Newsonomics: How Will The Pandemic Panic Reshape The Local News Industry?

McClatchy’s bankruptcy is barreling to a conclusion. Tribune’s quietly trimming its board to prepare for a merger. Google and Facebook face unprecedented calls to pay up on at least three continents. And all the while — wait for it — Alden ...

Newsonomics: What Was Once Unthinkable Is Quickly Becoming Reality In The Destruction Of Local News

As words like “annihilation” and “extinction” enter our news vocabulary — or at least move from debates over the years-away future to the frighteningly contemporary — it’s helpful to start out with the good news. Maybe even an old joke. What’s ...

The Newsonomics of the Mnuchin Money And The Bailout’s Impact On America’s Press

  Is that a light at the end of the tunnel? Or just the Mnuchin Express coming for the newspaper industry? The $2.2 trillion CARES Act will likely become law at some point today. It’s a bailout that has got local news publishers and their ...

Newsonomics: Here Are 20 Epiphanies For The News Business Of The 2020s

It is the best of times for The New York Times — and likely the worst of times for all the local newspapers with Times (or Gazette or Sun or Telegram or Journal) in their nameplates across the land. When I spoke at state newspaper conferences ...

The Seven Percent Rule: Why A Ridiculously Small Percentage of Digital Audience Drives The Future of News

Written for Traffic, the magazine of paywall provider Piano Media, here I explore in detail how and why less than 10 percent of readers really will make or break a digital news business. Good thinking, and analysis, via Mather Economics, New ...

Newsonomics: A Call To Arms (And Wallets) In The New Era Of Deregulation And Bigger Media

Quibble, if you will, about the level of degeneracy now afoot in the heart of the Old and New Confederacy, as the Roy Moore saga provides yet more sick drama in the country. That’s a sideshow. What’s quickly appearing on the main stage — if it’s ...

Newsonomics: A Q & A With NYT’s Mark Thompson 2020, A Half Billion In Digital Revenue And Thinning Competition

Five years is a long time, especially in the media business. It was five years ago this week that Mark Thompson took on the top job at The New York Times Company. It was an enterprise still wobbling from the effects of the Great Recession, its ...