Prompted by the rumblings of activist hedge funds Harbinger Capital and Firebrand Partners last month, I wrote about the New York Times (NYT) and its evolving technology assets. I found the Times to be surprisingly forward-thinking in its investments in the online world. As a strategic investor, it has made some fairly impressive investments in innovative startups that could solve the riddle of monetizing online news and content. Its investments include bets on blog advertising networks, news aggregation websites, blogging platforms, video sharing sites, job search engines, …

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 …