The Newsonomics of Where NewsRight Went Wrong

Renamed NewsRight, it was an industry consortium, and here a truism applies: It’s tougher for a consortium — as much aimed at defense than offense — to innovate and adjust quickly. Or, to put it in vaudevillian terms: Dying is easy — making decisions among 29 newspaper companies can be ...

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David Westin’s Departure Raises New Questions About NewsRight’s Viability

Given the company's lofty ambitions to assert news company might in the content marketplace, the company's achievements are distinctly underwhelming. At its tender age, NewsRight is less a failure, than a non-player. As some publishers do newer deals with Facebook, Flipboard, Pulse and Samsung, ...

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YouTube By the Quotes: Get Big Fast and Get Out

Google listens politely, takes meetings and grows stronger and stronger by the day, more able to withstand assault in court or the courts of public opinion, as the clout and financial wherewithal of the content creation companies, already diminishes, is further threatened.

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Attributor’s Anti-Piracy “Guardian” Trial Begins

Here's the 90-day question to watch: If Attributor's numbers are close to right, pointing to "112,000 near-exact copies of unlicensed article by more than 75,000 unlicensed sites" in a recent 30-day period, how will Google and Yahoo respond to a flood of thousands of notices?

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9 Questions: EveryBlock’s New Location, Do-Over Strategies, Sly Sports Moves and Madeleine Brand

If it fact, the ability to charge -- and get paid -- is based on having a good degree of proprietary content, then maybe it is the weeklies who have a better chance of bundling print and online than city dailies. Those that have websites or e-editions have seen them mainly as print retention ...

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Nine Questions: Philly.Com Gets Risque, Anti-Trust and Newspapers, Senior Niching, craigslist Killers and the Sweet Science of Content

What is Christine Varney taking from her newspaper industry talks? Obama's new anti-trust chief has drawn a lot of attention for her interest in Google's books deal, and beyond that, to Google's great search dominance. Varney has also been meeting with news industry people, management and ...

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AP, Attributor Content Tracking Moves Are Solid First Steps

Important Details:  Two significant announcements signal news publishers’ renewed efforts to gain better control of their content as we move on to the next stage of the Internet. The Associated Press announced a new “registry” and “beacon” program, aiming at better ...

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Can You Feel the Bottom? Born-Again Cost-Cutting Leads Back to Profitability

What the predictions failed to get right was how deeply newspaper companies have cut expenses. Consider these cuts, 2Q, 2009 compared to 2Q, 2008: * McClatchy: 29% * Gannett: 20% * Media General: 23% * New York Times: 20% It is these cuts -- coming on a base that has been shrunken quarter by ...

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Is Circulate the Geritol the News Industry Needs?

Here's my sense of the biggest questions ahead for it: * Scale: First and foremost, this is the challenge for any new solution, no matter how potentially game-changing. The network effect is a web law, and one of which news companies have so far failed to take sufficient advantage. If the goal ...

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Attributor “Fair Syndication Consortium” Completes Newspaper Trifecta

So, the three, somewhat ungainly pieces -- combined, represented a trifecta of web reckoning --I see going forward now are: Renegotiation of news producers' relationships with Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. I've written about my notion of Fair Share (no relation and coincidental timing with ...

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