. Now, the Internet has provided a fourth option, and Ms. Gahran wants to take advantage of it. She plans to recruit a "citizen journalism reporting team" to cover a controversial...

"So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand." -- Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, 1946-63 If Graham thought it was impossible to do a first draft of history in the newspaper, imagine how much more impossible he would consider our present time...

"Content is King." Remember that catchphrase and the essay by Bill Gates of almost a decade ago? "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet," wrote the Microsoft founder in 1996, the year his company helped launch one of the first online magazines, Slate. That boom-time utterance would soon seem like a taunt to Web-only newsgathering organizations that launched...

Someone tells you they have the opportunity of a lifetime for you. A way to make money by becoming an independent business owner through Quixtar. You're not sure about Quixtar and want to learn more, so you consult your favorite Internet search engine -- Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves -- and type in the word "Quixtar." What you see next are search results, and most likely you'll just check out the...

There is, writes Virginia Postrel in her column on Forbes.com, 'something about blogs [that] makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate. News pros seem terribly threatened by online amateurs.' As an illustration she quotes a Los Angeles Times columnist, David Shaw, an über-hack who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his media criticism. Blogging, Shaw writes, is a 'solipsistic, self...

Even as media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently sounded a warning to newspaper houses that digital is the future, print media in India is likely to put up a strong show in the coming years. "The relative share of each of the segments of the advertisement pie is not expected to change very materially in the next couple of years," contends executive director and leader (entertainment & media practice)...

After witnessing the popularity of blogging after the Dec. 26 Southeast Asian tsunami -- for both reporting and relief efforts -- and seeing how blogging impacted U.S. and British elections, Indian officials are beginning the process of granting accreditation to bloggers and other online journalists, according to The Times of India. For several years, online journos have had a "tough battle with...