The DEAL Week That Was: Making Sense Of Fox, Time Inc., Buzzfeed, Mashable, the Kochs and the FCC

It was a day to remember. Media consolidation finally saw its big day in the news, Thursday, Nov. 16, as so many long-running storylines began to reach their climaxes. Fueled by the Koch brothers’ half-billion dollars or more, Midwest stalwart Meredith Corp. looks like it finally has the ...

Read More

What Are They Thinking: Two Guilds Gear Up for Digital Media Dominance

Cue up the soundtrack from Newsies: “In 1899, the streets of New York City echoed with the voices of newsies, peddling the papers of Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, and other giants of the newspaper world. On every corner you saw them carrying the banner. Bringing you the news for a ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Mixing Old and New

Each morning, 135,000 people get Wall Street Journal editor Gerry Baker’s The 10 Point, his one-year-old touts email on the best of the Journal that day. Around the same hour, 600,000 people get The Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet, up from just 182,000 a year ago. About 110,000 get Quartz’s The ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Newsweek’s Pricey Relaunch

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Maybe the third time is the charm. Three years before Don Graham and Jeff Bezos talked about selling and buying The Washington Post, the Graham family bid goodbye to its second favorite son, Newsweek. Sid Harman, then 91, optimistically ...

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 the Digital-Only Paywall Parade

How much do top-echelon journalists need media brands? How much do brands need top-echelon journalists? The timing of pay initiatives from Andrew Sullivan and from The Daily Beast will provide a great picture into those questions. One way we’ll see how that contest goes is in comparing the ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Yahoo’s New Livestand

With the launch of Livestand, we see the beginning of Aggregator Wars 2.0, to be fought on a tablet near you. Livestand pushes the question: How are we going to receive news and features via the tablet, through individual apps (paid or free) or through an aggregator? And how are publishers ...

Read More

Nine Questions on Gannett Branding, Patch Widgeting, Stewart Becking, Bloomberg Viewing and Sunday Selling

Am I the only one who doesn't get Gannett's branding campaign? Yes, the Gannett math -- $33 million saved in furloughs, as much as $27 million potentially to be granted in exec bonuses -- seems sadly clueless, but what about the money the company has spent on its branding campaign. New logo and ...

Read More

The New HuffPo-AOL Combo: The Free, Anti-Murdoch Alternative?

Ah, but what kind of new face will AOL/HuffPost's be? It could be, simply, the anti-Murdoch. Sure, The Daily is "centrist," whatever that means in the world of 2011, but the right-leaning proclivities of Murdoch Media are clear. MSNBC has tiptoed into position, leaning forward gingerly, but ...

Read More