writers

Gawker's Nick Denton: See, You Ingrates? This Is What We're Trying to Do (Video)

Peter Kafka in Media on February 10, 2011 at 8:44 pm PT

The Blog King doesn’t want to be the Blog King: He wants his sites to be as compelling as TV. Here’s his promo reel.

Perfect Market Raises Another $9 Million to Help Papers Sell Old News

Peter Kafka in Media on January 17, 2011 at 9:00 pm PT

Perfect Market doesn’t promise to save the newspaper business. But the company says it can help papers wring more money out of the stuff they’re already making.

Honey, I Shrunk the E-Book: Amazon Slicing "Singles" for Kindle [UPDATED]

Peter Kafka in Media on October 12, 2010 at 6:50 am PT

No reason not to do this: Amazon is carving out room on its digital shelves for “Singles”–essentially, mini e-books for its Kindle platform. Or, if you prefer, you can think of them as very long magazine articles.

AOL Automates Its Story Factory. Does That Kill an Associated Content Deal?

Peter Kafka in Media on November 30, 2009 at 4:45 am PT

AOL is cutting its payroll by one-third. Now comes its plan to make the remaining employees more productive: New technology that assigns and even edits stories automatically. That sounds an awful lot like Associated Content, a start-up that AOL CEO Tim Armstrong invested in–and considered buying–earlier this year.

Huffington Post Pays for Content After All, Via $1.75 Million “Investigative Fund”

Peter Kafka in Media on March 30, 2009 at 4:58 am PT

It won’t fill the gaping hole opening up in American journalism, but it’s better than nothing. The aggregator has earmarked the money for a handful of staff journalists and a network of freelancers. Hope it’s ready for a crush of resumes.

The Writers' Strike: Our Last Video

Kara Swisher in News on February 18, 2008 at 2:14 am PT

While the writers’ strike in Hollywood was going on, BoomTown has been offering up suggestions about stuff to watch. Of all the many videos out there, the most promising to me have been the many, many spoof videos the writers have done about the strike that just ended. Along with terrific videos of the strike [...]

Hollywood Rumble!

Kara Swisher in News on December 12, 2007 at 12:01 am PT

While the collapse of the talks between writers and Hollywood studios to end the strike might seem more like a tragedy–a shoot-your-idiot-selves-in-the-foot tragedy, of course–you have to love all the very funny writers’ strike parodies being put on the Web. In fact, it feels like the first good stuff to come out of Hollywood made [...]