Newsonomics: On End Games and End Times

Platish or perish? With those malaprop-sounding fighting words a year ago, digital entrepreneur Jonathan Glick neatly, if broadly, summed up a question of the moment on Twitter. We’ve read so many obits for news media over the past 10 years that you’d think we’d be inured to yet another. But ...

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Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times Play Facebook’s Ubiquity Game

Intellectually, we all knew that the Internet was so big as to be virtually infinite. But it’s hard to know what to do with that squishy concept. Then BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti outlined his all-in approach in front of a couple thousand nerds at SXSW Interactive last week. He was both ...

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The Newsonomics of Three Cracks at the Mobile News Puzzle: Circa, NRCQ & News Republic

Follow Newsonomics @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   Mobile first. Two devilishly simple words that, at this point, tell us so little. By now, it’s common knowledge that most companies producing digital news are approaching — and at times surpassing — the ...

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The Newsonomics of the Shopping of Press+ and The Coming of Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   In April 2009, when Journalism Online began operations, its business — providing the backend for websites offering different kinds of paywalls — was largely derided. Two years later, when the company — having largely assumed the ...

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The Newsonomics of Where NewsRight Went Wrong

Renamed NewsRight, it was an industry consortium, and here a truism applies: It’s tougher for a consortium — as much aimed at defense than offense — to innovate and adjust quickly. Or, to put it in vaudevillian terms: Dying is easy — making decisions among 29 newspaper companies can be ...

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The Newsonomics of the Mobile Aggregator Roundup: Pulse, Summly, Zite…..& Flipboard?

Design is an important part of these acquisitive moves. One reason these companies have value on the market is that they stand out. It must be said: For the most part, news companies have once again missed a chance to innovate, to make something new of a new platform. Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite ...

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The Newsonomics of A News Company of the Future, the FT

At a time when so much of the news industry seems in flux, the FT has managed a steady-as-she-goes transition into the digital age arguably better than anyone else. While it occupies an enviable global business news niche, the ingredients of its relative success are ones that can be mixed and ...

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The Newsonomics of the Quartz Business Launch

This is the biggest unanswered question about Quartz, until we actually read it. Is this the same business news others have, but differently covered, written, or presented? Or is business news that others aren’t offering? ... It’s the content, silly, that will make or break a news product. The ...

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David Westin’s Departure Raises New Questions About NewsRight’s Viability

Given the company's lofty ambitions to assert news company might in the content marketplace, the company's achievements are distinctly underwhelming. At its tender age, NewsRight is less a failure, than a non-player. As some publishers do newer deals with Facebook, Flipboard, Pulse and Samsung, ...

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The newsonomics of good news

2. Digital circulation vastly improves circulation revenue margins. Last week, faced with a Wall Street Journal renewal notice, I opted for digital-only for the first time, knowing that WSJ’s tablet format and easy right-hand navigation makes it far quicker to read than the paper version. That ...

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