The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws ...

The Newsonomics of the New York Times Running in Place

Let’s look at today’s numbers with some peer-group context. Then let’s draw five lessons — in seven-day print trends, the plateauing of all-access subs, the allure of video, the role of events, and the crying need for smart curation — that ...

The newsonomics of 2013’s second half, from ad depression to day dropping to real estate as destiny

The newest News Corp sets sail. Cast adrift — but with a handy $2.6 billion in cash and no debt, making its peers oh-so-envi0us — the world’s largest newspaper company is in the midst of furious change. At the flagship Dow Jones/Wall Street ...

The Newsonomics of the Tribune Detour

It’s a Koch-around. The unexpected, and real, interest of Charles and David Koch in buying all the Tribune papers has set off a public and labor furor ("The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising and Uprising"). While the AFL-CIO itself has mounted a ...

The Newsonomics of Shop ‘Til You Hop

What’s most intriguing, I believe, is that the way they each, differently, is trying to change real-world relationships. It is the disintermediators and remediators — the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons, and Microsofts — that have gotten between ...

The Newsonomics of Advance’s Advancing Strategy & Its Achilles’ Heel

The lack of an All-Access model, I believe, looks like the Achilles heel of the Advance strategy, even if that strategy works in other ways. Why? Advance depends and will depend much more on ad revenue than its peers. Many of those peers believe ...

The Newsonomics of Hearst Magazines’ One Million New Customers

Hearst’s strategy here is one to watch. There are good reasons (more on that below) why daily newspapers have opted to go for door number one and get more money from long-time subscribers while making new subs a largely second priority. But they ...

The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising — and Uprising

The new board’s mandate, of course, is to maximize its take on the sale. Tribune newspaper profits run at the roughly $200 million level, maybe a third of which comes out of L.A. So, take the market multiple of 3 or 4 times that number as a ...

The Newsonomics of Climbing the Ad Food Chain

Digital advertising is all about technology in 2013, and you’ll see lots of talk of the ad-tech stack, and who owns it. Google, of course, owns much of it, through its successive AdWords/Doubleclick/AdMob and more creations, acquisitions and ...