The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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The Newsonomics of John Henry Buying the Boston Globe

But as John Henry takes over the Globe, he’s taking on a business that has done all that. Check, check, check. The Times Co. deserves credit for maintaining a healthy newsroom. The Globe paywall has won 39,000 digital subscribers and priced up print subscribers. It has rolled out a membership ...

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The Newsonomics of the New York Times Running in Place

Let’s look at today’s numbers with some peer-group context. Then let’s draw five lessons — in seven-day print trends, the plateauing of all-access subs, the allure of video, the role of events, and the crying need for smart curation — that undergirds this strategy. Three numbers — print ad ...

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The newsonomics of 2013’s second half, from ad depression to day dropping to real estate as destiny

The newest News Corp sets sail. Cast adrift — but with a handy $2.6 billion in cash and no debt, making its peers oh-so-envi0us — the world’s largest newspaper company is in the midst of furious change. At the flagship Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, it’s tough to find anyone in management ...

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The Newsonomics of the Tribune Detour

It’s a Koch-around. The unexpected, and real, interest of Charles and David Koch in buying all the Tribune papers has set off a public and labor furor ("The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising and Uprising"). While the AFL-CIO itself has mounted a quite public protest, two of Tribune’s owners — ...

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The Newsonomics of Shop ‘Til You Hop

What’s most intriguing, I believe, is that the way they each, differently, is trying to change real-world relationships. It is the disintermediators and remediators — the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons, and Microsofts — that have gotten between publishers, manufacturers, retailers, and their ...

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The Newsonomics of Advance’s Advancing Strategy & Its Achilles’ Heel

The lack of an All-Access model, I believe, looks like the Achilles heel of the Advance strategy, even if that strategy works in other ways. Why? Advance depends and will depend much more on ad revenue than its peers. Many of those peers believe that reader revenue may reach 50 percent of total ...

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The Newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies, from NSA to Google

Never too far from the action, serial entrepreneur John Taysom was in Palo Alto this week as well. Taysom, a current senior fellow at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative, is an early digital hothouse pioneer, having led Reuters' Greenhouse project way back in the mid-'90s. His list of web ...

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The Newsonomics of the Kochs: Impact on the L.A. News Landscape

Critics can say what they want about the diminishment about the L.A. Times. Its news presence and ability to set agendas, through its reporting and opinion pages, is certainly reduced, but it’s still got the only megaphone of its kind in town. As Gabriel Kahn, a University of Southern ...

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The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising — and Uprising

The new board’s mandate, of course, is to maximize its take on the sale. Tribune newspaper profits run at the roughly $200 million level, maybe a third of which comes out of L.A. So, take the market multiple of 3 or 4 times that number as a price — or $600 million-plus — for the eight papers, ...

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