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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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, ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Going Deeper, with Tech-Aided News Creation

You’ve read about some of this, with the “Robots Ate My Newspaper” headlines this summer as the Journatic faked-bylines scandal fueled popular dismay. Well beyond the headlines lies a bigger movement. It’s not quite a computer-generated revolution, though technology aids, assists, and adjusts ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of the new news cost pyramid

Still, those numbers are bound to chill many a journalist. You think posting reader metrics in newsrooms is still a point of contention — wait ’til story cost accounting becomes mainstream. And it will. It’s just simple manufacturing, and like it or not, that’s what the news business has long ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of 2011 News Metrics to Watch

What percentage of unique visitors will actually pay for online access?It’s going to be a tiny percentage — maybe one to five percent of all those uniques, the majority tossed onto sites by search. If it’s less than one percent, paid metered models may be of little consequence. At two percent, ...

Read More

USAT: It’s (About) Time for the Next Re-Invention

Today's announcement that the USA Today is falling on its own grenade, blowing itself up, taking casualties (130 layoffs) and taking an increasingly familiar digital-first, print-last path makes historic sense.

Read More

The Newsonomics of Content Arbitrage

Is there a danger in content arbitrage? It’s value-neutral; it’s all in how you do it. Let’s remember that journalism is essentially a manufacturing process, with as much or as little value added as we want.

Read More