The Newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech Company

 How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world? This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have ...

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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 Why Paywalls Now?

Why paywalls now? Why weren’t paywalls put into place in 2007, or 2002, or 1997? Might such paywalls have prevented the massive loss of reporting that local papers — and local readers — have suffered? Would they have saved a good number of the more than 15,000 newsroom jobs (a 28 percent ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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The Newsonomics of Pricing 201

Circulation has turned from a means (getting ad-rich papers to shoppers) to an end unto itself, actually getting readers to pay a significant share of the journalism costs. It’s a simple proposition: You ask the people who really value you and your journalism to pay you more. Surprisingly to ...

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12 Business-Building Lessons from Skift’s Rafat Ali

Now as CEO and co-founder of Skift, doing some curation, he's building out a new kind of business, in a vaster business sector. Travel, says Ali, is the largest employer in the world and is probably third in revenue behind finance and automotive. Lots of potential readers and advertisers. The ...

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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 ...

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The Newsonomics of Paywalls All Around the World

For now, let’s boil it down the how to 5 P’s: People: As in customers. Few newspapers — probably a dozen or fewer in the U.S. — know their combined print and digital audiences as a single audience. It takes a lot of technology moving to get a single, whole view of a customer, matching the ...

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The Newsonomics of the New York Times’ CEO Search

The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in ...

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