The Newsonomics of Telling Your Audience What They Should Do

You should. Two powerful words. If they come from your mother or the government, they pack a particular weight. But what if they come from media? Should media be in the “you should” business? WNYC, the flagship of New York Public Radio, now tests the virtue and value of those powerful ...

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The Newsonomics of Talking Points Memo’s Native Advertising Shift

Call it addition by subtraction, or deduction over misdirection. The commercial progress of Talking Points Memo is a telling lesson in the maturation of digital native news companies. TPM was born very much a blog, one of those early political blogs built on single-minded strong opinion and ...

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The Envelopes Open on the Sale of Digital First Media Newspapers

Valentine’s Day may be coming early for Digital First Media this week. DFM’s board and UBS, its broker, open the envelopes, looking for affection. It’s an uneasy love-me/love-me-not time, newspapers’ version of Match.com. Will DFM’s affection for the open market be returned, or will it be left ...

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NYT’s 3Q, 2014: Inside the Digital Acceleration of the Business

Call it acceleration of the digital transition. Those are the words that best describes this morning’s 3Q New York Times financial report and conference call. Take this month of October, the biggest ad revenue month of the year for the Times. Digital advertising will be up about 15% this ...

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The Newsonomics of the Sun-Times National/Local Network Play

Coming, officially today, to your hometown: A templatized, national/local, ready-to-go network of 70 news sites and apps that aim to make use of all the au courant digital news business knowledge of the day. It’s called the Sun-Times Network, and it’s the latest attempt to try to do local news ...

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The Newsonomics of the Millennial Moment

The new wave of news sites all look like they do different things. Vox attracts those drawn to the populist wonkiness of explainer journalism. BuzzFeed entertains those attracted by its mix of addictive animal videos and a growing news report. Vice entrances with adventurous, less-filtered news ...

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The Newsonomics of the New York Times’ New Cutbacks

It looks like New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson got a little ahead of himself. Call it premature exuberance. The Times had built major internal confidence, riding a wave of paywall-induced exhilaration, and eagerly moved on to what it had believed would be icing on the reader-revenue cake. I ...

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Newsonomics: Digital First Media’s Newspapers Half-Billion Dollar Pricetag (and California Schemin’)

Could the sale of the Digital First Media properties lead to the U.S.’s first quasi-national newspaper company? That’s the hope of DFM’s current owners, and the shiniest lure tossed out into the newspaper property marketplace by UBS, the unorthodox pick of DFM to be its banker/broker as its six ...

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Inside the Toronto Star’s $10 Million Niche Print Business

John Cruickshank, publisher of the Toronto Star, is the first to acknowledge that his strategy for the paper seems anachronistic. Cruickshank talked the New York Times Syndicate into providing him a semi-custom weekly collection of global news and book reviews so he could sell a ...

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The Newsonomics of the Washington Post and New York Times Network Wars

Call it the newspaper network wars. The Washington Post’s Newspaper Partner Program has grown from a March-planted seedling into a full-grown fall oak. The initiative now includes more than 120 daily newspapers in the U.S., and could connect with more than 200,000 digital newspaper subscribers ...

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