Newsonomics: Tronc “Crashes”, DFM Owner Sued, News Guard Funded, Advance Tiptoes Into Paywalls — and The Big Lesson From Hypergrowing The Athletic

Is it really only the beginning of March? The news business’ gyrations seem to be moving at warp speed this year, and particularly this week, as two newspaper companies long in the news make new big moves. As Tronc reckons with the crash of its stock price and oh-so-private Alden Global Capital ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Can Cross-Subsidy (And Nursing Homes) Help Revive The Singapore Press?

    SINGAPORE — Even virtual monopolies get the blues. Singapore Press Holdings — publisher of its flagship Straits Times — is confronting the worldwide downturn in newspaper business fortunes. The large daily (383,000 daily circulation, print and digital) and its well-regarded parent ...

Read More

Newsonomics: These Are The 3 Fault Lines Redrawing The U.S. Media Business

On the surface, Meredith’s $2.8 billion buy of Time Inc. seems fairly straightforward: Leading women’s marketing company adds more digital and print audience to its roster of Middle America titles, with People the prime prize. But in that purchase we can also see the deeper tectonic shifts ...

Read More

Newsonomics: A Q & A With NYT’s Mark Thompson 2020, A Half Billion In Digital Revenue And Thinning Competition

Five years is a long time, especially in the media business. It was five years ago this week that Mark Thompson took on the top job at The New York Times Company. It was an enterprise still wobbling from the effects of the Great Recession, its new paywall only a year old. The Huffington ...

Read More

Newsonomics: A Q and A With Tony Haile, Building Scroll, The “TSA Pre✓” For Reader Revenue

Tony Haile learned a lot of things about news during his seven years building Chartbeat, the analytics platform used in newsrooms worldwide. One of them: “Attempts to get this industry to work together have been slow at best.” Amen to that, one of the biggest hurdles to innovation ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee Moment: Is That All There Is To Reader Revenue?

It’s an age of ready-to-binge whodunits, exported from the Nordic cold onto our heat-seeking laptops and living room screens. So will anyone take up this mystery: Who killed the news subscriber? As print subscriptions have plummeted, digital subscriptions have slowly emerged. It’s ...

Read More

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

Newsonomics: Tronc & The Daily News, What To Make Of This Out-Of-The Blue Buy

For much of the winter and spring, Michael Ferro was uncharacteristically quiet. Once he’d defeated Gannett’s hostile takeover attempt of his newly named Tronc, Ferro seemed to cease being the center of the news industry storm. Some applauded; others privately told me they missed ...

Read More

Newsonomics: The Problem With Digital News: Older — Not Younger — Readers

Oh, those young people. Ask traditional media companies the problem with digital disruption, and the older people running those companies will often point to the younger generations. “All they want to do is watch video.” “They’ll read snippets, but not longer ...

Read More

9 Midsummer, 2017 News Lessons: NYT Subs, Sinclair’s Ascent, DFM’s Long Good-bye, New Antitrust Public Interest Thinking, WSJ Resurgence?

This hardly seems like a beachy, devil-may-care summer. Among fears of North Korean missiles, new Russian menace, and a highly unpredictable Administration, we are a nervous people. For the news media, it’s been a year of two tales. Never has the press been so pilloried, relentlessly, ...

Read More