David Lieberman, the veteran media reporter for USA Today, asked Betty Cohen, the CEO of cable channel Lifetime, why Lifetime was abandoning its familiar "Television for Women" tag line. Cohen, who's been on the job for a year, answered: "What women are saying is: Don't tell me you're television for women. I'll be the judge of that. It reminds me of what I heard when I was running Cartoon Network and even back when I was at Nickelodeon. If you have to say to kids, 'Watch this show, it's fun,' then how fun is it--not? I also thought that 'Television …

Time Warner's AOL unit, which has been in the midst of a much-needed transformation for better than a year, will soon behave even more like Web rivals Yahoo! and Google when it begins selling content on its site. The company says it will not limit content to what is produced by Time Warner's various divisions. Instead, it is in discussions with an array of TV networks and other providers of video and music. One reason AOL is beginning to go where others have gone before is the perception that Apple's iTunes site, which has been enormously successful, imposes too rigid …

After years of spending heavily on a national deployment of fiber-optic lines, the country's big cable companies are bound to be aggressive in defending their turf against a newly invigorated AT&T, reports MarketWatch. The proposed merger of AT&T and BellSouth, which observers expect will lead to a far more aggressive AT&T--one that will try to market video content as well as telephone and Internet service--could close by year-end. For Thomas Eagan of Oppenheimer, the merger is ultimately a negative for industry giant Comcast, which has systems in many of the large metropolitan areas served by BellSouth. "Cable operators would be …

In describing the development of this year's Magazine Hot List, the staff at Mediaweek observed a very clear trend: the action is with women.  Not that women haven't long dominated mag readership and top editing positions, but Mediaweek notes that the trend seems stronger than ever.  It certainly "holds true for our choices of Editor of the Year (Martha Nelson of Time Inc.’s People), Executive Team of the Year (the publishing and editorial executives at Martha Stewart Living), Startup of the Year (Condé Nast’s Domino) and Creative Team of the Year (the shelter title Dwell--they represent, for the most …

For all the  Sturm und Drang surrounding the newspaper industry's well-publicized woes, what often goes unnoticed is that a small number of papers are beginning to figure out that the World Wide Web needn't be viewed as a reader-stealing foe. Instead, the Web can be a valuable, revenue-producing ally. It can be leveraged as part of a broader strategy to serve readers and, consequently advertisers. Red Herring's print piece, posted on its Web site this week, is one of the best explanations yet of how big-thinking newspaper executives are, at last, successfully incorporating what's good and unique about the …

It's become clear by now that just about everyone with access to your mobile phone wants to sell you something--ringtones, TV downloades, animated shorts, music. To many in the industry, the tiny screens on the ubiquitous mobile are perceived as future profit centers. Already, early adapters are using their phones for a plethora of purposes, only one of which is carrying on actual phone conversations. Therefore, this story in The New York Times is somewhat sobering, pointing out that the industry may be overly optimistic about the near-term revenue potential of the emerging mobile media.  First of all, the …

The Los Angeles Times poses an intriguing question: for an industry that tends to measure success by the number of consumers it can persuade to buy its products, Hollywood hasn't yet been able to define what constitutes a genuine hit for programming that is seen on the Web. Internet companies have invented "hit" applications--e-mail being the most notable--but entertainment makers are still grappling with the newfangled business models made necessary by Web economics. First of all, Web audiences don't all congregate in front of their computer screens at the same time; they consume content when they wish to consume …

Never underestimate the ability of Conde Nast to spot a market and produce a big, glossy magazine to serve it.  Despite the skepticism that greeted the debut issue of Men's Vogue last year, its publisher reports that the magazine sold some 200,000 copies.  It even did well in red states, which was somewhat of a surprise, given that the cover subject was left-leaning actor George Clooney.  According to WWD.com, a spokesman for the magazine said the enthusiastic response wasn’t limited to the U.S. “In Japan, there was such demand that wholesalers demanded more copies than we were able to …

Giant, self-described as a magazine for super-fans, has had trouble breaking into the competitive market for entertainment-related titles. Going up against the likes of Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Premiere, and others has proved daunting, perhaps all the more so because Giant has targeted those hard-to-get male readers.  "According a source familiar with the figures, Giant only sold 37,500 newsstands copies on average for the second half of 2005," reports Mediaweek. "That said, Giant's sell-through average is just 15 percent based on a newsstand draw of 250,000, well below the industry average of around 30 percent for an established title …

You'll have to scroll down through several items in this piece about alternate reality games in order to get to the paragraph about American Express and JetBlue, but Joyce Schwarz notes that the deal between the card company and the airline is quite novel. "If you're flying JetBlue in April, you can turn on your seat's DirecTV screen and participate in what may be the first made-for-in-plane-only reality show, [which is] called 'Share the Love'.... A vote for one of the two families competing in a cross-country race to win a year's free travel will not only help pick the …