Tweets: Publish, Publisher, Publishing



more news below



SkyMall, Time Warp

SkyMall files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection - LA Times: "SkyMall, the company that produces in-flight catalogs located on nearly every domestic flight, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy... after struggles to reach passengers who were turning to smartphones and tablets during flights... "

SkyMall loses its captive audience - LA Times: "... a new era of passengers packing smartphones and tablets means the catalog has lost its captive audience. SkyMall lost $3.2 million in May through September of 2013, the only period reported in detail by its new parent company, Xhibit Corp., an Arizona marketing firm. Analysts warn that SkyMall must modernize or join the Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs on the scrap heap of retail history. "SkyMall feels to me like it's in a time warp," said New York retail consultant Bob Phibbs. "It looks the same as it always has."..."

more news below



Facebook, Brands, No More Unpaid Ads

Facebook Will Curtail Unpaid Ads by Brands - NYTimes.com: "... Facebook recently shocked investors by saying that it planned to spend billions of dollars on projects that might never generate any profits. And on Friday, the company told marketers that if they wanted to reach customers on Facebook, they needed to buy an ad... Marketers have little choice but to play along. Facebook has accumulated one of the biggest vaults of consumer data in the world. It dominates social media advertising the way Google dominates search ads, and analysts say that brands will keep flocking to the service. “Facebook is saying, ‘We’re in charge. You’re renting from us,’ ” said Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst at the research firm eMarketer. "But businesses continue to spend more money on advertising on Facebook, and users continue to spend more time and share more information on it.” The change to the news feed is the latest blow to businesses that try to reach customers through their Facebook pages. So many posts, videos and images are being published on Facebook that the average user has about 1,500 new items they could see when they log on. Some people have as many as 15,000, the company says. Over the last two years, the social network has repeatedly tweaked the system to show the top 300 or so items that it predicts each person will want to read. Facebook argues that people prefer to see videos, photos, news articles and updates from their friends and family more than from brands... Still, while some advertisers may now focus more on other social platforms that do not rank their content, such as Twitter, no one can afford to ignore Facebook. “They are sitting on such a wealth of data to be able to target effectively,” he said. “They have dominance in the kind of products they are offering the market.” (read more at link above)
more news below



The Press Is Less Free Today

Good read--

Why the Press Is Less Free Today - The New Yorker: "In the worldwide movement away from democracy, perhaps the most vulnerable institution is the free press, and the most disposable people are journalists. If they’re doing their job right, they can have few friends in powerful places. Journalists become reliably useful to governments, corporations, or armed groups only when they betray their calling. They seldom even have a base of support within the general public. In some places, it’s impossible to report the truth without making oneself an object of hatred and a target of violence for one sector of society or another.... the decline of traditional media closed foreign bureaus all over the world, critical reporting has been left to local reporters. Many of them are talented, enterprising, and courageous, and often more able than their Western counterparts to work up sources and get to the heart of the story. But their position is also far more precarious. They have no wealthy foreign news organization or influential foreign government to back them. The only government around, their own, might want them dead. In countries like Mexico, the Philippines, and Pakistan, local journalists are the target of brutal campaigns of intimidation and murder by shadowy secret services or armed groups, from narco-traffickers to Islamists. Finally, there’s the invisible global hand of digital surveillance. The Chinese have perfected its use; the Iranians are getting better all the time. In this country, with the Snowden revelations, there’s a pervasive sense of being monitored, which has pushed many journalists to the routine use of cryptography to protect their sources. And there’s an ambiguous set of signals from the current American government, which promises never to jail journalists for doing their job, but uses the considerable power of the state to plug any leaks it deems harmful. In the age of mass data collection and shifting definitions of journalism, no one knows the rules or how they might be abused and broken." (read more at link above)

more news below



Why the New Republic Staff Left En Masse (video)

Why the New Republic Staff Left En Masse: Video - Bloomberg:
(Allow video to load after clicking play or go to link above)

Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson reports on the mass exodus of staff from The New Republic forcing the cancellation of all issues until February 2015. Johnson speaks on “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg 12/8)

more news below



Bloomberg Businessweek, 85 Years, Disruptive Ideas (video)

Bloomberg Businessweek: 85 Years of Disruptive Ideas -

Bloomberg Businessweek Deputy Editor Romesh Ratnesar discuses the magazine chronicling the most disruptive ideas of the past eighty-five years.

more news below



Mediagazer

publishing - Google News

self-publish - Google News

content creation - Google News

content curation - Google News