Since my current work is in new media and social networking, I am keenly interested in the turbulence facing the newspaper industry. Clients, ranging from Fortune 2000 companies to small innovative startups, come to my team at SocialOptimize to gain an understanding of the new media landscape and to develop an actionable strategy for building a meaningful presence in social networks. They ask about their traditional marketing budgets and I tell them that we will see the disappearance of many old model newspaper, radio, and television companies as they struggle …

News Corporation (NWS-A) and its Myspace subsidiary announced the formation of an incubator named Slingshot Labs. It will be seeded with about $15 million to hire a team of software developers. The goal of Slingshot will be to create new Internet technologies and startups to bolster News Corporation’s properties in Web media, especially social networking giant Myspace.
Myspace has witnessed a significant slowing of growth while watching archrival Facebook achieve healthy expansion over the past year. Even Microsoft (MSFT) bought into the phenomenon by investing $240 million in Facebook at a …