What Are They Thinking? NBC-U and The ‘Digital Dozen’ Seek Perpetual Youth

Consider them Ponce de Leon investments. Just as the Spanish explorer trawled Florida for the Fountain of Youth 500 years ago, NBC-Universal and its peers are now embarking on expensive voyages to seek a solution to aging and death, investing in ...

Newsonomics: Why Native Apps Still Matter in the Age of Distribution

Does a brand still mean anything in news? Ezra Klein bubbled up a provocative question and raised some good points in his recent piece “Is the media becoming a wire service?” In the Age of Distribution, the news body seems destined to be ...

Newsonomics: 10 Numbers on The New York Times’ 1 million Digital-Subscriber Milestone

If, half a decade ago, you’d been able to put money down in Vegas on The New York Times’ chances of reaching 1 million digital subscribers by 2015, what kind of odds could you have gotten? Longer than longshot. In 2010, when the Times announced ...

Newsonomics: Eight Questions (And Answers) About Nikkei’s Surprise Purchase of the Financial Times

Is Nikkei the new Axel Springer of Asia? Is $1.3 billion as ridiculous a price as the $5 billion Rupert Murdoch paid for Dow Jones? How did the turn from Berlin to Tokyo happen in 15 minutes? Will Japanese lessons be the first order of business ...

Newsonomics: How Much is the Financial Times Worth, and Who Might Buy It?

  Updated post on Nikkei’s purchase of the FT Complete archive of Newsonomics FT coverage   If you wanted to buy a top business news publisher, which one would you choose? Assuming the marketplace offered you choice, would you go ...

Newsonomics: On End Games and End Times

Platish or perish? With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter. We’ve read so many obits for news media over the past 10 years that ...