I'll be looking at the big, existential questions facing media companies: What will it mean to be a newspaper or a broadcast network in 10 years? Is there a way to get consumers to start paying for content they're used to getting for free? Can the norms and ethics of traditional journalism flourish on the web? Will "integrated" advertising (i.e. product placement) spread from entertainment programming to news? And lots more.
I'll also devote plenty of pixels to the personalities and controversies that make this such an exciting beat to cover. When David Geffen makes his next run at The New York Times, I'll tell you whether the Sulzbergers should accept his offer. If Maureen Dowd commits another act of accidental plagiarism, I'll be her personal ombudsman. And anytime Rupert Murdoch does anything at all, I'm there.
I also plan on breaking news in this space from time to time, if only to give my fellow bloggers something to write about. If you have tips or suggestions, I hope you'll email me at Jeff AT DailyFinance DOT com.
A little about me: I spent most of the past two years writing the Mixed Media blog on Portfolio.com, the website of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine, which shut down in April. Before Portfolio, I covered media, entertainment and politics for the pop culture magazine Radar (another victim, sadly, of the great magazine recession). And before that I reported on media and advertising for the trade newspaper WWD, where I wrote a daily column, "Memo Pad."
These are fascinating times to be covering the business of media -- depressing, yes, and more than a little scary for a journalist who hopes to be gainfully employed for the next few decades, but fascinating all the same. Incremental change in the publishing, broadcasting and information industries has given way to wholesale retrenchment and desperate innovation.
Fortunes will be lost and made; new values will succeed old verities. DailyFinance is your front-row seat to it all. Come back often.
