Can Facebook deliver on high IPO expectations?

The Facebook IPO buzz has at last become a reality. After years of anticipation, the company finally filed for its initial public offering, and there was no shortage of enthusiasm from industry watchers. “Every startup wants to be the next Facebook, every founder, the next (Mark) Zuckerberg and every angel investor, the next Peter Thiel. It’s easy to see why. Facebook has more than 800 million users, nearly a decade of amazing growth and it just filed the biggest Valley IPO in a decade,” wrote GigaOm’s Edward Aten. In its filing, the company revealed that it’s looking to raise at…  Full article

Earnings roundup: Digital a bright spot for NYT, McClatchy, Gannett

There’s no question that digital matters, but the message was made loud and clear in the most recent round of earnings among media entities. Gannett posted a 33 percent drop in fourth-quarter net income and pointed to reorganization costs as one reason for the decrease. But while its paper empire continues to lag, its digital business is up 11 percent for the year. McClatchy fared better, and touted its digital investments in an upbeat earnings report. The company beat forecasts due to heavy cost-cutting and debt reduction and dividends from online investments such as CareerBuilder.com. “Despite this good news,” noted…  Full article

The super social Super Bowl XLVI

When it comes to broadcast sporting events, nothing draws a bigger TV audience than the Super Bowl. But Super Bowl XLVI set a record beyond regular old TV viewership on Sunday night: NBC reported that more than 2.1 million people streamed the show on computers, tablets and smartphones. In fact, it was the “most watched single-game sports event ever online,” NBC declared. Considering those numbers, it’s not too surprising that Twitter posted some records of its own surrounding the event. During the nail-biting end of the Super Bowl, Twitter reported hitting 12,233 posts per second, the highest number ever for…  Full article

GigaOm buys PaidContent from Guardian

When Guardian News & Media acquired ContentNext, parent company of PaidContent, in 2008, some industry observers raised their eyebrows at what seemed to be an ill-fit match. After all, Guardian Media Group is best known for owning time-honored British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer, while PaidContent is an online entity that covers the forefront of digital media. “I had trouble seeing why a general interest news organization, even a forward-looking one, would buy what was essentially a network of niche sites geared toward media and technology executives,” wrote PBS MediaShift’s Dorian Benkoil. The mismatch became glaringly obvious in November…  Full article

Tablet owners drive e-commerce to mags, but mobile use still not huge

More and more tablet owners are seeking out electronic content over their paper counterparts, according to a new survey. A study from GfK MRI found that a majority of tablet magazine readers (67%) would rather read an electronic version of a magazine than a paper version. What’s more, many tablet users would like more e-commerce in digital magazines. GfK MRI’s survey found that 70% of tablet owners would like to be able to buy items by clicking on ads in a digital magazine.

But does readers’ interest in digital content translate into explosive use of the mobile Internet? A…  Full article

ComScore: Pinterest closes in on Twitter in referral traffic

Pinterest, the image-based social-networking site where users “pin” and organize things they like online, has been generating a lot of buzz lately, primarily due to its impressive growth. ComScore recently found the site reached 11.7 million unique monthly visitors in January, up from only 7.5 million in December, marking the fastest growth ever for a standalone site. Plus, a separate study from Shareaholic showed that Pinterest is now the fastest-growing site for referral traffic—and it drives more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. The site grew to 3.6% of referral traffic in January from 2.5% in December, which…  Full article

Of Note

Online Publisher’s Association Gets New Executive Officers (Folio)
On the heels of its 10th anniversary, the Online Publisher’s Association announced that the group has selected new executive officers for the 2012 calendar year

Helen Gurley Brown Gives $30 Million for Media Innovation at Columbia and Stanford (NY Times)
With the donation, the former editor of Cosmopolitan and the two schools plan to create a center for media innovation

Bay Citizen, Center for Investigative Reporting Plan to Merge. Now What? (PBS MediaShift)
Under the agreement, CIR, which also runs California Watch, will take over management of the Bay Citizen, an online publication with a partnership with the NY Times

Reuters productizes social media through Social Pulse (Nieman Journalism Lab)
The new effort tries to package raw social data in ways that even an executive could get into

Debunking the "original sin" of online newspapers (GigaOm)
The theory that newspapers could have somehow won a war against the Internet if they had just charged users for content misses the point

Print News Media Go Live With Video Programming (NY Times)
Websites, newspapers and other news organizations are gearing up to produce hours of video programming.

Earnings Roundup: Apple shines brightly; Google, Yahoo miss

Google’s recent privacy changes and social-networking efforts have some critics howling that the company is set to take over the world—but its most recent earnings announcement told a slightly different story. While Google is still going strong, this time Apple was the one that blew past expectations, setting a new earnings record. The company reported earnings of $13.1 billion, or $13.87 a share, up from $6 billion, or $6.43 a share. That meant it more than doubled its earnings from a year ago and far exceeded the $10.08 per share analysts had been expecting. “A company this big is not…  Full article

Politics Spotlight: Interactive SOTU; Yahoo/ABC videos; GOP mobile spend

In 2008 we saw social media play a key role in the presidential election, with Barack Obama using his network of online supporters to solidify his position. So how big a role will technology play in the 2012 election? So far, digital tools and platforms—for both politicians and news outlets that are covering election events—are already making some serious headway. “Throughout the 2012 battle for the White House, media outlets have been designing web apps dedicated to political coverage, while individual journalists have been tweeting and uploading photos non-stop,” explained Mashable’s Alex Fitzpatrick. President Obama took interactive political efforts to…  Full article

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