Posted by: Jon Fine on July 01
Yesterday I got the below email:
It''s our pleasure to introduce you to SalaryTK: The job board for journalists who don't want to get paid.
Editors and publishers have quickly learned that using free labor is the best practice for adapting to a volatile media landscape . . .
But SalaryTK is not just a job board. We're a consultancy working with media companies looking to snag top talent in the ever-growing unpaid sector of the media workforce. The free labor we'll help you attract will more than pay for our services.
So, if you're a journalist looking for unpaid work, an editor who needs free copy or a publisher trying to get an edge in the increasingly competitive market of unpaid labor, visit SalaryTK... because great journalism is priceless.
It was the kind of day where I couldn’t tell how serious all this was, so I emailed back. This led to an email exchange and phone call with a person involved with the site.
Continue reading "SalaryTKer Talks, Laughs (Sort Of) At Unpaid Media Jobs"
Posted by: Jon Fine on June 26
This week, in the ever-tired, ultra-binary "battle" between old-media bona fides and new-media triumphalism:
--TMZ.com broke the news about Michael Jackson’s death.
--Columbia S.C.’s daily newspaper The State did an old-school stakeout at Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport to break the news about Gov. Mark Sanford’s trip to Buenos Aires. (They also had the emails.)
--UPDATE: And the Huffington Post's Nico Pitney asked the President a question at a press conference, a development that, for some reason, some folks found newsworthy.
Verdict: Either “everybody wins!” or “there’s something for everyone in these results” or "who cares?" You decide.
But can we please agree to stop using each major breaking news story as an excuse to flog your favored hobby horse, whether it’s “new media can’t do what traditional media can” or “old media is sluggish and nonresponsive”?
There's no reason we have to choose between old and new, 'kay?
Posted by: Jon Fine on June 22
Many media types routinely namecheck The Economist as a favorite magazine. I am not among them. Yes, The Economist is global and comprehensive and all that, but more often than not the tone strikes me as smug and, good Lord, it is not a particularly energizing read.
But while I may be convinced that that the Economist’s admiredness-to-actually-being-read ratio tops that of every other magazine on the planet, including The New Yorker—a magazine I do actually read, but is notorious for existing primarily in unread piles atop nighttables—The Economist is managing the feat of bettering its business in an absolutely gruesome market.
For the year ending March 31, sayeth paidcontent.org:
Economist Group posted operating profits 26 percent higher than last year at £56 million and revenue 17 percent better revenue of £313 million.
The profit numbers were boosted, the company admits, by layoffs. But the revenue growth is what surprises me. You don’t hear many stories like among old-media companies these days, regardless of the dismissive things said about your primary product by certain irritable media columnists.
Posted by: Jon Fine on June 18
Earlier this month, I expressed some puzzlement over the new GM “revivention’ ad campaign (and accompanying Web site). I was having a hard time deciding whether or not they ads seemed strange because, yknow, the ads are actually strange, or because GM was trying to navigate such unprecedented terrain: a brand that huge, and once so identified with American might, in bankruptcy.
But forget how they appeared to one guy (and to those who commented on said guy’s blog). Are the ads working?
Data provided by a company called Zeta Interactive suggests they might be.
Continue reading "Is GM’s “Reinvention” Ad Campaign Working? Study Says: Maybe!"
Posted by: Jon Fine on June 10
A few hours ago I interviewed IAC Chairman-CEO Barry Diller onstage at the Advertising 2.0 conference, During said interview, he came out much more strongly in favor of paid content online than I’d ever heard him.
I’m nowhere near so sanguine as he is that getting people to pay online will be so doable. Not that the big newspaper and magazine and TV players won’t try; some of those houses are burning down so quickly that their occupants no longer have a choice. But there’s a very big difference between putting a tollbooth up and stopping motorists from flocking to the other free roads available to them.
I typically do a terrible job remembering and notating exactly what was said in such onstage situations. Luckily CNET’s Caroline McCarthy was all over today’s session. Read her full account, but some of her Diller quotes appear after the jump:
Continue reading "Barry Diller And I Don't Agree About Charging For Online Content"
