In March, I put together the fourth annual March Madne$$: The School Tuitions Of The NCAA Bracket. A popular piece, I watched as numerous sites reposted the work wholesale and sold ads against it.

That's when I tried something new in the ongoing efforts of writers to get paid on the Internet. Instead of angry emails or cease and desist notes, I just sent invoices to site editors and managers.

To my surprise, one paid me.

The great menace in headlines in 2011 was that either every headline was "11 Ways to X" or that it was "Y Happens to Z [SLIDESHOW]." You know, whatever our pals at Business Insider and Huffington Post's Celebrity Sideboob's page were doing. Well, guess what, we all got used to it, and now it barely registers as tacky or grabby, except when it's over the top. Sure: promise me 11 things, I will at least read three of them. Fair's fair.

The menace before that was the "How" headline, which is so hard to avoid. "How X Became Y." "How Apple Something Something'd." "How Your Mom Became Your Dad." That [...]

"Gannett is not the only big media enterprise where the consequences of bad decisions land on everyone except those who made them. The Tribune Company, a chain of newspapers and television stations run into the ground by Sam Zell after he bought it in 2007, is paying out tens of millions of dollars in bonuses as part of a deal in which it would exit bankruptcy. Over 4,000 people in the company lost their jobs, and the journalistic missions of formerly robust newspapers it operates — including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun — have been curtailed. And even though Randy Michaels and some [...]

Is Twitter your job? We have maintained in the past that it is not. A year later, we think that more and more media employees are engaged in the practice of using their Twitter accounts to promote not just their work, but their workplaces. That's true even with the transition of Jim Roberts from @NYTJim to @NYCJim, as he left the New York Times to become the executive editor of Reuters Digital. (His Twitter is still chock-full of Times links, though!)

How much Twitter work is working? We looked at a work-week's worth of tweets at three publications: BuzzFeed, Gawker and Business Insider. Just how often were [...]

"Apple’s Newsstand launched with the release of iOS 5 on October 12th, and by any measure, it appears to be a big win for Apple and for publishers alike. Since the iPad took the technology world by storm 18 months ago, it’s been an interesting time for publishers with several notable App Store rejections, industry confusion about how to implement tablet subscriptions, and a fair amount of criticism of Apple’s 30% revenue share. It appears now that Newsstand is the real deal, delivering on the iPad’s promise of a new dawn for publishers. Huzzah!"

That was from November 29th, 2011, just over a year ago, and it came with the [...]

The North American Review began publication in 1815, long before The Atlantic, which was founded in 1857. It is not our oldest continuously operating publication because it ceased publication in 1940, after having fallen on some very hard times. But it almost did not fall on hard times! A savior had swooped in to save the magazine in 1938. That savior, Joseph Hilton Smyth, was in the business of snapping up a number of small struggling publications, including the Saturday Review of Literature and Living Age, and he bought a piece of Current History as well. Unfortunately he didn't have any money of his own and was apparently spending money [...]

Another day, another newspaper bankruptcy. This time it was the Journal Register national chain, home to eighteen small dailies including the New Haven Register, and now operating under the seemingly sexier-sounding name of Digital First Media. That rechristening had been trumpeted as more than mere window-dressing—Digital First Media’s senior executives publicly embraced the Internet as the future of journalism, boasting of not only their "digital DNA," but also their determination to “stop listening to newspaper people” and their stuck-in-the-past, ink-stained thinking. Don’t panic over vanishing print ad revenue, Digital First chief executive John Paton insisted last September: If you stack them high enough, “Digital dimes can replace Print [...]