paid content

The annual subscription for Honolulu Civil Beat is a pricey $240, attracting plenty of skeptics. But don't count it out yet -- Omidyar may have timed the bottom of the paid-content news market well. Watch this space for an indicator of where the news business is headed.

More than a quarter of Americans now get news via their cell phones, according to a new Pew Research poll -- another stark reminder of the massive problems facing today's media. The biggest draw for mobile news junkies: weather reports.

The News Corp. chairman's strategy for crippling rival Google has been more orchestrated than it seemed, a profile in this week's New York magazine reveals. And lest you doubt his intentions, Murdoch even named his effort after one of Julius Caesar's conquests for the Roman Empire.

After months of deliberations, The New York Times has finally decided on both a structure for charging readers to access to its popular website and a date when the pay demands will take effect.

What media-industry developments and market forces will make headlines in the year to come? Pay-to-read online content, tablet computers, mom-and-pop newsrooms and, oh yes -- banks taking over the magazine and newspaper game.

Saul Friedman has written a column for the Long Island, N.Y. daily newspaper, Newsday, since 1996. But recently, his weekly column on aging, "Gray Matters," became restricted behind a paid subscriber wall. As a result ,Friedman, who is the winner of journalism's prestigious Nieman Fellowship and...

Steve Forbes, editor in chief of Forbes magazine and former Republican presidential candidate, was at the Paley Center for Media Tuesday afternoon to talk about the economy as part of Advertising Week. But what I really wanted to know is what he thinks of BusinessWeek. Why doesn't Forbes -- or just...

Just about every major periodical is pondering a move to paid digital content, but most are taking an oh-so-gingerly approach, trying to figure out how to coax some fresh revenues out of readers without taking a big hit in traffic and advertising. Not Variety, though. The Hollywood trade paper is...

Microsoft's Bing may be the fastest-growing player in the search market, but IAC chairman Barry Diller doesn't seem to think much of its prospects. Diller told attendees of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on Wednesday that he believes trying to beat Google at its own game, as Bing is...

The evidence continues to pile up that this will be the year newspapers start charging you to access their digital content. The latest news: Journalism Online, the e-commerce start-up created to help publishers monetize their websites, now says that more than 1,000 publications, including both...