Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought some of GigaOM’s stories to paidContent and vice versa, only hinting at the depth of coverage our combined efforts will offer. But most of the integration has been behind the scenes — until now.

In just a few days, we will move into that new home when paidContent shifts to the same publishing platform as GigaOM. Most of the changes are under the hood — you’ll still see the same great stories by the same top-notch writers and much of the site’s look and feel will be very familiar. But we are making a few important changes that we want to fill you in on before you visit our new virtual digs.

Same furniture, different rooms

Now that we are part of the larger GigaOM Network, some of our content will be appearing in different places. Both mocoNews and paidContent:UK are being phased out as sites; rest assured, their content stays. Links are being preserved and all the content is moving over.

Between the ubiquity of smartphones and the growing importance of tablets, content lines are getting more blurred. Having a separate site to cover mobile content no longer makes sense. But that doesn’t mean that we’re reducing our mobile coverage — far from it. Tom Krazit, who has so adeptly led mocoNews for the past year, is joining forces with GigaOM’s mobile writers. Together, that combined team lets us get deep into mobile technology on GigaOM, while at paidContent we continue to focus on how it fits into digital content strategy and monetization. The mocoNews archives will live on paidContent.org. You will have access to it all.

paidContent:UK has been an important voice on the transformation of digital content. But there are more stories to be told about Europe, and we’re delighted that Robert Andrews, an integral part of that site since its launch, will continue his coverage as part of a bigger team with a broader international reach. We’ll reveal more about those plans soon. As is the case with mocoNews, all of the content will be at paidContent.org and existing links will be redirected.

It’s only getting better

Thanks to the intense effort of our developers, you’ll have access to all the vital pieces of the current paidContent site when we switch to the new platform: our daily coverage, our archives, our newsletter, RSS feeds, search, a revamped event site, and more. With most of these pieces, you may not even notice a change. There are other features that we won’t have initially but will be rolling out gradually. Don’t worry, we’ll provide you with a comprehensive guide to all of the changes when the new paidContent goes live next week.

Most important, as we promised in February, paidContent is only getting better as part of GigaOM.

As we near the end of our first decade, I’m thrilled to be able to say we continue to bring you the same news coverage, smart reporting, and insightful analysis of the rapidly evolving economics of digital content — and we will be able to bring you more of it.

Thanks for your support. Welcome to the new era of paidContent.

We’re pleased to announce that Jon Miller, the chief digital officer of News Corp. (NSDQ: NWS), and Fred Wilson, Managing Partner, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures, have joined a great lineup — with more on the way.

Register today to join us at paidContent 2012, where we’ll look at the most pressing issues and opportunities in digital media — what’s happening now, what’s to come, and what it all means.

Contact us if you’d like to suggest speakers (please read this first), if you’d like to advertise with us, or if you have general questions.

Check out coverage of paidContent 2011 and paidContent 2010.

»  Amy Banse, Managing Director & Head of Funds, Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Ventures
»  Brian Bedol, Founder & CEO, Bedrocket Media Ventures
»  Jim Guerard, Vice President & General Manager, Professional Video & Digital Publishing, Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) Systems
»  Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director, FT.com
»  Larry Kramer, Adjunct Professor of Media Management, Newhouse School of Communication, Syracuse University
»  James L. McQuivey, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
»  Jon Miller, Chief Digital Officer, and Chairman and CEO, Digital Media Group, News Corp.
»  John Paton, CEO, Digital First Media
»  Bob Sauerberg, President, Conde Nast
»  Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer, NBC News
»  Liz Schimel, EVP & Chief Digital Officer, Meredith (NYSE: MDP) National Media Group
»  Jonathan Shar, GM, Digital Newsstand & Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), BN.com
»  Fred Wilson, Managing Partner, Flatiron Partners and Union Square Ventures

It’s a very exciting development for us, as ContentNext and GigaOM share so many of the same goals and have such similar cultures. We both believe fundamentally in the power of breaking news and smart, useful content across different platforms, and we both have a core conviction about practicing truth and fairness in our journalism. We also both happen to believe that you can build very profitable businesses if you can execute on those principles.

We have other things in common, too: Both companies’ founders — in our case, Rafat Ali, in GigaOM’s case, Om Malik — turned influential one-man blogs into vibrant media companies by being way ahead of the curve. (A side note: The two founders have also long been close friends.) The chance to work with Om is one that anyone would leap at. He is a true visionary with a unique understanding of technology and a gift for communicating that knowledge. He’s also stacked GigaOM with talented writers and editors who, like him, have a deep curiosity about the intersection of technology and business, particularly innovation. (You can read Om’s post on the sale.)

At a time when so many content companies are groping for sustainable business models, GigaOM has a dynamic approach to making money. Its multiple revenue streams extend from site advertising to conferences to subscription products and beyond; from its online audience of more than 4.5 million monthly unique visitors, to its leading events like GigaOM Structure and GigaOM Roadmap, to GigaOM Pro, which provides research on emerging technology markets from over 110 independent analysts. GigaOM has built a suite of products that can serve a variety audiences, all of which congregate under the GigaOM brand. And now that will expand to include our sites, newsletters and conferences.

For readers of ContentNext’s sites — paidContent, MocoNews, paidContent:UK and ContentSutra — there’s nothing not to like about this deal. You’ll still be able to attend our stellar conferences and enjoy our trenchant posts about the industries we cover. You’ll still be getting all the content you know from the writers that you’re used to getting it from. But now you’ll be getting something else, too: more smart voices on different and vital topics, and even more news and analysis.

Under the terms of the purchase, Guardian News & Media (GNM), which bought ContentNext Media in 2008, will take a minority stake in GigaOM. GNM joins existing GigaOM investors including Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures, Alloy Ventures and True Ventures. The sale is the culmination of a process that began back in the fall, with multiple bidders for ContentNext. The New York investment bank Coady Deimar Partners advised GNM on the deal.

“With our shared commitment to journalistic ethics, GigaOM and paidContent are a natural fit,” said Paul Walborsky, CEO of GigaOM. “paidContent is the leading voice covering the evolution of media, an area that is very important to us. Integrating our teams will enrich our editorial coverage and expand our footprint immediately in two markets that are critical to our growth – New York City and the UK.” GigaOM, which was founded in 2006, is based in San Francisco. ContentNext, whose roots go back to 2002, is based in New York.

The sale ends ContentNext’s three-and-a-half-year run as part of Guardian News and Media. When GNM had bought ContentNext, part of the idea was that it could help the UK publisher gain mindshare in the U.S. as the Guardian expanded there. In recent months, GNM has been focusing its investment activity in the U.S. around the buildout of a new site. “paidContent has a fantastic presence in the tech/media space, and the match with GigaOM, itself a really smart and pioneering company, is a good one. We are delighted to become shareholders in GigaOM as part of the deal,” said Andrew Miller, CEO of Guardian Media Group, the parent company of GNM. “The Guardian’s focus in the U.S. is on building guardiannews.com, but we look forward to seeing paidContent thrive and grow in its new home and wish its staff all the very best for the future.”

We thank the Guardian for their stewardship, and can’t wait to start working with our new colleagues at GigaOM.

See GigaOM’sannouncement of the deal for additional details.

Junglee.com is not another “international Amazon” like Amazon.fr or Amazon.de. Rather, it is a marketplace that aims to connect buyers with online and offline retailers. The site offers 12 million products from 14,000 brands.

Amazon is also building a fulfillment center in Mumbai and has development centers in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai.

Users cannot buy goods directly from Junglee, although most product pages do link back to Amazon.com in addition to local sellers’ sites. The Kindle appears on Junglee.com but it is available only through Amazon.com, not from any local seller.

Some features of the site, however, are familiar. In November, Indian digital media site MediaNama reported, “Retailers have to provide XML based feeds of their products to Amazon, customized to Amazon’s categorization, and on completion of the sale, they will be responsible for delivery. Each retailer will be reviewed and rated by customers.

Junglee.com is not India’s only e-commerce site. The most well-known is Flipkart.com, founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007. It sells books — over 11.5 million titles — and other products and ships about 30,000 items per day.

Many Indian customers already use Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.co.uk offers free super saver shipping to India. “From the metrics we see, Amazon currently gets more traffic from India than Flipkart does,” Indian venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy recently told Reuters.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the two CEOs would step down Monday morning and be replaced by Thorston Heins, who has been RIM’s chief operating officer. They will both stay on RIM’s board, but will no longer have executive roles at the company founded by Lazaridis and overseen by the duo for nearly two decades.

The company confirmed the move in a press release following the published report, and Balsillie and Lazardis granted interviews to the WSJ in conjunction with release of the report, interestingly timed for the middle of the San Francisco 49ers-New York Giants championship game in San Francisco. In the report, they said they were not pushed from their roles but it’s hard to take that at face value, given that RIM was under serious pressure from investors to release a plan for management changes by the end of January following a deal cut just before its annual meeting last July.

Lazaridis will become vice chair of RIM’s board and will chair something called the Innovation Committee. RIM said he will provide “strategic counsel” to Heins and will apparently be much more active than Balsillie, who will remain on the board but with no new public role. Barbara Stymiest, a current RIM board member, will become Board Chair.

The former CEOs, as well as Heins, also spoke to their hometown paper, the Globe and Mail, in advance of actually announcing the move. Heims has been chief operating officer of product engineering for RIM following a reorganization last year in which RIM laid off employees and attempted to streamline its operation. But that wasn’t enough to prevent the company from making several more product and strategic mistakes during the latter half of 2012.

RIM is in deep trouble for taking far too long to react to the launch of the iPhone, a seminal moment in the modern mobile computing industry that was initially dismissed by RIM’s management has having been faked by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). Changing consumer tastes for smartphones led to a precipitous drop in RIM’s U.S. market share in 2010 and throughout 2011, and the company has fumbled several attempts to catch up. New BlackBerry 7 handsets were delayed in 2011 after RIM miscalculated the processing power that would be required, and a similar mistake led to the delay of its first QNX-based smartphones, which were supposed to appear in early 2012 but now aren’t expected until the end of the year.

Heins promised the Globe and Mail that “what you will see with me is rigour and flawless execution.” That’s something RIM could surely use following all the product delays, but the company also needs to articulate a clearer vision for how it intends to transition between the staid BlackBerry OS and the newer QNX operating system, which RIM has renamed BlackBerry 10 yet struggled to get anyone to notice the software following the failed launch of its Playbook tablet.

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NEW YORK, Jan. 20, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The Wall Street Journal has named Raju Narisetti as Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, which includes WSJ.com, SmartMoney.com, MarketWatch and the Chinese, Japanese and German-language editions of WSJ.com. Mr. Narisetti will also become a Deputy Managing Editor of the Journal, and he will report to Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor and Executive Editor, Online.

Mr. Narisetti currently serves as Managing Editor for The Washington Post (NYSE: WPO), where he oversees the company’s digital content products, staff and strategy. Today’s appointment marks a return to the Journal for Mr. Narisetti, who first joined the paper in 1994 as a reporter in Pittsburgh and most recently served as Editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe in 2006.

“Raju has done remarkable work as the digital czar at the Washington Post, integrating print and online businesses, building a successful web site, and developing key relationships with the digerati,” said Robert Thomson, Editor-in-Chief of Dow Jones and Managing Editor of the Journal. “His experience in creating Mint, a national web site and newspaper in India, also brings important relationships and unique expertise that will assist us as we expand our global digital network. Raju is wired, and we are jazzed.”

“Raju knows the world, knows digital journalism, and knows the Journal,” said Mr. Murray. “He is the perfect person to lead us into a new era of global growth.”

Mr. Narisetti’s appointment follows the recent departure of WSJ.com Managing Editor Kevin Delaney.

Strong Digital Growth from New Content, Product Offerings and Global Expansion

The Wall Street Journal Digital Network has seen tremendous growth in recent years with the introduction of expanded news coverage, content and new products as well as increased usage across its Web sites, mobile applications and tablet editions. The network has more than 1.3 million paid digital subscribers across multiple platforms and devices, and averages more than 50 million visitors per month online.

WSJ.com’s success has been buoyed by an expansion in politics, national and world news, sports and lifestyle coverage, as well as live and on-demand video, real-time blogs and the launch of premium verticals. WSJ.com generated a 42% year-over-year increase in traffic in 2011, averaging more than 36 million visitors per month worldwide. The new WSJ Live interactive video application is already available to millions of users via the iPad and multiple Internet-connected televisions and set-top boxes.

Globally, more than 30% of the total digital audience comes from outside the North American market, including Asia, which generates more than 11 million visitors per month, and nearly six million from Europe, Middle East and Africa. In 2011, traffic to the Journal’s Chinese- and Japanese-language Web sites increased 38% and 150%, respectively.

To further serve its expanding global audience, the Journal and Dow Jones have launched a series of regionally focused digital initiatives – the most recent of which, a German-language news site (WSJ.de), launched earlier this month. Other regional offerings are available, including China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and Eastern Europe.

From Yang’s letter to the board:

“My time at Yahoo!, from its founding to the present, has encompassed some of the most exciting and rewarding experiences of my life. However, the time has come for me to pursue other interests outside of Yahoo! As I leave the company I co-founded nearly 17 years ago, I am enthusiastic about the appointment of Scott Thompson as Chief Executive Officer and his ability, along with the entire Yahoo! leadership team, to guide Yahoo! into an exciting and successful future.”

It is a surprising move but only in its timing and its thoroughness. Activist shareholders — most notably Third Point’s Daniel Loeb — have called for his resignation, concerned in part that Yang was on the board while he was exploring ways to take the company private.

Yang also has stepped back before, resigning as CEO — but always keeing a connection. This time, Yang — aka the “Chief Yahoo” — is severing all ties with the company he and David Filo founded in 1995 for the navigational guide they developed as students at Stanford in 1994. He has been on the board since 1995, was CEO from 2007-2009, and at this writing, still anchors the management page.

That page is headed now by Scott Thompson, the PayPal president who joined Yahoo as CEO just two weeks ago, replacing Carol Bartz, who was fired on Labor Day. Yang’s departure letter includes a shout out for Thompson, who in press-release speak thanked Yang for “the warm welcome and support Jerry provided me during my early days here.” Thompson’s first earnings call in next Tuesday.

But Yang can’t get completely away: he’s still one of the company’s largest individual shareholders. And resigning won’t really help him escape the blame for Yahoo’s failure to thrive as an investment or to set a strong course, no matter how many highlights the company’s been able to string together. It also doesn’t blot out the memory of failing to sell to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) when the price was right.

What it does do is remove him as an impediment, imagined or real, to Yahoo’s future and leaves Roy Bostock, chairman of the board, as the lead voodoo doll for outside investors and critics to stick pins in until he, too, goes away. (Kara Swisher’s sources say Bostock and three others will be leaving soon: board vets Arthur Kern, Vyomesh Joshi, and Gary Wilson.)

Unless, of course, resigning from the boards of Yahoo, Yahoo Japan and and Alibaba Group is a palette cleanser for an effort to work outside the company to take it private.

I hope not. I hope Yang is sincere when he says it’s time to pursue interests outside of Yahoo! (I’ll give him the exclamation point this once).

It’s bittersweet to watch someone who has given his all, sometimes with stunning results and sometimes with outcomes far less than desired, decide what’s best for him — and the company — is to move on.

The sweet bit comes from knowing Jerry Yang has a lot more left to accomplish.

Yahoo! Stock Chart by YCharts

Much more in our CES archives.

With our intense focus on newsworthiness, paidContent 2012 is being programmed in real time to make sure we capture what’s top of mind for you, today, in your industry. Our theme this year, At the Crossroads, explores convergence — how entertainment, advertising, publishing, television and news companies are finding ways to be meaningful and profitable online, uncovering the overarching lessons applicable to all industries as they forge new paths in the digital space.

The speaker roster includes some of the top leaders in the news and magazine publishing industries, including Bob Sauerberg, President, Condé Nast and John Paton, CEO, Digital First Media; Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director, FT.com and Liz Schimel, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Meredith (NYSE: MDP) National Media Group. We’ll hear from entrepreneurs, VCs and investors, including Brian Bedol, Founder and CEO, Bedrocket Media Ventures, Bijan Sabet, General Partner, Spark Capital and Amy Banse, Managing Director and Head of Funds for Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) Ventures; from executives at the forefront of the e-reader battle, including Jonathan Shar, General Manager, Digital Newsstand and Emerging Content, Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), BN.com; and leading analyst James L. McQuivey from Forrester Research. We’re adding new speakers every day, so stay tuned.

As with all of our events, the conversation is 360 degrees — not only on the stage — so get ready to join your mentors and your peers to take an active role in this networking opportunity. Register today — our early registration discount expires Monday, January 16. For travelers, we’ve made arrangements with hotels near The TimesCenter for special rates.

Contact us if you’d like to suggest speakers (please read this first), if you’d like to advertise with us, or if you have general questions.

Check out coverage of paidContent 2011 and paidContent 2010.