New York City (Photo credit: kaysha)

From it’s Midtown base, 29th Street Publishing hopes to revolutionize magazine publishing using simple apps for serialized content. There are currently two dozen apps in development at 29th Street.  They promise to make the apps more simple, making the path to subscription easier for writers with online audiences that may not necessarily be paying.

One of their apps is for the website Bygone Bureau, whose editor said that he sees promise in being able to generate revenue to pay his writers using essays already on his website. He’s also considering offering some articles exclusively on the Bygone Bureau app.

Five of the 29th Street apps have been released and are only purchasable through Apple Newsstand. Both Apple and 29th Street receive a cut of the money paid for each app.

The Wall Street Journal

News Corporation, New York (Photo credit: robjewitt)

In an effort to survive a rapidly transforming industry, NY-based publishers are using both mergers and lawsuits to compete with Amazon and Apple. According to Highbrow Magazine, at least two of the Big Seven publishers are in merger talks. News Corp., which owns HarperCollins is considering a merger with Simon & Schuster. Penguin (which had been in talks with NewsCorp) and Random House recently announced a merger.

Publishers also are suing both Amazon and Apple, alleging they violated the Sherman Act’s antitrust regulations. The DOJ complaint claims the two companies “conspired to raise retail e-book price and to otherwise limit completion in the sale of e-books.” Three publishers have settled out of court, but Apple, MacMillan and Penguin are continuing. The case will head to court on June 2013. Barnes & Noble said that the case might ultimately lead to higher e-book and hardcover prices and less choices for the consumer.

Author Scott Turow commented on his blog that “The irony bites hard: Our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of real competition.”

Highbrow Magazine

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News Distribution Network (NDN) recently made comScore’s list of top ten online video properties. According to Adweek, the video wire service’s audience just topped 53 million. NDN distributes video content from providers including AP, CBS News, Fox Sports as well as local TV stations. NDN has 4,500 partners, including the New York Post, the New York Daily News and it just signed a deal with CBS Local to distribute content from 13 stations, including NY, LA and Chicago. NDN provides the platform and the content to news organizations and sells advertising to its partners–and keeps the lion’s share of ad revenue.

NDN CRO Kevin Gentzel said, “We’re becoming a wider distribution arm. The more partners we have in local content, the more markets we’re penetrating.” In addition to supplying video to publishers, NDN also posts the video. For the New York Daily News, NDN  embeds videos remotely. Steve Lynas, the News’ svp of digital, said that embedding video in the story is more effective than putting it on the right rail. Matching videos to stories is currently done by people, but Gentzel says once it’s up to scale the process will be automated.

Adweek

29^th Street

Jacobs told Neiman Lab that a reader’s relationship is with the publisher–not the app. They want to be “as thin a middleman as possible.”  He said the app’s performance is key. Issues should download and content should appear quickly. He said, “We felt other apps weren’t taking care of the user by making them wait so long.”

Neiman Journalism Lab

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily folded after less than two years. Digiday reports there are many reasons for its demise—including Steve Jobs. Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, said that The Daily was the Apple Store’s top news app –and if that’s not enough to be successful, maybe something on the platform needs to change. But The Daily also had its own internal issues. They thought it would thrive with ads and a subscription base. But apparently readers didn’t think the content was worth $40 a year. Its small subscription base—100,000 readers—wasn’t scalable for advertising.

But the final nail in the coffin was that The Daily was a “walled garden” that was unconnected to the wider Web and couldn’t attract bigger audiences. Adam Lavelle, chief strategy officer at iCrossing, told Digiday, that, “News is sourced socially into experiences consumers find digestible. The Daily was a news factory that had a digital distribution platform, but it wasn’t connected. Once you were in The Daily, it wasn’t connected out to other things.”

Digiday

English: Brooklyn Public Library at Grand Army Plaza. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Brooklyn Public Library is moving ahead with a new strategic to plan to bring the institution into the digital age. The library has evolved into more than just a place to borrow books but also a social service agency, where people come to learn computer skills. Linda Johnson, the President and Chief Executive of the Brooklyn Public Library, has developed an agenda which reflects the shifts in the community of library users and in the publishing world, such as the introduction of e-books. Also, Johnson is looking to open two smaller branches next year that will focus more on technology than books, populating the main library with a special teen section and training residents to take their GEDs online.

One of the obstacles in the way for Johnson and the Brooklyn Public Library is figuring out how to raise money. Ms. Johnson has reached out to Russian billionaire and Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who recently donated $1 million to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Crain’s New York

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NowThis News is attempting to revamp news with video news content. The company was founded by Eric Hippeau and Ken Lerer, both Huffington Post ex-executives. The app and website feature professionally produced video content in short segments. The site has content from other networks and repackaged news stories, and a typical video on the site consists of a one to two minute clip which shows NowThis News hosts and video content. According to Digiday, Hippeau said, “The idea came as Ken and I were tossing around thoughts in mobile news. It was evident there was no video news, breaking news, that was created in video format just for mobile devices.”

NowThis News is one of the first to enter the field of rethinking news in terms of mobile devices. Additionally, former CNN executive Eason Jordan was hired along with former ABC News Digital executive producer Ed O’Keefe and former Washington Post executive director of digital news Katharine Zaleski. There is currently a team of 30 editorial and technical employees and a  studio at its offices in New York.

During Election night, NowThis posted 25 pieces of content, including President Obama‘s victory speech and a clip of people cheering post-election from 2008 and 2012. The site’s goal is to regularly have 15-20 videos per day. Though it has not yet secured advertisers, buyers are beginning to pay attention to NowThis, which has already begun to create an audience. While other major publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal push ahead in the online and mobile video arenas, the competition for advertising money is hightened.

Digiday

Lower Manhattan skyline (Photo credit: Markusnl)

NYC Community Media, a local newspaper publisher, lost its office on Canal street in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and is currently working from 1 MetroTech Center in Brooklyn. According to Crain’s NY Business, the publisher is using this experience to inspire a new website called NYCReconnects.com, aimed at helping lower Manhattan recover from the hurricane.

Jennifer Goodstein, Community Media’s newest owner, noted that the weekly newspaper, NYC Reconnects, will be published for at least a few months or “until people are back where they need to be.” There will be 30,000 copies printed of NYC Reconnects, which will be given out for free below 23rd street in apartment buildings and street boxes. the publisher puts out five papers focused on lower Manhattan and Chelsea, like The Villager and Downtown Express. Articles will center on how individuals have dealt with the effects of Sandy and the paper will give a guide about food, housing, and activities.

Community Media’s Canal Street office was flooded, leaving the basements offices and electrical system under five feet of water. The company has been working from Brooklyn since Monday, and employees expect to remain there for about six weeks.

Crain’s NY Business

According to Crain’s New York Business, the firm already receives about 40 percent of its revenue from North American publishers, including Reader’s Digest, Time Out New York and Canadian publisher McGraw-Hill Ryerson. 

Crain’s New York Business

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The New York Times’ circulation increased 40 percent, according to a recently released report by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. The big bump was due to an increase in digital subscribers, which number more than 896,000, more than any other of the 25 dailies on ABC’s list.

According to the report, digital subscribers also make up more than half of the Times’ 1.6 million paying readers.

Fishbowl NY

PROmedia eBook Reader (Photo credit: PiAir (Old Skool))

Ganxy, a NY-based startup, launched today at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The startup gives authors and publishers a set of easy-to-use tools for publishing e-books and controlling online marketing. The company was founded in 2009, according to paidContent, and makes it easy for publications to create a “showcase” for a book that includes a cover, description, video, and other marketing materials. Books can be sold directly through the site, or link to the retailers. The showcase can be tweeted, posted to a blog, or shared on Facebook.

Additionally, authors and publishers can track where sales come from. For example, if the sale is made by a click through from Twitter versus Facebook. Creating a showcase is free, but the Ganxy takes 10% of each ebook sale through a showcase and through links to affiliate sites. Any book purchased by readers can be downloaded in any format. Currently, a few clients are using Ganxy in beta mode, like Diversion Books, and author and cracked columnist Robert Brockway. The site will now accept new users in waves.

The company is completely self-funded and it’s president, Aleks Jakulin, previously taught data mining at Columbia University. Joshua Cohen is cofounder and previously worked at Merrill Lynch and Random House. The current primary focus is books, but in the future the showcases may be used for other digital content.

paidContent

Yesterday an invited group of digital media founders, editors and executives from such companies as Visual Revenue, Taboola, NewsCred, Seeking Alpha, Patch, Genesis Media, Newslook, The Daily and others met in midtown at ZAG/S&W for PluggedIn Ventures’ Digital Publishing Roundtable to discuss current challenges in creating, distributing and monetizing digital content.

Participants agreed that the past year has seen acceleration in the rise of tablets and the transition of magazines from print; e-books have risen while bookstores continue to fade. Online video viewership is growing but in decreasing lengths. And everything seems pointed toward mobile devices and their grasp on collective (yet fragmented) attention spans.  As a result, publishers are increasingly realizing that they need to move beyond repurposing print content and static ads in digital channels and to look to video  to make a real difference in monetizing their content.  Some key takeaways:

Video is more cost productive: Video doesn’t make more money than print content but it gives offers more bang for the buck. It gives better revenues than a generic banner ad, but it doesn’t make more money.  Banner ads are still generating more revenue. But there is more video inventory – so it can make more money on a cost-per-use basis. Advertisers look at CPM. It really comes down to relative CPMs in the simplest cases. They are looking at CPMs on the display side anywhere from 50¢ to $2.50, and video CPM’s can approach $15 or more. For example, pre-rolls  are now about $20, while banner ads average about $3. So while content isn’t a big money-maker, video is worth doing.

Website paywalls won’t make things profitable: Paywalls, the arrangement whereby access is restricted to users who have paid to subscribe to a site, is just not viable today. To make people pay for content doesn’t make sense — most readers don’t think they should have to pay for it anyway. The combination of paywalls, lack of performance and the need to create a digital subscription base is actually suppressing traffic. Publishers need to find a way to make dynamic and lightweight versions of the paywall that will replace the economics of subscription.  For instance, if users keep hitting refresh on NYTimes.com, they will not get more articles or content – instead they will get a “you must subscribe” button. But if these users are valuable, they should be allowed into publication’s site. In return for providing this time, attention and engagement, they should be given a pass for the rest of the month or the week or even just additional articles. In essence, paywalls won’t make things profitable; they are more of a hurdle to overcome.

Smaller Digital Publications need to focus on driving traffic: Digital publishers need to focus on targeted, value-added content for premier users. Publications like TheBlaze.com and TheDaily.com, for example, are focused on driving traffic – they are getting users by letting them see their content. This is their main way of monetizing — in order to grow they have to get significant traffic to their site. Publications need to focus on nurturing their content, nurturing their audience and aggregating the content that is relative for each reader.

Not everyone should get paid for content:  The internet is a democratizing platform for publishing. It’s the biggest innovation ever– one person can reach millions of people. But that still doesn’t mean that everyone should get paid for that content. Many writers will write just because they like to express themselves, but for those who want to monetize their content they will need different technologies like new platforms and toolkit innovations. They need to find a way replace the money they are losing from subscriptions. Premium publishers, like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, are missing out on money by not having access to great video advertising. They just don’t have video inventories and so are in no position to put ads into them.

Targeted advertising experiences make more money: In order to make money, the audience needs to be optimized.  While banner ads can be targeted, they are blunt instruments and appear in a static way for everyone.  With video, ad experiences can be targeted to individuals. There may be a higher premium on inventory, but it allows publications to make more money. Videos need to be more targeted and put in conceptually where there is a logical fit.  The fundamental premise behind advertising is that display will continue to exist; however, it’s not doing enough to solve the economic problems of traditional publisher. Video is a more effective vehicle for monetizing premium content.

Patch

The goal of Patch is to combine “content, conversation and commerce,” according to Patch CEO Jon Brod. Traffic on the site is up 40% since the start of this year, and the redesign is intended to better incorporate readers and specific groups, like, for example, “Police and Fire.” All of the businesses listed in the Patch directory will become groups where business owners will be allowed to post content and customers have the opportunity to post reviews. Editors will still be writing editorial content, but will take a smaller role in the sites. Patch is also releasing a redesigned mobile app in November.

paidContent

Logo used from about 1963 until 2007 (January 2008 issue) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Reader’s Digest is increasing its issues from 10 to 12 a year while at the same time making an effort to be more digital. Though the publication has struggled recently, its circulation declining from 8 million to 5.5 million and a 22.5 decrease in revenue, it is making an effort to bounce back with digital expansion. The site, according to Digiday, received two million unique views in August, up from 923,000 in 2011.

The company has fixed search issues on its site, and has been using all of its platforms to drive views to the site. Beginning next year, Reader’s Digest also plans to up its tablet editions. Marilynn Jacobs, VP and GM of the publication, said, “Like every publisher, we’re looking to put our content everywhere it can be looked at. We’re following consumer demand. This is driven by demand on platforms and our readers being incredibly vocal, saying, ‘I want a monthly issue in print and digital.’” However, the audience of Reader’s Digest is unique, almost half of its readership is over the age of 55.

Digiday

New York Daily News logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since the NY Daily News re-launched its homepage as Daily News America, viewership on the site has increased by 21.6%. according to Capital NY. This places the Daily News in the same range of view as sites like USA Today and The Los Angeles Times. In terms of print, the Daily News is ranked fifth in the nation, but with most of its circulation in NY. With the expansion through a redesigned site, the publication hopes to attract new advertisers.

Colin Myler, editor-in-chief of the Daily News, recently wrote, “We can now say with confidence that we are a national player. Every aspect of the content being created, whether it be national, international or local, has had a significant impact on our great web audience growth.” Myler also mentioned the last of the NY Post website in the stated website rankings, taking a shot at the competition. Though, the Post has been developing a revamped website with former Gawker editor Remy Stern, who was hired in April.

Capital NY

The event will take place from 8:30-10:oo am on September 27 at Sullivan & Worcester offices at 1633 Broadway.

PluggedIn

[Editor's Note: PluggedIn Ventures is sponsored by Trylon SMR, owned by Trylon Communications, Inc., the parent company of NY Convergence]

Founder Jim Bruene (The Finovate Group) -Photo Credit: Lauren Keyson

By Lauren Keyson

One thousand people poured into the Finovate Fall 2012 to watch 64 entrepreneurs demo their innovative financial technology products to 1,100 financial institution executives, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.  The founders had seven minutes to present their fintech innovations, which included banking, investing, security and retail to the consumer. The largest and most represented field was mobile. The second most demoed area was social – such as Twitter and Facebook integration, followed by mobile payments, security, small business and sales/marketing/investing.

“There is so much stuff that is migrating into mobile,” said Jim Bruene, founder of Finovate. That was just huge. It just interacts with everything that people are showing.  But we really look for something new that people haven’t seen before, and that have impact. I created Finovate because I’ve been in the financial product area for a long time, I just wanted to see all the good stuff comes out quickly, and all the new stuff in one place. Being exposed to that is the ‘funnest’ part.”

Bruene did say a few companies stood out because they were completely new to him.  For example,  CK Mack had an innovative business model.  It’s a system that enables people to invest in the rental real estate market, mostly single-family houses.   Consumers can come in and put $100 dollars in a house here and another $25 there. Co-founders Linda Schictanz and Marcus Zoeller explained the product as a way of bringing the returns generated by rental real estate to the online investing market. “Our web platform opens the historically popular field of real estate to a broad audience, allowing unprecedented diversification and stellar returns.”

Another was Bolstr, a crowdfunding platform that empowers communities to invest in local businesses.  “It’s the first crowdfunding platform focused on adding liquidity to main street small businesses and the only platform able to legally operate pre-JOBS Act,” said founders Charlie Tribbett and Larry Baker. “We worked tirelessly along with our legal counsel to create a model that works within the current regulatory environment.”  How it works is that people can invest in say, a restaurant, and then they can participate in the revenue – they actually get a piece of the restaurants revenue until they get they get their return.

While several of the demonstrations had to do with traditional consumer banking, there was a new category called ‘youth banking.’  PlayMoolah is on a mission to change the way kids use money through fun technologies that allows them to experience money management in order to earn, spend, save and give. “Through real dollars, real action and real impact, we hope for kids to take control of their money and become empowered by using it to live their dreams and create value for society,” said co-founders Audrey Tan and Min Xuan Lee. Then there was Waspit, or “Banking 2.0.”  It combines traditional banking features with social media platforms to create more intuitive experiences for its users.

Virtual Piggy aims at the same under 18 demographic but it’s aimed at security.  It is designed to provide a secure mechanism, so youth can initiate purchases online that are parent approved, controlled and monitored.  The parents can establish parameters around what they can spend, but it’s still full service banking for the younger crowd.

There were also several companies that focused on using the phone to make payments more secure.  One of these was Locaid, which locates smart and feature phones, tables and mobile devices on wireless carriers. It allows mobile developers to locate devices for enterprise authentication, fraud management and consumer location.

The two-day conference ended yesterday with eight Best of Show winners:  Credit Sesame, Money Desktop, PayTap, ShopKeep POS, Dashlane, Dynamics,  eToro and LearnVest.

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TheStreet bought The Deal LLC, which owns the mergers and acquisition magazine The Deal, for $5.8 million recently, according to The Wall Street Journal.  Elisabeth DeMarse, Chairman and CEO for TheStreet, wrote, “We own investing journalism here at TheStreet, and The Deal owns deal journalism, so together we are a glove fit, combining these two excellent newsrooms.” The magazine will be shut down and staff will be laid off, including editor Robert Teitelman.

This sale was considered a few years ago by The Deal, but did not secure the price it wanted. The Deal began in 1999 as a newspaper focused on mergers and acquisitions. Other publications followed suit and eventually deal coverage had its own place in financial news. TheStreet expects the high renewal rates of The Deal’s digital subscribers to offset some of the declines in TheStreet’s offerings.

The Wall Street Journal

CBS Logo Light (Photo credit: watchwithkristin)

CBS Interactive announced a new partnership with nRelate. Recently purchased by IAC, nRelate is a content discovery service that targets article recommendations. CBS properties including CBSNews.com, CBSSports.com and CNET will join nRelate’s network.

Zack Rogers, SVP of revenue operations at CBS Interactive, told MediaPost that the deal “expands advertising opportunities for brands that produce content.” nRelate’s network contains roughly 50,000 publishers. According to the company, its content widgets generate an average click-thorough rate of 6 percent, higher than the 0.09% of display ad CTRs.

MediaPost

[Editor's Note: nRelate is a NY Convergence ad tech partner]

City Limits’ circulation is about 10,000 and Editor Jarrett Murphy said that magazine side wasn’t growing while printing costs were escalating. Meanwhile the number of digital readers was steadily growing. “Saving money pays for a lot of stories,” Murphy told the New York Post. The publication also recently acquired Bronx Network News from the Mosholu Preservation Corp.

New York Post

English: An iPad 2 on stand. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

OnSwipe, the NY based iPad publishing platform, has more than 5,000 published users that use their free software to make beautiful and touch-screen friendly sites for tablets. Originally the company received six million dollars in venture backing, but this was not enough to support a 48-person team building free software.

The solution was to hire workers to focus on revenue, namely building an ad team to directly sell their own magazine-like ads. They created touchable ad units similar to flipping through a magazine. Onswipe’s business model is similar to NY based company Outbrain. They provide useful tools that publishers want for cheap, and split the spoils.

Pando Daily

Lucky (magazine) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The online magazine Lucky will be introducing a shopping site called myLucky.com that directs readers to buy clothing and accessories directly from more than a dozen retailers. Instead of directing shoppers to store sites, users can now stay on the myLucky.com site to make purchases from their shopping cart. Shoppers can also click on mylucky versions of particular Web sites like Macy‘s that features a narrower list of merchandise organized by Lucky editors.

Brandon Holley, Lucky editor in chief, told the New York Times that, “What we are trying to do is give them the world of options. She needs choice. She needs diversity.” This magazine is the latest to look at e-commerce to save its revenue. Lucky advertising pages revenue declined by 15%, down to $29 million from $34 million the same time last year. Holley hopes that the new shopping component will be a bigger part of revenue in the future, and the magazine is already creating revenue-sharing relationships with specific retailers. Lucky expects to get about 3% to 15% of each sale.

The New York Times

The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New Yorker released their app for the iPhone today, according to All Things D. The app presents all of the same content as the New Yorker iPad app, the magazine and some digital extras through Apple’s Newsstand. Access for print subscribers is free, but it is possible to purchase a digital only subscription and to buy individual issues. This week’s edition is available for free so that users can try out the app for themselves.

This iPhone app marks a different direction for Conde Nast, which has tried to limit all of its digital content to iPads and other tablets. Additionally, Conde Nast and Adobe, who created the publishers app platform, have figured out how to handle “paginated HTML,” meaning the app can now handle text as text instead of as a large image file. For example, this week’s edition is about 23 megabytes, while the iPad versions have been more than 100MB each. The New Yorker will now use this same tech to slim down the iPad version. Additionally, for fun, the New Yorker had Lena Dunham, from “Girls” and Mad Men’s Jon Hamm make a video announcing the iPhone launch.

All Things D

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The Sulzberger family has had control of The New York Times for over a century and seems to always be in the middle of one controversy or another, and the financial troubles of the last ten years have threatened to take the famous publication out of existence. New York Magazine‘s Seth Mnookin did a full coverage history of Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his legacy at the paper. The financial troubles began with the Internet and freedom of information, which suddenly begged for free news. This left magazines and newspapers in a complicated situation with revenue structure for their businesses.

Soon, the Times was seeing a double-digit decline on ad pages and circulation, and many predicted that the paper would fail. However, most of the lost revenue was made up for by changing the newsstand price from $1 to $2, and in March the paper launched its digital pay wall, which now seems to be working better than anyone had guessed it would.

Mnookin gives a lot of the credit to Sulzberger Jr. for keeping the paper afloat in tough times. He was signed on as publisher of the Times in 1992, at age 40, and followed in his dad’s footsteps. At the beginning, he was followed by skepticism about his qualifications for the position. Now that Sulzberger has survived, it seems as though he is surrounded by the death of one famous publication after the next. Sulzberger’s first priority, to transform the Times from a local paper with a national focus to a national paper with a local focus, was a good instinct.

The Times had to deal with the Internet, but Sulzberger caught on quick, and said to Mnookin that he wanted to reach all of the, “people we think have an affinity for the Times’ news organization who currently don’t read the Times, either because they can’t get access to it or they may not read it because they don’t read newspapers and they want to access that information [some other way].”

Though this was a decent goal, it did not help the relationships between the paper’s print and online staffs, which were still existing as separate entities since the founding of Times Company Digital in 1995 by Martin Nisenholtz. From early on, the site published great content and by 1999 the website had a database of more than 10 million registered users. Through all of the difficulties, Sulzberger still poured money into the web operation, and by 2008, nytimes.com, “had become one of the most impressive news sites on the planet.”

New York Magazine

The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The New Yorker seems as though it is lagging behind other competitors in terms of adapting to the Internet. According to Buzzfeed, the magazine has been hindered by Conde Nast‘s lack of resources and contractual writer’s agreements, and a recent resignation of Jonah Lehrer ended up worsening the issues, not improving them. A former staffer blamed the current editor, David Remnick, for the magazine’s failures to integrate, saying that he focused on a book project at the wrong time. Whomever is to blame, the outcome has been a website that features slow-to-update blogs, bulky pdfs, and a homepage that has just recently started staying recent to daily news.

The site started out as a strong web presence, but soon became out of date when in 2008 Conde Nast executives decided to keep all of the site’s content behind a pay wall during the election. After election day, Remnick hired Politico’s Avi Zenilman as a blogger, but this didn’t compare to improvements other sites were making. Jason Kottke, a blogger who had been interviewed as a potential editor of newyorker.com, said about the site, “I think it’s good but not great… I understand that there are a lot of competing interests at the magazine (editorial, technical, political bureaucratic, legal, etc.) but for a reader who just wants to pay to read the magazine’s fantastic material in a reasonable format, it can be a frustrating experience.”

Buzzfeed

Image via CrunchBase

The digital paywall that The New York Times implemented in March 2011 continues to pick up speed. According to Mashable, about 509,000 people now subscribe, which is up 13% from March 2012. Additionally, people who are not subscribed can only read 10 articles a month on the website, down from 20 at the beginning of the year. Digital subscriptions cost from $15 to $35 a month.

The growth, along with an increase in the price for home-delivery and single issue papers amounted in an 8% increase in circulation revenues for the first quarter, which offset an 8% decline in print  advertising and 4% decline in digital advertising. These declines are due to a decrease in display and cost-per-click advertising at the About Group. The New York Times Co. reported an operating loss of $143.6 million for the quarter, which was due mainly to a $194.7 million writedown for the About Group. Last year at the same time, the company reported a profit of $31.5 million.

Mashable

NYU Tisch School of the Arts (Photo credit: pseudonymiss)

At just 24 years old Emma Koenig has a viral blog, a book that is to be released next month, and a pending deal for a television series. That is not to say that she isn’t like other recent college grads, she left her East Village apartment to move back in with her parents in NJ, had a line of low paying or no paying jobs, and attended an expensive college, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

According to The New York Times, Koenig’s Tumblr blog began in 2011, and has the tone of the HBO series “Girls” but “defanged a bit.” Koenig writes her blog in handwritten script and includes graphs and pictures. Her book, which is called “I’m in My Twenties,”  the same as her blog, is due out next next month from Chronicle Books, and will be sold at Urban Outfitters stores. Koenig’s blog attracted a lot of attention after it was listed on The Huffington Post‘s “7 Sites You Should be Wasting Your Time on Right Now,” and  is currently being drawn up for an MTV pilot.

The New York Times

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Vook, which was created for non-tech people to publish books, is enhancing its cloud-based book platform this week. The company recently moved from SF to NY, and is now introducing features like an HTML5-based reader that allows tablets and smart-phones to view published titles. Vook’s VP of business development, Matthew Cavnar, demoed the new features at this months NY Tech Meetup and calls the program “WordPress for e-books,” and told Xconomy that, “Anyone can quickly create an e-book, add video, audio, and publish it.”

Vook works with small, midsize, and large publishing companies like HarperCollins. The company was founded three years ago, and has since raised $7.75 million from backers like Lerer Ventures and VantagePoint Capital Partners. Vook’s new features include automated creation of landing pages, where there is information about authors, sharing buttons for various social media, and the ability to show preview versions for the e-books. The company also plans to add a star-rating system and a comment feed, so readers can discuss the e-books on the landing pages.

These services, according to Cavnar, are meant to help authors and publishers promote and sell their own digital titles. Vook takes a 15% royalty cut on sales made through its Web pages.

Xconomy

The New Yorker (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Conde Nast-owned publication, The New Yorker, will add Andy Borowitz’s Borowitz Report to its network of blogs. Borowitz, satirist and comedian, boasts about 275,000 Twitter followers and has been a frequent contributor to the “Shouts and Murmurs” section of the magazine. According to Mashable, the comic announced the move with some of his usual humor, writing, “Longtime Borowitz Report readers might ask: how will moving to The New Yorker, known for its excruciating fact-checking, change The Borowitz Report, which is composed entirely of lies? The answer: not at all. The Borowitz Report will be as inaccurate as always, and if I ever write something that turns out to be true you have my deepest apology and my promise that it won’t happen again.”

Borowtiz ended the announcement with a genuine dedication to his mother, who passed away this month at the age of 83 and loved reading The New Yorker.

Mashable

Bitly (Photo credit: The Daring Librarian)

Bitly, known to most as a link shortening service, raised another $15 million in a new round led by Khosla Ventures. The NY-based Betaworks company hopes to use the money to shift the company focus to be the “primary online service for sharing and discovering interesting content,” according to GigaOm. The new round was announced this week and included other investors such as RRE Ventures and OATV.

Daily registrations to the Bitly site increased 300% after the May 29^th redesign launch, however, it was also apparent how difficult it would be to leave the old bitly behind. People who visited the site complained about the link shortening service being removed from the front page of the site, it was eventually moved back.

The company says that the funding will help the team focus on growth and expansion for the social web products.

GigaOm