When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that [...]

[Yesterday, we showed how our Martin Langeveld's predictions for 2009 turned out. A few hits, a few misses, but lots of thoughts provoked. Here's his list of what we can expect in 2010. —Josh]
Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.2 percent in Q3 of 2009 and [...]

[A little over one year ago, our friend Martin Langeveld made a series of predictions about what 2009 would bring for the news business — in particular the newspaper business. I even wrote about them at the time and offered up a few counter-predictions. Here's Martin's rundown of how he fared. Up next, we'll post [...]

When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular [...]

After 44 years at The New York Times, most recently as the assistant managing editor in charge of journalistic standards, Craig Whitney bid farewell to the newsroom this week. The position of standards editor was created in the aftermath of Jayson Blair but has come to address issues that were both hard to foresee in [...]

Last week, I attended the Transparent Text symposium at IBM’s offices in Cambridge. The conference focused on text-based data storage, analysis, and visualization — awesomely nerdy stuff, in other words.
Some of the presentations would be familiar to loyal readers of this site: Amanda Michel’s distributed reporting at ProPublica, Ethan Zuckerman’s Media Cloud and “nutritional [...]

The top-selling item in The New York Times Store this summer was a set of rakish rain gear with a literal spin on journalistic transparency. Isaac Mizrahi, the clothing designer and reality-TV host known for democratizing couture, fashioned a see-through rain coat and umbrella for the Times, which offered the set for $99. (See photo [...]

I drive a 1996 Honda Civic, and I love it. Why? It costs me virtually nothing. It gets 30 m.p.g., we paid it off years ago, and I carry no collision coverage. I could sell it, but I won’t. It’s running great, and it probably will last several more years.
What does this have to do [...]

It’s been four months since Josh predicted that a news organization would sue The Huffington Post for copyright violation over its aggregation of headlines, ledes, and article summaries. The interim has been marked by saber-rattling, settlements, and dubious proposals for changes to federal law.
But I’m still hoping to see that lawsuit — not because [...]

We all know that The New York Times and other papers have been thinking hard about finding ways to charge readers for the news on their web sites, and there’s evidence that the decision-making process is moving along. Bloomberg has reported that a survey of print subscribers included this sentence:
The New York Times website, nytimes.com, [...]

Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper. That’s per a memo sent to staffers this morning, which said [...]

Yesterday’s meeting of top newspaper executives in Chicago, where they considered ways to charge for content online, has reignited the often-passionate discussion of whether news sites could generate subscription revenue from readers. Plenty has been written about the futility of erecting pay walls — much of which I agree with — but a few points [...]

Our tour of The New York Times Co.’s research and development lab, which concludes with today’s video, represents the first time many of their projects have been seen in the wild. But before we got in there, similar tours had been given to more than 150 advertisers. The company, of course, has a huge stake [...]

We’re back in Living Room 2.0 at The New York Times Co. today for their research and development group’s vision of how news will fit into the armchair experience of the future. Ted Roden, a creative technologist in the group, describes two applications for Times content that might work well on your television or other [...]

In a corner of the research and development lab at The New York Times Co., they’ve prototyped a living room of the future. It’s not as whizbang awesome as you might hope — a lamp glows red or green depending on how the markets are doing — but it does feel like a reasonable conception [...]