Tom Davidson

Pete Townshend – yes, that greybeard who played at the Super Bowl the other night – has always been one of my favorite pithy writers. Don’t Get Fooled Again’s best line may be its last – “Meet the new boss/ Same as the old boss.” In this decade of unparalleled tumult at American newspapers, that [...]

Note: My friend and former colleague Bill Day is one of the sharpest sales-side guys I ever worked with. He’s adept at dealing with traditional, agency-driven advertisers and their massive buys – and maybe even better at bundling together innovative ideas like events, direct marketing and promotions to tap revenue from people who rarely advertise [...]

While I’m obsessed with digital media, the smarter part of my household focuses on the world of book publishing. That world is agog this morning, because The World’s Largest Bookstore (registered trademark, etc.) yanked all the books published by the conglomerate MacMillan overnight. The reason: MacMillan wants its ebooks to appear first on Apple’s iPad, [...]

Much kerfuffle – and more derision than warranted – erupted earlier this week when the New York Observer reported that Newsday has sold only 35 online-access subscriptions since it walled off the site last October. There was astonishment at the low numbers: “Michael Amon, a social services reporter, asked for clarification. “I heard you say [...]

A snarky comment on Alan Mutter’s blog set me off the other day. Alan was reacting to Mark Potts’ excellent riff on the coming iSlate (not just a fanboi dream, but potentially a great leap forward). Predictably, some of the commenters were pining for 1994: “This smells a little like Google, which siphoned off $21 [...]

The gang at GrowthSpur, of which I proudly call myself a member, is having another of its introductory sessions for hyperlocal and niche site operators. We think journopreneurs – and people who just want to operate great local sites, whether or not they claim the “j” word – are one of the key parts of [...]

  Economist Robert Picard has always been one of the sharpest thinkers about the nexus of economics and media. Today, he nails a topic that has long vexed me (and others): the willingness of journalists to stay in their newsroom cocoons, woefully ignorant of the business workings that for so long provided bountiful resources for [...]