NYT & Mark Thompson’s First Report: Unsteady as She Goes

2012 is the first year in which circulation revenue has surpassed advertising revenue. Full-year, it's now 51% of all revenues. Especially given the continued ad decline, that majority revenue number is hugely important. It's now the foundation of the business, and it gives the Times the only ...

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The Newsonomics of the Digital-Only Paywall Parade

How much do top-echelon journalists need media brands? How much do brands need top-echelon journalists? The timing of pay initiatives from Andrew Sullivan and from The Daily Beast will provide a great picture into those questions. One way we’ll see how that contest goes is in comparing the ...

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Nine Questions on the News Corp Split: The Rise of Twenty-First Century Fox and The Daily’s Demise

Why did The Daily fail? I think the short answer is that it missed the first law of media: Make it interesting. The Daily was attractive, even sometimes stunning, in its visual appeal, but too empty-headed to attract a daily readership. If you are going to call something The Daily, you better ...

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The Newsonomics of Israel’s First Paywall

Back up your offer with…journalism. It’s tough to talk cost-cutting publishers into new investments in journalists. But Haaretz took that step to fortify a business opportunity. Too often, publishers have gone to the pay market with newly cutback products — ones that hardly generate enthusiasm ...

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The Newsonomics of Breakthrough Digital TV, from Aereo to Dyle and MundoFox to Google Fiber

Today, TV is no longer a box. Sure, even with all the Rokus, Boxees, and Apple TVs, it seems like TV isn’t yet an out-of-the-box experience. But with Hulu, Netflix, and Comcast’s Xfinity, it’s emerging quickly, escaping our fixed idea of what it once was — the boob tube in the living room. If ...

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New Orleans’ Forced March to Digital

The New Orleans move is not a shocking one. By 2020, we'll be used to a few days a week of print, or maybe just "the Sunday paper," and wonder why we chopped down whole forests; didn't we always have these tablets? Newsprint is going the way of the steam engine, to be visited in theme parks. ...

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Berkshire Hathaway Media Group: Financial Engineering Makes the Deal

It's the early movements of the ball that make this deal more a feat of financial engineering than a newspaper deal: Lend Media General $400 million, and extend a $45 line of credit, at 10.5% interest. That allows Media General to escape shorter-term financial pressures, and gives BH a good ...

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The Newsonomics of 99-Cent Media

Content no longer demands to be free. It wants a fee — but how much of one? Consumer pricing is not a core competence of many media companies. For decades, media pricing was on automatic. Newspapers picked a quarter or fifty cents, and then re-programmed the coinboxes. Magazines kept prices low ...

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The Newsonomics of This American Life and Mr. Daisey’s Media Blur

The 39-minute Daisey piece did what dozens of previous stories on Foxconn’s massive manufacturing of our Apple (and other) wonders hadn’t accomplished: It captured listeners’ imaginations. Why? Daisey turned our portable pleasures to guilty ones. Then, within two weeks, The New York Times began ...

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The newsonomics of hyperlocal’s next round: Patch, Digital First, and more

“Everyone wants us to fast-forward to the end of the movie,” Webster notes. He has a sensible point. Given how each Patch rumor — two sites consolidated here, freelance budgets cut back there — is treated as forensic evidence, Webster is in relatively hardy form. He admits that Patch, with its ...

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