The Newsonomics of Forbes’ Real Performance and Price Potential

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   The bidding for Forbes is now moving into round two, with a sale expected within a month. A surprising set of largely non-U.S. buyers is flipping through the pages of a memorandum prepared by Deutsche Bank, which Forbes has tasked ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of How the News Industry Will Be Tested in 2014

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   Our 2014 stage is set, and oh what a marvelous assortment of characters will be walking across it. Many of these characters — the Bezoses, Henrys, Kushners, Omidyars, and Buffetts — are new non-newsies thrusting themselves into the ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Public Radio’s All-in-One Tablet Strategy

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   It’s a tablet experiment in cross-pollination. How do you use the 48 square inches of an iPad to expose the depth of public radio — thousands of hours of national programming, local shows, and community news that add up to a ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Scripps’ TV Paywall & the Last Man Standing Theory of Local Media

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   How much would you pay for online access to Ron Burgundy — or at least the Ron Burgundys of Cincinnati? In an industry-shaking move, E.W. Scripps’ WCPO.TV — that’s the website of Cincinnati’s ABC affiliate — is putting up a paywall ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of the New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Listen to Mark Thompson and you hear echoes of early 2011. “We have the theory. We’ve done the research. We’ve done the modeling,” the New York Times Co. CEO told me last week. “Then there’s ...

Read More

As Digital First Media Announces Its Paywalls, 41% of US Dailies Will Soon Have Them

Even the paywall contrarians are coming around. John Paton’s Digital First Media will announce today its adoption of metered paywalls at all its Media News and Journal Register sites. That’s more than 75 papers, including big ones in Denver, San Jose, L.A., Salt Lake City (among the ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of the Surprisingly Persistent Appeal of Newsprint

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Tonnage. The word speaks to a different age of news media when ink, bought by barrel, and newsprint, bought by the ton, ruled. Newspapers — in print — still go out to some 40 million-plus Americans and as many as 1.4 billion worldwide. We ...

Read More

The newsonomics of 2013’s second half, from ad depression to day dropping to real estate as destiny

The newest News Corp sets sail. Cast adrift — but with a handy $2.6 billion in cash and no debt, making its peers oh-so-envi0us — the world’s largest newspaper company is in the midst of furious change. At the flagship Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, it’s tough to find anyone in management ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of GAFA’s Global Reach

The top five digital ad companies — none of which is owned by a newspaper company — took in 64 percent of all digital ad spending in the U.S. in 2012. That's Google — with an astounding 41 percent of all that ad money — and then Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Facebook is most ascendant ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of the Body Shop

Cultural misalignment. Reader misalignment. Merchant misalignment. Shopper misalignment. Publishers searched for new models but came up short, and too many stayed the course as the world was changing. You can listen to Click and Clack and realize that lots of people, including publishers, ...

Read More