newspaper industry

Carlos Slim is one of the New York Times Co.'s biggest shareholders, but most of his holdings are in the form of warrants received after loaning the media company $250 million. The Mexican billionaire's growing stake has raised concerns about whether he would try to influence the fabled journalism brand in any way.

We're addicted to free information, and we only have ourselves to blame. When the Web emerged, newspapers and magazines saw it as a sort of add-on -- a guest bedroom in their fancy mansion, where they could give away their best work in the deluded (and rarely substantiated) knowledge that...

Can Microsoft (MSFT) gain much needed market share for its Bing search engine by signing a deal with News Corp. (NWS) and other news publishers to remove their web pages from the Google (GOOG) search index and give Bing an exclusive on links to The Wall Street Journal? That's the kernel of an...

French films usually include at least one scene of serious-looking, chain-smoking café patrons reading the newspaper. But that shot is make-believe: The newspaper industry, as troubled as it is in the U.S., is dying in the land of Sartre and Voltaire, where the per-capita circulation is...

With local TV stations scrambling as advertising dwindles, it's prompting some to examine a money stream traditionally relegated to newspapers: obituaries. WNEM-TV, a Saginaw, Michigan, CBS affiliate owned by Meredith Corp. (MDP), may be the first TV station in the U.S. to air obituaries -- an idea...

Once upon a time, Capitol Hill was teeming with newspapermen looking for the obvious and hidden, so they could inform the American people. Today, the press is still spending plenty of time in Washington -- but for a much different reason. An industry representative sought tax breaks for the...

A former owner of The Boston Globe visited the newspaper recently. Stephen Taylor, whose great-grandfather started the newspaper, is looking to bring it back into the family. But he is facing competition from Platinum Equity, a private equity firm from Beverly Hills, California, which also visited...

Sometimes when you need an answer, you have to turn to the cause of the problem. This is ostensibly what the Newspaper Association of America did when it approached the world's leading technology companies for ideas on how to charge for online news. IBM (NYSE: IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and...

Imagine that, instead of paying for a bundle of cable stations, you had to pay for each one separately. That would be a death knell for many networks. This is a major hurdle facing online content providers that need to produce more revenue to survive. A new Google initiative could provide a...

It's no surprise that smaller newspapers are holding up better in the current media recession, which predates and has been exacerbated by the worldwide economic downturn. Historically, they have had wider margins and have not had to face the same competitive pressures as their urban, regional and...