Mediagazer: Product Friday: Monetizing Content is a Product Problem (Charlie O'Donnell/This is going to be BIG!)

4:20 PM ET, August 22, 2010

Top News:

Jeremy W. Peters / New York Times:

Facebook Feeling Unfriendly Toward ‘Social Network’ — LOS ANGELES — At the New York Film Festival next month, Hollywood will unleash “The Social Network,” a biting tale of the Silicon Valley giant Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. — Now Facebook must decide whether to bite back.

Discussion: PopEater, Thompson on Hollywood, Gawker, Hollywood Reporter, VentureBeat, New York Magazine, /Film, The 48th New York Film … and The Playlist

Charlie O'Donnell / This is going to be BIG!:

Product Friday: Monetizing Content is a Product Problem — They say people won't pay for content. They say that paywalls are stupid and that its just not monetizable. — Remember when they said that people wouldn't pay for music? — What Apple proved, and what I suspect is the issue with web content …

Hal Espen / New York Times:

Book Review - Morning Miracle - Inside the Washington Post - By Dave Kindred — Reading about the mass unemployment of tens of thousands of reporters and editors in the unfolding print apocalypse, or talking with nervous, demoralized friends and former colleagues in various newsrooms and magazine offices …

Paul Carr / TechCrunch:

Forget Ads In Books, Lit-Lovers Face An Even More Hideous Prospect — It's a pity readers don't want to pay for stories about the death of traditional media, because otherwise journalists and commentators would be riding a big fat cash cow. — In recent months it's been impossible to open …

Discussion: Snarkmarket, TeleRead and eBookNewser, more at Techmeme »

Chrystia Freeland / New York Times:

Business Journalism's Image Problem — These are grim days for print journalists: we are the auto workers of the white-collar class, toiling in an industry in structural decline (see: sale of Newsweek for $1). But this summer's best-seller list offers some relief for the world's inky-fingered wretches.

Joshua Errett / nowtoronto.com:

Patchwork news — You've Got Mail, the 1998 dot-com rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is a grim reminder of just how inescapable AOL once was. The title, of course, was AOL's annoying trademark email greeting, which played a supporting role in the movie.

Lou Dubois / Inc.com:

The Evolution of Sports Blog Nation — Jim Bankoff has long believed that web-only programming and products were the future of the Internet, particularly those with extreme specificity. The longtime AOL executive helped launch AOL.com, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and plenty of other properties …

Larry Neumeister / Associated Press:

Photographer and AP drop claims against each other — NEW YORK — A photographer who took a picture that the Barack Obama “HOPE” image was based on dropped his claim Friday that he owns the copyright to the photograph, instead of The Associated Press. The AP also dropped its claim against him.

DigiDave:

Generations in the Desert - Thoughts from Aspen — Much like FooCamp, the Knight Focus event in Aspen was very invigorating. FooCamp had a “FrieNDA” policy about blogging (I went ahead and assumed things were off the record). This event was the opposite and while I could never fully …

Discussion: The Buttry Diary

Standupkid / LocalNewser:

“I” Reporters vs. “It” Reporters — A passing quote in a story today by St. Pete Times TV writer Eric Deggans caught my eye: in writing about Sunday's NBC documentary on New Orleans five years after Katrina, Deggans quotes anchor Brian Williams as saying, “I'm going to make you sad, and I'm going to make you angry.”

Discussion: blogs.tampabay.com

Joseph Tartakoff / paidContent:

Forecast: More Digital-Media IPOs Coming — In an eye-catching report earlier this week, New York investment bank Peachtree Media Advisors said there had been a surge in digital media deal-making during the first half of the year; the volume of transactions was up 68 percent, the bank said …

Chris Foresman / Ars Technica:

Figuring out magazine subscriptions in the iPad age — After being actively courted by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, several magazine publishers have launched digital versions of titles like Wired, Popular Science, Time, and People targeted toward iPad owners. Most of these digital versions include …

Discussion: Noted and TUAW