• BusinessWeek's Jon Fine reports that New York owner Bruce Wasserstein may be in the running to break out a dollar bill and buy BusinessWeek. [BW]
• ESPN banned New York Post employees from appearing on the network yesterday after the paper ran (blurry) pics of a nude Erin Andrews. [AP]
• Will will happen with…
Tim Armstrong, AOL CEO, just bought a company from... Tim Armstrong, investor. The official line is that the deal is on the up and up, since the consummate salesman won't be taking any profits off his stake. Rich.
• The late night battle rages on: After losing ground to Letterman, Conan bounced back last night, and had a pretty solid first week overall. [THR, NYT]
• Boston-based Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. confirms that it has been talks with the New York Times Co. to purchase the Boston Globe. [BH]
• Stephen Colbert's…
The 21st century dawned with news that two media megaliths, AOL and Time Warner, were to merge. Critics howled that the vast tentacles of a combined AOL-TW would subsume us all. Today, Time Warner confirmed it's spinning off AOL, ending a business saga that defined whatever you're calling the 2000s.
In flusher times, Google geeks set the agenda for company sales executives; distracting sidelines were encouraged. The recession — assisted by a new sales chief who apparently doesn't mind his diabolical reputation — foreclosed on such coddling.
Dear Ryan:
As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.
Google's top European salesman, Dennis Woodside, stepped in for New York-based sales chief Tim Armstrong after Armstrong left to become AOL's CEO. An anonymous Googler sent him this memo detailing the New York office's many problems:
An AOL tipster tells us incoming CEO Tim Armstrong, the Google sales veteran, wants to buy Twitter, the hot message-broadcasting startup. One problem: He hasn't even started at AOL yet.
Marcy Simon, the former mistress of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, has landed a PR gig at Mark Penn's Burson-Marsteller. We hear her new job is stirring up antitrust trouble for Google at Microsoft's behest.
At last, AOL has done something right: The Time Warner Internet unit has hired Google's Tim Armstrong as its new CEO, booting the laughably incompetent duo of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant.
Why has the Gray Lady assigned full-time reporters to communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey? Even a Times editor admits the paper will never make money on microjournalism. But they could market software to bloggers.
Why is the Gray Lady building websites for the obscure suburbs of South Orange, Maplewood, and Milburn? Perhaps because those are the exact same towns Google executive Tim Armstrong picked for Patch, his local-news startup.
Journalism pundits have been begging Google to put its billions behind the project of saving journalism. At last, a Google executive has come through. Here's Tim Armstrong's secret plan to save the local news business.
Speaking to a klatch of invited press, Google's leadership painted a typically rosy picture of the company's prospects amid a faltering economy and chaos on Wall Street. "The company has a very large amount of cash in very, very boring and secure investments," CEO Eric Schmidt assured everyone. Schmidt also promised…
Why would Google confess to the many problems it has had selling ads? The problems, Google ad-sales exec Tim Armstrong admitted to the Wall Street Journal, extended far beyond YouTube, where Google's bureaucracy compounded advertisers' hesitation to place commercials next to the site's free-for-all video content.…
Tim Armstrong, Google's head of North American advertising and commerce, is tasked with turning Google's $1.65 billion money pit cum legal headache, YouTube, into a profitable enterprise. Since the departure of the online video-sharing site's former moneyman, Shashi Seth, ideas ranging from affiliate links to iTunes…
Yahoo shares are almost below $20 in morning trading and as the company approaches its August 1 annual meeting, Yahoo's directors have finally begun to fear for their jobs and their reputations. They're negotiating with Yahoo's major shareholders and, along with agreeing to renew talks with Microsoft and approach…
Google advertising exec Tim Armstrong wore a smile and told those gathered at the American Association of Advertising Agencies yesterday how his company planned to destroy them. The weapon? A dashboard. With it, Armstrong said, buyers will be able to manage TV, radio print, search and display campaigns. Sounds like…
Tim Armstrong
The Fox Business Network had Google's Tim Armstrong on this morning to talk about YouTube, but quickly transitioned to the much bigger news of the day: the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo.
