Media

Joe Michaels, who has worked at the show since 1989 and has held the director chair for 18 years, was given a new job last week that portends more change to come.

If changes to the city's strict transportation laws are implemented, the San Francisco-based black car service gets to start sending out cars in Miami.

The peer-to-peer housing site once again touts its positive economic impact, but this time in a city that has given it the green light.

Google wields a big sheriff's badge when it tells online snake-oil salesmen to peddle their wares elsewhere.

Mark Coatney, a former journalist who helped media companies understand Tumblr, bids farewell to coworkers in a sentimental post.

Russia’s main social networking site vKontakte is an absolutely massive operation. It is the second most visited site in Russia and the 19th most popular site on the planet. The site, which has around 40,000,000 users every day, is also a huge thorn in the side of the recording industry. VKontakte allows its users to upload music to their accounts for anyone to play and as a result the site has become one of the largest repositories of unlicensed music anywhere in the world. The site’s operators insist that the responsibility for uploading infringing music lies with its users but music industry groups like IFPI see that as shifting the blame. IFPI insist that something must be done to stop businesses being built on the back of unlicensed content. They may soon get their wish. As reported yesterday, Russian-hosted services – vKontakte included – will soon face a new legal environment due to a shifting of responsibility for illegal uploads. Following the approval of a new law in the State Duma on Friday, removing infringing content swiftly will soon be a priority matter if services don’t wish to find themselves blocked at the ISP level. Although it has yet to become law, interesting things started to happen at vKontakte just before the bill received its majority vote on Friday. Site users began to notice that searches for popular artists, which at one time were extremely easy to find, started to throw up notices that the content had been removed. The scale of the takedowns become apparent when searches for popular artists such as Rihanna, Adele, Beyonce, Amy Winehouse and Coldplay all began to draw blanks. The user backlash was swift and vocal, with some complaining that their entire collections had been deleted. “We always removed audio and video recordings when we were served the legitimate complaints from copyright holders, it’s just now such applications have increased,” vKontakte spokesman Georgy Lobushkin said in a statement. The problem stems from complaints sent by the major recording labels. Universal Music told Russia’s Vedomosti that a letter had been sent to vKontakte via IFPI and the Goltsblat BLP lawfirm demanding the takedown of its content. While Sony and Warner have declined to comment, it seems almost certain that this is a coordinated action by the labels. “We’re not going to remove all the music at all, or just Russian or foreign music, or just rock or just pop music. We will remove the specific compositions of certain artists. Most of the audio will remain on the site,” said Lobushkin for vKontakte. “The musicians who are not afraid to share their art for free, will not go away. There is a lot of music in this world, and no one can impose their preferences or forbid people from listening to something.” In the meantime, however, users of vKontakte seem intent on preserving their collections by any means possible. There are reports in the Russian media that there are efforts underway to impose new naming conventions on files so that they won’t be marked for deletion by copyright holders. The group Coldplay, for example, are now known as “Cold Game”, Selena Gomez has been dubbed “Sweet Dwarf” and Maroon 5 are to be called “5 Dudes”. The effort seems unlikely to succeed, but there are signs that users may still get access to music via vKontakte if things move in the right direction. Unlike previous copyright holder actions against Grokster and more recently LimeWire, there doesn’t appear to be any desire to crush vKontakte with expensive lawsuits. In fact, all the signs suggest that the labels want to do business with the social networking giant. “We would like to see VKontakte agree with us about the legal ways of using music,” says Universal Music Russia CEO Dmitry Konnov. “Now this is the first step. We hope that it will eventually lead us to the negotiating ta

When you bet on a strict, un-leaky paywall as The Times of London has, you’re forced to get creative about how to put your work in front of new audiences — particularly if you’re trying to influence their opinions. Unlike its fellow Times across the Atlantic, the U.K. paper has chosen not to allow a set number of articles per month or a number of free routes around the paywall. So a year ago, The Times set up a Tumblr for its opinion content, with the aim of giving “a flavour of what our columnists and leader writers do, how they think, and what influences their writing.” #timesopinion-container > img { position : absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } After initially posting 80 times or more a month, posting fell off, and earlier this month, the Times Opinion Tumblr was shut down, with editors announcing they would be moving all opinion content back to its original home on the newspaper’s main site. “We wanted to see if it attracted new readers to The Times and were very clear, with ourselves and our readers, that it was an experiment to see how it could work for us. It flourished in parts, but we’ve come to the conclusion that it wasn’t quite right for us,” communities editor Ben Whitelaw wrote in a post that also appeared on the Times Digital Development blog. The Times reactivated its Comment Central opinion blog — behind the paywall — on the same day that the Tumblr blog was shuttered. Whitelaw wrote that posts to the blog would occasionally be free-to-access. Nick Petrie, The Times’ social media and campaigns editor, told me that the Tumblr page was part of an effort to draw in new digital subscribers to TheTimes.co.uk. Regular Times columnists like Oliver Kamm and Daniel Finkelstein posted shorter “off-the-cuff” pieces on the page, which were freely viewable to all visitors. Times Opinion had amassed 66,000 followers since its launch, Petrie said, “but it wasn’t driving traffic back to the site.” “Tumblr seemed like a good, light, easy-to-use platform that we could use to give people a taste of our comment and opinion, which is obviously the type of journalism that the Times is renowned for,” Petrie explained. “There was a hope that pushing out a small amount of original journalism, of original comment and opinion, would further enhance the idea of giving people a taste of what’s on offer if they became a subscriber.” Reaching an audience to influence What to do about opinion writing behind a paywall is a question newspapers have dealt with as long as there have been paywalls. Opinions, after all, are meant to influence, and influence would seem to grow along with the audience reading them. The Wall Street Journal, a paywall early adopter, committed early on to posting many of its opinion pieces online for free even while most news content was subscriber-only. Meanwhile, The New York Times took the opposite approach in the mid 2000s with TimesSelect, which kept the news free but put the newspaper’s columnist behind a paywall. (The Wall Street Journal also began posting pieces from its editorial page on an Opinion Journal Tumblr, but back in 2007; like the U.K.’s Times, the Journal also stopped updating the page about a year after its debut.) Petrie said that The Times had not specifically set up analytics for the Times Opinion Tumblr, so the editors aren’t sure what kind of traffic the page generated. According to comScore data, The Times has seen a substantial increase in traffic over the past year, from 748,000 unique worldwide visitors in April 2012 to nearly 1.5 million in April 2013 — but that’s still far behind other British newspapers without strict paywalls such as The Guardian, which has over 18 million monthly uniques in the United States alone and well over 30 million worldwide. The Times, owned by the soon-to-split News Corp., remains on shaky financial ground; last week, acting editor John Witherow announced that the paper would be cutting 20 editorial jobs as a

DISH's intentions related to wireless are becoming clearer with its deal with regional wireless carrier nTelos to test a 50Mbps fixed wireless broadband service. DISH could use its spectrum along with that from CLWR (if successful in their acquisition bid) to develop a viable broadband platform. This would help DISH to remain competitive with other MVPDs that increasingly offer broadband packages that enable advanced services such as VOD, home monitoring, cloud storage, etc. This is in line with our belief that DISH will try to transition towards IPTV using its wireless infrastructure.

The results of an open publication of all radio ratings would be new engagement from listeners and advertisers. Right now there is so much industry whining about listener apathy toward radio, positive actions would be appropriate.

A new U.K. study shows that the only activity to rival Internet access for men is sex.