• Gavin O'Malley, Aug 21, 2009, 12:17 PM
  • The Great Facebook Cash-Out CNet Why are Facebook employees -- whom one might assume would be the slightest bit optimistic about a future IPO or acquisition -- rushing to cash out their stock options? Beer money? Or are they all just reading Blodget and tripping over themselves to buy Yahoo stock. Read the whole story...
  • Rupert Murdoch's Axis Of Firewall Los Angeles Times They may not know it yet, but free media-loving consumers (along with liberals and anti-oligopolists) have a new archenemy in Rupert Murdoch. Less than a month after promising to purge his vast empire of free content, the media baron is now lobbying major publishers to join his crusade.

    Arguing that advertising revenue alone can't sustain their business models, News Corp. execs have recently met with top publishers -- New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., Hearst Corp. and Tribune Co. -- about forming a consortium based on charging for distributed content, both online and on mobile devices.

    Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller is positioning News Corp. as a sensible leader in the effort to start collecting fees from online readers because of its success with the Wall Street Journal Online, which maintains more than 1 million paying subscribers, each of whom fork over $103 a year.

    Now, if you agree with media entrepreneur Steve Brill, Murdoch's mission is actually to save professional journalism from what he calls "a form of group suicide." Brill himself -- along with former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, the former head of Tele-Communications, Inc. -- recently embarked on a venture to help publishers charge readers for full access to Web sites, single articles or packages of related content.

    Likewise, newspaper and technology consultant Alan Mutter is currently pitching an online registration service that would track Web users as they read articles on an array of publisher sites.

    But, while perhaps able to be perceived as honest brokers, neither Brill nor Mutter have anywhere near the clout of Murdoch and his minions. What's more, his timing is perfect as industry-wide ad revenue fell 28% in the first quarter of 2009, according to the nonprofit Newspaper Assn. of America -- due in large part to the recession.

    Still, anyway you slice it, the movement equates to a vote of no confidence for online advertising, which after about 10 years, has yet to amount to more than 12% of newspaper's revenue. For sure, along with the publishers themselves, marketers and agencies are partly to blame for this failure. Read the whole story...
  • Could Yahoo Put Your Kids Through College? Business Insider One analyst believes you would be wise to put all of your money in Yahoo stock. Now! Read the whole story...
  • The Tweeting Utility The Observer Twitter's cofounder lays out a plan for city governments to improve the quality of life of their citizens on the cheap -- with Twitter. Read the whole story...
  • Twitter Gets A Business Model VentureBeat Also in Twitterland: Co-founder Biz Stone says the company is starting to roll out commercial accounts to encourage business users to pay for premium services like analytics. Read the whole story...
  • Facebook Becomes More Twitter Friendly Facebook Blog Also, also in Twitter news: Facebook is introducing a feature that can automatically cross-post updates from Facebook Pages on Twitter, but only for celebs and organizations at the moment. Read the whole story...