6.20.2002
Thou Shalt Not Link. No Really. I Mean It. Come On You Guys, Cut It Out!
The squabbling over whether sites can control how others link to them rages on: The latest furor is over National Public Radio's link policy, which bans all linking to their pages without permission. The policy isn't new, but it "became the talk of the blogs on Wednesday, a day after Cory Doctorow posted up a link to the permission form on BoingBoing, his blog," Wired reports. "From there, the link was picked up by several Weblogs and discussion sites, with nearly all of the people linking to NPR, presumably without permission. By Wednesday afternoon, the NPR link form was the No. 1 item on Daypop, which ranks the popularity of items in Weblogs."
At Wired 

6.19.2002
Ad Doldrums Ending, Paper Execs Say
The Wall Street Journal reports newspaper execs are saying "the worst of the 18-month-long advertising recession appears to be over."
At WSJ

6.19.2002
Webby Awards Announced
Among the best and the brightest Web sites this year: BBC, Washingtonpost.com, ESPN, Google, Amazon, Lonely Planet Online, The Onion, epicurious.com, and evite.com.
AtNewYork.com

6.18.2002
Commuter Cross-Promotion
Talk about news flash: The Orlando Sentinel has bought a billboard along Florida's Interstate 4 and is using it to flash the latest headlines and to promote upcoming story packages.
At Editor and Publisher

6.17.2002
Online Giants Create Ad Consortium
Some of the Web's biggest sites are trying out a new tactic to increase ad sales: They've joined together to offer advertisers more bang for their buck. The new ad consortium -- NYTimes.com, USAToday.com, CBSMarketWatch, Weather.com and CNET - lets advertisers buy space on all five sites at once. AT&T Wireless is the consortium's first ad buyer. The company's  "ads are expected to run exclusively on the five sites in coming weeks. The company is spending about $1 million over one to two months at the exclusion of other sites."
At CNET

6.13.2002
Cronkite Weighs in Online: "Those People" Must Obey Libel Laws Just Like "The Rest of Us"
Veteran journalist Walter Cronkite has just a few quibbles with how journalism is being conducted online. "I'm a little worried about the use of the Internet by people who pretend to be journalists," Cronkite said in a speech at a recent convention in Colorado. Online reporters should "be held to the same standards as other journalists -- those who publish unsubstantiated rumors (should) face the same penalties. There's no reason those people shouldn't answer to the same laws of libel the rest of us do."
At the Rocky Mountain News

6.11.2002
Media Mergers a Culture Killer?
TV industry bigwigs are asking the Feds to study whether media mergers will ruin TV and maybe even "our great national resource," American popular culture. 
AP story at the New York Times

6.11.2002
Make it Stop! Still More Pundit Yammering on the Deeper Meaning of Blogs
"Are weblogs the blinking neurons of an emerging, chatterbox superbrain? Or are these proliferating online diaries merely podiums for bush-league blowhards? Truth be told, they're a bit of both -- and that's precisely what makes them so damn addictive."
At Business 2.0
Also: NYT on blogger infighting

6.09.2002
Demand for Online News Flattening Out
A new study from Pew finds that demand for online news is flattening out. "The Internet has established itself as a major source of news and information, but its growth has slowed considerably since the 1990s. Currently, 35% of Americans go online for news at least once a week, up only slightly from 33% in 2000."
At The Pew Research Center

6.09.2002
Study Finds 600 Percent Increase in Spam Since April 2001
At WashingtonPost.com

6.07.2002
Weatherman Duped by E-mail Reports
Despite recent rumors to the contrary, everyone is *not* a journalist. New York meteorologist Steve Caporizzo found that out the hard way last week: Caporizzo asked viewers to e-mail reports on the effects of a string of massive thunderstorms. After reading some of the unconfirmed reports on the air, the station learned some of them were just plain bogus. "We certainly learned a lesson, and will certainly be more careful next time,'' news director Rob Puglisi said. Local competitor WNYT news director Paul Conti noted that airing unconfirmed e-mails from viewers is "dangerous. Really dangerous." Consider yourself warned.
At the Times Union

6.07.2002
Dubious Sources, Continued
A gullible reporter in Beijing learned another lesson about online sources this week: Don't crib stories from The Onion. A reporter at the state-run Beijing Evening News lifted an Onion story saying that U.S. Congress was threatening to move the nation's capitol to Memphis or Charlotte, N.C. "unless a fancy new Capitol...with more bathrooms and better parking" was built, The Los Angeles Times' Henry Chu reports. "Wow, even journalists now believe everything they read," said Onion Editor Robert Siegel. "If I were a reporter in Beijing and found an item like that ... I might want to follow up and check my sources."
Los Angeles Times story at Boston Globe.com

6.06.2002
Cooler Than Basketweaving...Blogging at Berkeley
Berkeley is offering a class on blogging next semester, Wired reports. "The Berkeley class on blogging is the latest in a series of signs that the media establishment is starting to warm up to what was long seen as legitimate journalism's loud-mouthed kid sister."
At Wired

5.31.2002
Video On Demand Via Satellite...
"A system that's being used to deliver interactive educational programming via satellite to rural areas of China is coming to Hollywood," according to Hollywood Reporter. "Field trials in China show (the system is) a cost-effective solution for delivering VOD by way of digital direct broadcast satellite networks to an unlimited number of customers simultaneously."
At HollywoodReporter.com

5.29.2002
Eye On Media
Newsday takes a look at the plethora of media-watch Websites that are adding their own spin to the mainstream's take on the news.
At Newsday

5.29.2002
Video On Demand Via Cable
"After a decade of hype and dozens of trial runs in the hinterlands, video-on-demand over cable TV is finally ready for prime time. That may be welcome news for viewers--but it threatens the economic underpinnings of ad-supported television."
At Fortune

5.29.2002
BBC Takes Spam to New Heights
BBC was having a hard time getting viewers to watch their new comedy, Dossa and Joe. So using TiVo technology, BBC sent their show out as spam: They downloaded it to the country's 50,000 TiVo households without permission. "The experiment has caused fury among viewers," Media Guardian writes. "Almost 1,000 messages have already been posted on a TiVo Web forum -- some say their video recorder settings were overridden to force them into viewing "foul mouthed rubbish."
At Media Guardian

5.29.2002
Get It Together: Online Ad Revenue Tallies Vary Wildly
CBS MarketWatch writer William Spain wants to know: Why are online ad revenue estimates so terribly far apart? "We're not talking about a couple hundred million bucks here or there, but a gap of about $5 billion between the high-end and low-end guesses for what was spent online last year."
At CBS MarketWatch

5.29.2002
Nude Steffi Ruling: Web Sites Are Responsible for User-Posted Content
A German appeals court has ruled that Microsoft Germany is responsible for content posted by users -- including manipulated photos posted last year that put tennis star Steffi Graf's head on a nude body. If the similar photos show up on the site again, Microsoft Germany will have to pay a fine, the court ruled. One Microsoft spokesman the decision  "endangers the existence of live-chat and private (Internet) communities."
AP Story at The Miami Herald

5.28.2002
New Minnesota Law Protects Online Privacy
Marketers are shaking in their boots over a new online privacy law that "requires Internet businesses to obtain consent from consumers before disclosing their personal information to third parties for marketing purposes," Adweek reports. Well imagine that. "Minnesota became the first state to pass an online-privacy law last week, increasing the anxiety among advertisers that others will quickly follow. Similar legislation is already under consideration by legislators in California and Michigan...Advertising lobby groups contend that such legislation would place huge burdens on marketers."
At Adweek

5.28.2002
Analyst: Newspapers Ad Revenues Will Be Flat This Year
"Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine on Friday raised her newspaper advertising revenue forecasts for this year and next year following better-than-expected April revenue results. Fine now estimates newspaper ad revenue to be flat this year, instead of down 1.5%, and up 4.5% to 5% next year, instead of up 4%."
At E&P

5.23.2002
Web Users Line Up in Droves for Slide Shows
If you haven't been publishing scads of photos on your news Web site, maybe it's time to start. Yahoo tells the New York Times that the photo slide show is one of the most popular features on their site. The ability to showcase hundreds of news photos "is perhaps the perfect example of the advantage of online news," said Kourosh Karimkhany, senior producer of Yahoo News. And readers love them, NYT writes. "Other news sites, including the digital editions of newspapers like this one, have also embraced the slide-show concept, grouping news photos by topic."
At The New York Times

5.23.2002
Comcast Sued for Spying on Customers
"A multimillion-dollar privacy lawsuit on behalf of customers of Comcast's broadband Internet service has been filed in a federal court. The litigation seeks compensation for the approximately 1 million Comcast Internet customers nationwide whose Web surfing habits were tracked earlier this year."
At Newsbytes 

5.21.2002
Dot Kids: Coming Soon To Computers Near You
The House of Representatives has approved a kids-only zone on the Internet, "a safe online "playground" for young children," according to Newsbytes. "No Web site with a kids.us address would be allowed to post hyperlinks to locations outside of the kids.us domain. The legislation also now prohibits chat and instant messaging features, except in cases where a site operator can guarantee the features adhere to kid-friendly standards developed for the domain."
At Newsbytes

5.21.2002
People Are Talking 'bout...
Posters at Poynter's online-news discussion list are grumbling about the new slow-loading New York Times ad that starts blasting audio at you when you open the page it's on. If you happen to be listening to music while you work, you'll get two sound feeds bombarding you at once. And if your kid is asleep on the sofa -- or you just happen to be one of those crazy types who likes to decide for yourself when your computer gets to make noise -- well too bad for you.
See the ad at NYT.com
Send your thoughts to feedback@nytimes.com

5.20.2002
Broadband Gaining Ground
More than 25 million homes users cruised the Internet through a high-speed line in April, 2002, compared to just 15.9 million in April, 2001.
At Newsbytes 

5.20.2002
Yahoo Pricing for NYT News "Dumb"
Yahoo, how could you? $2.50 to read one story? That's what Yahoo is  charging for New York Times stories (those more than a week old) that turn up in Yahoo news searches. "The word that pops to mind here is DUMB," says Poynter.org columnist Steve Outing. "Expecting Yahoo users to pay $2.50 for a single story is just crazy."
At Poynter.org

5.17.2002
Now if We Could Get Something Like This for Newsrooms…
"The Spanish government plans to eradicate technological illiteracy by launching a program to teach the Internet to all citizens. The courses, divided in basic, medium, and advanced levels, take 15 hours and cost 15 Euros. At the end, the pupil will have a Surfer Card, which certifies Internet competence."
At Poynter.org

5.14.2002
Online Ads On the Rise - Sort Of
A new Nielsen NetRatings study shows -- now listen carefully here -- the number of unique online ads is on the rise. News stories about this study sure make it sound like the study says online advertising is up, but it doesn't say that at all. This study tracks the number of ad designs in use, not the number of ad buys or advertising spending. So if you've been feeling optimistic about online advertising after reading stories about this study, faggedabout it.
E&P's Ad Increase Story
See the Nielsen NetRatings release (pdf)