MediaFile

In a moment of dubious etiquette, venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen said at a New York Times conference this week that the company should dismantle its print operations not in ten years, or five, but “as soon as possible.” Cue print lovers’ outrage.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, speaks at the Iab Mixx Conference and Expo in New York, October 2, 2012. REUTERS/Mike Segar

Of course, those paying attention to the newspaper business shouldn’t be surprised to hear anyone, let alone Marc Andreessen, speculating on the eventual or imminent demise of print. At least 14 metropolitan dailies have closed since Newspaper Death Watch (a sobering site if ever there was one) started keeping track in 2007, and another 10 are working on a digital-only or digital-print hybrid. In May, New Orleans’ Times-Picayune said it would be reducing its frequency to three times a week. Gannett and McClatchy are both struggling with falling ad revenue and rising pension costs, and earlier this week, the Tribune Co. – in its fifth year of bankruptcy – announced plans to sell off some or all of its papers.

So everyone knows print is in trouble. But simply giving it up – all production and distribution costs included – is no panacea. True digital success stories are few and far between (think The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Financial Times) but are touted as beacons of hope for the industry. To date, newspapers’ transition to online-only has not been, as Andreessen asks of the NYT, a matter of “going on 100 percent offense,” so much as necessary reaction to harsh realities: ad revenue is down, circulation is flat and putting out an actual paper is expensive. It’s too early to know how such nascent operations will fare in the long run.

For the New York Times specifically, the prospect of an all-digital operation is still a financial bridge too far. It’s true that company saw a 10.9% drop in third-quarter print ad revenue, compared with the same quarter in 2011 (and in line with a staggering drop in print ad dollars documented here) but digital ad sales have yet to come even close to filling the void. Moreover, the New York Times Co. saw a 2.2% decline in digital ad revenue in the third quarter, which—at $44.6 million—accounted for less than a quarter of overall ad dollars. In other words, online advertising is still the David to print’s (however floundering) Goliath. The subdued panic resulting from the digital advertising plateau is evident in marketers’ attempts to “revolutionize” the ad space. See: social media marketing, custom content and lofty price tags for exclusive tablet campaigns.

The Internet has sustained some pretty intense assaults in the past couple of years. There was the heavy-handed attempt to stamp out content piracy with SOPA/PIPA, the Federal Communications Commission’s Net neutrality ruling, which many saw as splitting the baby, and that whack job who claimed to own a patent on the World Wide Web.

It is again open season on the Internet in Dubai, where the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency ‑ whose mandate includes global communications ‑ is weighing proposals from many of its 193 member nations. Some of these proposals ‑ such as decentralizing the assignment of website names and eliminating Internet anonymity ‑ would make enormous changes to the organization and management of the Internet.

The ITU meeting, which began on Monday, runs through Dec. 14. Its agenda, and even the fact the proceedings are taking place at all, set off alarms among the Internet’s guardian angels.

The Apple Maps fiasco has become terribly overblown, if not hysterical.

It started with the fanfare release of the iPhone 5 and its software upgrade in September, which included a big switch from Google Maps to a homegrown alternative from Apple. The upgrade did not go well. Almost immediately, users began noticing that the maps were … unreliable. Not bad enough to slow iPhones sales but bad enough to dominate the news cycle for days.

But the damage was already done. Everyone seemed to be having a field day with Apple’s self-inflicted wound. More than two months later, the drama continues.

This week, Apple fired a senior executive, Map Division head Richard Williamson. Previously, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook showed Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software, the door when he wouldn’t go on his own. Cook himself wrote a quick and sincere apology, which seemed to quiet the clamor.

Editor’s note: This piece first appeared on PandoDaily.com. It is being republished with permission.

There’s a reason that healthcare and public education are the least functional parts of our economy. In neither is the person receiving the treatment the one actually paying the bill.

First off — calm down, crazy Libertarians — I’m not suggesting we abolish either. But it’s certainly a problem that in both healthcare and public education there’s inherent confusion over who the customer actually is.

Instagram, the mobile photo sharing app that Facebook bought for about $700 million, has been doing something new over the past few weeks. Up until now, one couldn’t see all of a user’s Instagrams online, the way you could, say, see all of a Twitter users’ tweets. But in recent weeks, users’ collections have been uploaded to the Internet automatically (see my profile page as an example). Instagram never bothered to ask for permission. Don’t want people to be able to easily access all your pictures from your Web browser? Too bad.

Between the Instagram change and other more substantive and complex alterations to Facebook’s user-feedback policy this week, the world’s largest social network has a clear modus operandi: What’s good for Facebook is good for you. This is the Facebook Doctrine.

Along with relatively innocuous Instagram changes came word that Facebook intends to eliminate its very modest experiment with democracy. It was a scheme by which members could undo changes (but still not stop them from happening before they took place). The rules Facebook put in place established a transparent process: A policy could be reversed if it received more than 7,000 comments, more than 30 percent of people on Facebook participated in a vote, and if that plurality voted against it.

Just in time for the utter madness of Black Friday, Nintendo has released an extraordinarily complex successor to its Wii, grandma’s favorite videogame console. The Wii, which made gaming accessible to every demographic through ease of play, is no joke. As of the end of September, it had sold 97 million units worldwide.

So what of this new machine? Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo of America’s swaggering president, has been hitting the road to promote the Wii U, a machine without the simplicity of the intuitive Wii. The Wii U is a kind of videogame console meets iPad. Its not easy to learn, and it’s a big gamble for the Japanese company. Replicating the Wii’s success is a nearly impossible task that even Mario with all his Power-Ups would find daunting.

A full year prior to the Wii’s release, Nintendo’s stock began to rise amid an elated, buzzy excitement in the press. The gauzy coverage said the Wii’s motion controls will yield a fascinating experience the whole family will love. By the time the Wii hit the shelves in November 2006, Nintendo’s stock price had more than doubled to over $28. A year later, at its high, it rocketed to nearly $77 a share. Not only did Nintendo make money on games, it made money on the Wii, which was cheap to produce. The Wii became a trend that doubled as a lifestyle choice. You could play Wii Sports with your family, and you could exercise with apps like Wii Fit.

“There are no second acts in American lives.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

Good thing Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to tell that to AOL and Yahoo, which are confounding wet blankets with sparks of renewed life and relevance. The bit of renaissance for these Internet pioneers comes when Google and Apple are in a bit of a rut and Facebook seems to have found its bottom. (The one constant: Groupon and Zynga are still floundering.)

None of these things are related, of course. There is no astrology of technology, aligning the stars in such a way as to favor some and deny others. Tech success isn’t a zero-sum game, especially when valuations aren’t everything. Just look at Apple’s rise and fall and rebirth.

Editor’s note: This piece originally ran on PandoDaily.com. It is being reprinted with permission.

Good news! For the first time in seven years, AOL’s revenue didn’t shrink! The company said Tuesday morning that it brought in $532 million in revenue last quarter, flat with the same quarter one year ago. Which is to say AOL still hasn’t seen any growth since 2005. Okay… maybe it’s not such great news after all.

But AOL investors are happy. They pushed the stock up as much as 16 percent Tuesday, after AOL reported its earnings and promised a $5.15 a share dividend this December, financed by the $1.1 billion deal to sell and license its patents to Microsoft. AOL also posted a net profit of 22 cents a share, versus a 2-cent loss a year ago. That profit was well above the 17 cents a share analysts were expecting.

The Cast of Start-Up: Silicon Valley

This evening Bravo aired the hotly anticipated first episode of its technology-focused reality show “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley.” The show has been an object of chatter for months among tech media and Valley pundits, some of whom objected to the idea of a television series glamorizing the parts of their universe they see as a sideshow. (Clearly they have never seen reality television before!) I think dismissing the idea of a show is wrong: Silicon Valley deserves a pop culture examination and send-up of its weird little world. But, at least after one episode, this show probably isn’t it. (more…)

This week Apple faces two significant tablet challengers. The first is Microsoft, which is releasing its long-awaited Surface tablet on Friday. The second is… itself.

Yesterday, amidst the anticipation for the Surface and strong sales for the Kindle Fire, Apple announced a slew of new devices, the $329 iPad Mini the most intriguing among them.

The mobile era has been defined by Apple: iPod, iPhone, iPad, you know the drill. Apple ascended largely unchallenged, facing only a few stunned and weak rivals. By the time it got to tablets in 2010, Apple benefited from an unspeakably large pent-up demand for a device nobody had been clamoring for. Since then it’s sold more than 100 million iPads.