LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood trade newspaper Variety is putting its Web site behind a "pay wall" starting Thursday – reserving its online content for paid subscribers and hoping its advertisers will stick around despite the smaller Internet audience. Variety plans to shut off free access gradually, asking one in 10 visitors for a user name and password that will be sent to paying subscribers.
Barnes & Noble's electronic book reader bears a striking resemblance to Amazon's Kindle, adding some useful features; but it falls achingly short in the critical area of speed.
With Nielsen's update to its @Plan system, some big sites are getting a shock and seeing wide swings from what the old data said about their audiences.
Hearst plans to launch next year a service called Skiff to sell digital subscriptions to newspapers and magazines in a format it hopes will be more visually appealing to users of electronic readers and other electronic devices." />
So what does the future hold for digital reading? On Monday, Forrester Research analysts Sarah Rotman Epps and James L. McQuivey posted some interesting predictions for the booming e-reader market in 2010.
In The Wall Street Journal, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that the Internet will not destroy news organizations. He says that Google working in cooperation with publishers of newspapers and magazines can help bring about a business model to share ad revenue from searches." />
Escalating the battle between traditional newspapers and online news providers, media mogul Rupert Murdoch lashed out at Google Inc. and other Web companies Tuesday, accusing them of looting news articles and contributing to the industry's decline.