Tampa Bay Business Journal
Clear Channel, which cut about 300 sales employees from its ranks nationwide last week, is set for another one or two rounds of layoffs, an analyst predicts.
Bloomberg
Time Warner Cable substantially slowed subscriber losses last quarter -- only "34,000 residential TV customers, better than the drop of 217,000 in the prior quarter," writes Edmund Lee. That makes Comcast's "proposed $45 billion takeover look like a smarter bet."
ValleyWag
The only thing more disturbing than the domestic abuse charges levied against RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal is the industry’s apparent attempt to ignore them. Despite pleading guilty to two misdemeanors for domestic violence and battery, last week, “His online advertising network plans to raise $100 million from its IPO and just partnered with Condé Nast,” ValleyWag reports. “Meanwhile Marcom, [a] … conference that claims the … (IAB) Netherlands as a partner, sent out a press release touting Chahal as a featured speaker on ‘dark social.’”
CNBC
While traditional major media company stocks "all posted phenomenal share-price performances," in 2013, so far this year "most of the major media stocks remain underwater while the S&P 500 has risen about 2 percent," writes John Jannarone. "Even Comcast, which reported strong results Tuesday, has seen a slight share price decline so far this year."
Women's Wear Daily
Conde Nast's Vogue is expanding its Web site -- last redesigned in 2010 -- by "amassing a bigger staff comprised of a mix of new hires and existing employees who will move over to the dot-com," writes Alexandra Steigrad. The new version of the site will be unveiled in September during New York Fashion Week.
Gigaom
With the goal of reducing complex stories to their simplest form, The New York Times just debuted The Upshot. “The idea [behind the new site] is to give readers some help in understanding complex stories like Obamacare,” GigaOm reports. “Ever since Nate Silver left … the NYT has been working on a new venture aimed in part at filling the hole he left, and also at competing with the ‘explanatory journalism’ of Ezra Klein’s recently launched Vox project.”
The Wall Street Journal
Taking a significant loss, Discovery Communications is selling HowStuffWorks.com to Web services company Blucora. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Discovery is unloading the site for $45 million, “or less than a fifth what Discovery paid to acquire the web publisher in 2007.” Blucora plans to integrate HowStuffWorks into its search advertising business InfoSpace.
Financial Times
Research shows digital video moving to TV-like devices. More viewers are watching online video via connected TV devices such as Apple TV and Google's Chromecast and Roku, according to a study done by research group Frank N Magid Associates. "People with connected TVs are watching nearly 12 hours of video programming
each week via the internet, according to research from video advertising company Tremor Video, and Nielsen," writes Emily Steel.
NBC's "Today" show will be simulcast on SiriusXM satellite radio beginning June 26, "in a move clearly intended to reach commuters in cars on the way to work," writes Bill Carter. This is "not the first time a morning show has tried to expand to radio," adds Carter, noting that "ABC’s 'Good Morning America' had a brief run on XM radio before XM merged with Sirius. But that experiment did not work, largely because, according to Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s president and chief content officer, 'it was cut up, not a full-blown version of the show.'"
The New York Times
Google, Adobe and other tech leaders are finally going on trial for allegedly colluding to keep employees in their place. Set to begin next month, an antitrust lawsuit “accuses the companies of agreeing not to solicit one another’s employees in a scheme developed and enforced by Steven P. Jobs of Apple,” The New York Times reports. “In their drive for control, the companies undermined their employees’ opportunities to get better jobs and make more money, the court papers say.”