New York Times

Ingredients of Communication

When people talk to one another long enough, they want to meet, and when they’ve been in one another’s presence, they want to keep in touch.

– Clay Shirky, talking to David Carr about the “ingredients of communication” in the digital world

Kitteh Culture

As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world? And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.

– Jonah Peretti, CEO of BuzzFeed, in conversation with David Carr of the New York Times

News Byte

New York Times Digital Subscription Numbers Grow 20 Percent

Peter Kafka in Media on February 2 at 6:09 am PT

The New York Times ended 2011 with 390,000 digital subscribers, up about 20 percent from its third-quarter total. Some of the new subscriptions came from the publisher’s International Herald Tribune, which started digital sales last fall. The Times saw overall revenue drop 2.8 percent for the quarter, as ad revenue shrank 7.1 percent while circulation revenue increased.

News Byte

BSR Rebuts New York Times Report on Apple Supply Chain

Liz Gannes in News on January 28 at 4:20 pm PT

Corporate responsibility consultancy BSR isn’t happy that its name got pulled into the New York Times’ provocative report on Apple and its suppliers’ manufacturing practices (“a consultant at BSR” was the source for a significant section of the piece). The company today asked for the story to be corrected, with BSR CEO Aron Cramer noting he had refuted various claims in a letter to the NYT before the piece was published. Apple CEO Tim Cook previously disputed the claims in an internal email that became public.

Apple CEO: Any Suggestion That We Don’t Care About Supply Chain Workers Is “Patently False”

John Paczkowski in News on January 27 at 8:20 am PT

… And offensive, too.

The Full Valenti: Dodd Trades His Olive Branch to Tech for a Howitzer, After SOPA/PIPA Gets Delayed

Kara Swisher in Media on January 20 at 11:32 am PT

What would Jack do? (And would it work anymore?)

The New York Times Bits Blog Gets a Billboard

Liz Gannes in News on January 18 at 12:03 pm PT

Competition in the technoblogoverse just got a little fiercer! The New York Times Bits technology blog now has its very own billboard on Highway 101.

News Byte

Join the Club: EMI Sues Grooveshark, Again

Peter Kafka in News on January 5 at 1:28 pm PT

EMI Music, which had sued music streaming service Grooveshark in 2009, then ended up cutting a deal with the company, is now suing Grooveshark again. EMI’s publishing unit claims that Grooveshark has yet to pay a royalty on its deal. As the New York Times notes, the suit means that Grooveshark is now in legal fights with all four major music labels.

SOPA Through the Generations

The schism between content creators and platforms like Kickstarter, Tumblr and YouTube is generational. It’s people who grew up on the Web versus people who still don’t use it. In Washington, they simply don’t see the way that the Web has completely reconfigured society across classes, education and race. The Internet isn’t real to them yet.

– Yancey Strickler, a founder of Kickstarter, in an email — from an article by the New York Times’ David Carr about the dangers of SOPA

A Look Back at IBM’s Palmisano Era and the China Strategy

Arik Hesseldahl in News on January 2 at 9:33 am PT

Palmisano will be remembered as the man who sold IBM’s PC division to China’s Lenovo. Seven years later, it seems to have been a good trade for both parties.