Fuat Kircaali

http://twitter.com/fuatkircaali Today marks the 30th day of Ulitzer's public beta. We had an amazing month and perhaps one of the most widely discussed launches of a "new media" site. Gartner recently asked, "Will Ulitzer dominate news content on the Web eventually?" The answer is yes, and I'll explain why. First, I'd like to share some of the 30-day stats with you. We had more than 140,000 visitors who read 197,000 pages of articles, blogs and news stories. The syndicated page views (outside the Ulitzer domain) exceeded 1,369,983 page views. The legendary technology reporter Maureen O'Gara was the most read Ulitzer author with 231,600 rolling page views, and we syndicated more than 3,000 Ulitzer stories. My First Blackberry, Circa 1999 I remember receiving my first Blackberry 10 years ago at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco. It was a small device similar to a ... (more)

Will PR Firms Survive The New Media Avalanche?

http://twitter.com/fuatkircaali Last week I received an email from Lindsey Miller at Ragan Communications. I answered her questions for a story she was working on here. The following is the full text of my reply to her on this subject. What kinds of PR firm will survive the "fast-approaching new media avalanche"? What steps will firms have to take to ensure that they make it through? I know a lot of PR firms that are chasing new accounts among publicly traded companies, which are seen as cash cows in the business. I also know a lot of firms whose sales teams are larger than their s... (more)

Is the PR Business Extinct? Yes

http://twitter.com/fuatkircaali The short answer is yes. In our estimation, roughly 70% of today's PR firms with their traditional public relations and communications business structures will not survive the fast-approaching social media avalanche. The remaining 30% that need to reinvent their position real fast in their newly morphed industry will prosper, compared to where they were and what they were doing before. For publicly traded companies, current rules dictate that information can be made public by a press release or by a telephone conference call but not simply on a we... (more)

Cloud Expo and The End of Tech Recession

http://twitter.com/fuatkircaali At SYS-CON Media we see our inventories are filling up to 100% capacity for the months of November, December, and January, and we are seeing better-than-normal RFP activity for the first quarter of 2010. When I say this, I am comparing the current insertion order activity to the same period last year. We will be closing 2009 roughly 32% below 2008 in revenues (far better than any other tech media company), which forced us to reduce our expenses for the same period by around 40%. Last fall, while the world was falling apart, we were preparing for a ... (more)

Success, Arrogance, Rise and Fall

New Media on Ulitzer Last week we were accidentally copied in on an internal e-mail from a software company with a market cap in excess of five billion dollars. As I read through this long e-mail thread, which included references to our company, I couldn't help but reflect on the past. I forwarded this e-mail to their CEO and he acknowledged its receipt. History is repeating itself, I realized, and I wanted to share my thoughts with our readers and with the CEO of this software company. In 1985-86 I worked at IBM as a market research analyst in White Plains, NY, at the company'... (more)