Newsonomics: The Washington Post’s Ambitions For Arc Have Grown — To A Bezosian Scale

In the blink of a digital era, The Washington Post’s Arc publishing platform has sprinted from an experiment to a full-on strategic business. Arc is now used by more than 30 clients operating more than 100 sites on four continents. It’s not the industry standard, but it’s not too early to call ...

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Newsonomics: GateHouse’s Mike Reed Talks About Rolling Up America’s News Industry

    The news shocked long-time newspaper observers two months ago: “Tampa Bay Times to be sold to GateHouse Media in $79M deal.” Had GateHouse devoured yet another storied publisher? No: It was a FloridaPolitics.com April Fool’s prank played out to a near-incredulous audience. Mike ...

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Newsonomics: How Grows The Millennial Market, Charlotte Agenda and Spirited Media?

Two local-news companies have focused on the large millennial populations in urban centers. Now, with several years under their collective belts, we can report some intriguing numbers. By far, their number one source of revenue: sponsorship.   RELATED ARTICLE On track to bring in $850,000 ...

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Newsonomics: Did Digital First Media Owner Alden Cook The Books?

  That’s the allegation now moving into Delaware’s Chancery Court. This week, Solus Alternative Asset Management LP accused Alden Global Capital — the increasingly maligned majority owner of Digital First Media — of “possible mismanagement and breaches of fiduciary duty.” The big charge: ...

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Newsonomics: As News Guard Gets Funded, Will An Ad Play Lead It To Success?

The latest Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz startup (which I described in detail last fall) takes an easy-to-understand traffic light approach to combatting the scourge of fake news. Its promised green/yellow/red signals seem like they should be brain-dead simple for even the least brand-aware of ...

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Newsonomics: What’s The Sound Of A Tronc Crashing?

Thursday marked a day of reckoning for Tronc. The company — the last big public newspaper company to report year-end earnings — released those numbers for 2017. They weren’t good, as I had signaled in my earlier reporting on the chaos at and subsequent sale of the Los Angeles Times. But what ...

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News industry analyst Ken Doctor: ‘People will pay for quality content’

“People will pay for quality content. When the Times launched a paywall in 2011, people joked about it and said it would never work,” said Ken Doctor, a news industry analyst, on a recent Digiday Podcast, hosted by Brian Morrissey. “But even since before the Trump bump, we’ve seen that ...

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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 York Times, Washington Post, Tronc, Star Tribune, ...

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Newsonomics: Seven Big Questions As Meredith Digests Its Time Inc Buy

Des Moines takes Manhattan? The pride of Iowa publishing, Meredith Corp,, looks like it has finally put Time Inc. out of its 20-year print-to-digital agony. On Sunday, Nov. 26, as expected, Meredith agreed to buy Time. While this has been a deal long expected to find a way toward completion, ...

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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 new paywall only a year old. The Huffington ...

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