Wal-Mart Stores’ acquisition of the VUDU online movie service may presage more efforts by the world’s largest retailer to goose sales of digital entertainment… Tweet This Post

CNN yesterday launched an “à la carte” wire service which allows journalists, publishers and media organizations to buy individual CNN Wire stories for single use. Each story costs $199 and can be bought off the CNN Wire site using a credit card… Tweet This Post

If only creating a wire service was as easy as pundits blabbering about creating an alternative to AP. CNN’s nascent wire service, launched for newspapers and online, is already tinkering with its business model a few months after its launch: it has launched a text-only online store, at CNNWireStore.com, to start offering a la carte [...]

BusinessWeek’s efforts to reinvent itself in the internet age hasn’t come cheap. On the eve of McGraw-Hill’s Sept. 15 bid deadline for the business magazine, The New York Times reports that BW’s social net Business Exchange is on track for nearly $21 million in expenses from its 2007 launch through 2009 . Last year’s revenue, [...]

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has now agreed to let any book retailer resell access to the out-of-print books it is putting online via its Google Books search engine. But the offer does not seem to have appeased the company’s critics, who contend that Google will still wield too much control over the book industry—and particularly over [...]

Google (GOOG) is developing an online subscription and micropayment system that will enable online content providers to more easily charge for their content… Tweet This Post

If the Newspaper Association of America and Google were to display their relationship on Facebook, the description would read “It’s complicated.” As newspaper revenues continue to tank, the NAA has stepped up its sort of passive-aggressive lashing out at the search giant for, well, essentially being more effective at monetizing the distribution of its content [...]

It was in October, on stage at our Future Of Business Media conference, that The Economist publisher Paul Rossi first wondered about the resurrection of the online paid content model. Now the website, which, since 2007, has charged only for stories more than a year old, tells us MediaWeek’s report, that it will put all [...]