CNET, a welcome SOS for CBS

It took a decade and a half to get there, but CNET finally is making it big in the TV business. Now, the $1.8 billion question is whether CNET can help CBS make it bigger in the Internet business.On track to have its shares acquired for a juicy 45% premium by CBS, CNET originally was formed as CNET-TV in 1993 by Halsey Minor and Shelby Bonnie to create a technology channel for cable television

The inconvenient truth for publishers

Another shoe is about to drop on the battered newspaper industry and it is going to be a big, fat, green Birkenstock.With global warming and soaring gasoline prices focusing consumer, political and eventually regulatory interest on environmental sustainability and energy consumption, people looking to be kinder to Mother Earth are going to start wondering about the impact their daily paper makes

Cablevision overpaying for Newsday?

Cablevision is valuing Newsday at more than twice the amount Rupert Murdoch thought it was worth, according to a side-by-side comparison of the two deals.While the Cablevision offer for Newsday appears at first to be “only” $70 million more than the $580 million originally offered by News Corp., a proper comparison of the deals has to take into account the considerable benefit that News Corp.

Cablevision's rosy vision for Newsday

Cablevision’s bold plan to purchase Newsday will test as never before the concept – and the economics – of the hyper-consolidation of local media by a single company. Don’t count on it succeeding.By adding the dominant Long Island daily and the free amNewYork to the largest and most highly concentrated cluster of cable systems in the country, Cablevision has the potential to become nearly all

Why Tribune has to sell Newsday

If you can imagine your mortgage payment tripling at the same time your take-home pay is shrinking, then you can understand the financial pain forcing the Tribune Co. to sell Newsday.The first-quarter earnings release issued by the company late Friday, which touts a $1.82 billion “profit” based on an technical accounting adjustment, dances around the magnitude of the challenge the company faces

How the Net clobbered U.S. media

The abrupt decline of the newspaper business in the United States is strongly correlated with the rapid adoption of inexpensive broadband Internet service – a phenomenon that likely threatens most other media companies throughout the world.That’s the conclusion of a presentation I delivered today to the annual world congress of the International Newspaper Marketing Association, which is meeting

Will Murdoch be Zell's exit strategy?

Rupert Murdoch may be standing pat on his bid for Newsday, because he knows that Sam Zell knows that News Corp. is probably the only plausible acquirer if the highly leveraged Tribune Co. deal goes south.Like a pair of masters plotting several moves ahead in a chess game, Rupe and Sam may be using the Newsday transaction to see how News Corp. could come to the rescue in the event the Tribune Co.