Newsonomics: Tronc “Crashes”, DFM Owner Sued, News Guard Funded, Advance Tiptoes Into Paywalls — and The Big Lesson From Hypergrowing The Athletic

Is it really only the beginning of March? The news business’ gyrations seem to be moving at warp speed this year, and particularly this week, as two newspaper companies long in the news make new big moves. As Tronc reckons with the crash of its stock price and oh-so-private Alden Global Capital ...

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The Newsonomics of the Orange County Register’s Swerving All Over the Freeway

  Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab     Pity Aaron Kushner’s poor driving instructor. We can easily imagine the then-16-year-old’s driving inclinations as he first took the wheel. Heavy on the gas. Lightning quick on ...

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The newsonomics of selling cars.com — and $3B in “newspaper” money

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor   First published at the Harvard Nieman Journalism Lab Sometimes, you see the train wreck coming. Tony Ridder, the last CEO of Knight Ridder, saw the classifieds pileup ahead and would talk about it in our company meetings by the mid-’90s: the ...

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The Newsonomics of Patch’s Unraveling

Overall, Patches have proven out a truism: More news coverage is better than less news coverage. Patch has added content to the mix that its competitive dailies missed. Now many of those will be gone, along with all the uncountable coverage losses driven by the loss of those 17,000 largely ...

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The Newsonomics of Aaron Kushner’s Virtuous Circles

Aaron Kushner is the anti-Advance....Kushner and his 2100 Trust ownership group have taken a industry-contrarian approach since he took over the Orange County Register on July 25 — not even six months ago. It’s addition by addition. Addition of costs in the short run, aimed at the addition of ...

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The Newsonomics of Google’s (Ad) Singularity

Add it up, and Google moves to its next stage. Paid search equals about half of digital advertising, and the Google absolutely dominates that business, with a still-astounding 82 percent market share. Since buying Doubleclick for a paltry $3.1 billion in 2007, it has moved to become the display ...

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Nine Questions on Newspapers’ 2Q Reports

So what do we make of the first half of 2008 in DailyLand? Bad and getting worse. I’ve listened to the CEO webcasts — so you don’t have to! — and must say that there were a couple of eerie echoes of my own suggested remarks, offered a couple of weeks ago ("Candidly, ...

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