Newsonomics: Facebook Subscriptions: ‘Tokenism’ or A Real Test?

As Facebook Inc.  faces challenges on multiple fronts — legal, regulatory, political and competitive — it’s nurtured high hopes for its new news subscriptions initiative. Facebook is likely to formally announce the new program this week, and as soon as later on Thursday, Sept. ...

Read More

What Are They Thinking? Zanny Minton Beddoes: New Breed of Editors Are Taking Over

Zanny Minton Beddoes starts with two numbers: 1.6 million and 73 million. The first represents The Economist’s paid circulation today. The second forms a target group of people like Economist readers, a small percentage whom she hopes to bring into the fold as digital storytelling and marketing ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Why The Economist Decided Now’s The Time to Speak Chinese

The Economist is launching its new Global Business Review (GBR) today, and the Chinese/English product marks a small but important new test of Paywalls 2.0 — the creation of new paid digital products short of a full digital subscription to an existing print-based product. The New York Times is ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Pricing 101

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and ...

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

For the Economist: Beyond “Objectivity,” the Web’s Transparency Opens a New Window for Journalists

For journalists today it is a two-way window. On the creation end, no matter how much they crowdsource, use Twitter and engage with communities, core journalistic principles of fairness remain fundamental. On the viewing end, the new transparency helps us get it more correct, we would hope. ...

Read More

For the Economist: Preserving the Best of Media Culture

In any city, the number of print journalists far outnumbers broadcasters, even though in America the daily reach of TV news is fairly close to that of newspapers. Too often broadcasters follow up on (and feed off) work begun by print journalists. (At worst, it is "rip and read", driven by ...

Read More

For the Economist: Readers Expect Us to Lead, Listen and Lead

Algorithms will help us master this social whirl, recreating communities and circles of readers, in part inspired by the integration of game dynamics into news sites that we already see developing. What now seems like social guesswork is becoming science, and it will drive the news business in ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: ...

Read More

Nine Questions on the Dallas Morning News Pay Plan

How big will the Morning News payoff be? Let's look at the emerging one percent rule here. If the Morning News were to get -- after some period of time -- one percent of its 4-5 million monthly uniques to sign up for a digital-only subscription, and stick, that would be worth $9 million a year. ...

Read More