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 ...

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The Newsonomics of Selling More Stuff

This new strategy will be significantly fueled by developments at two of the U.S’s top papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. From the Times, we’ll soon see a spate of new products, individually priced and targeted at niche audiences, as CEO Mark Thompson acts on his belief that ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos’ (and Warren Buffett’s) “Runway”

What do all of these newspaper buyers have in common? They don’t have to look back at loss and what used to be. They’ve bought strong brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of reader/customer relationships and thousands of advertising relationships. Those are the kinds of assets that a ...

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The Newsonomics of Patch’s Unraveling

Overall, Patches have proven out a truism: More news coverage is better than less news coverage. Patch has added content to the mix that its competitive dailies missed. Now many of those will be gone, along with all the uncountable coverage losses driven by the loss of those 17,000 largely ...

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Nine Questions: Savior Bezos, Chronicle Debacle, Patch Undone, the Long Beach Lunge & More

Is reader revenue one of the answers to the next stage of hyperlocal? The halving of Patch ("The newsonomics of Patch's unraveling", today at the Nieman Journalism Lab) is just another curve on the long road to marry local news and digital. Like Backfence and many newspaper forays, it has found ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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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, ...

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The Newsonomics of Rupert Murdoch, American Publisher

Tribune’s own market assessment of all its eight newspaper properties, part of the bankruptcy proceeding, came in at $623 million, compared to $2.85 billion for the broadcast business. Without competitive bidders, that amount may be optimistic. With competitive bidders — especially in L.A. and ...

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The Newsonomics of Amazon’s Prime Subscription/Membership Moves

Now let’s turn the news and magazine industry, and ask a few questions: --What’s the difference between a shipping fee and a subscription? --What’s the difference between a buyer and a reader? --What’s the difference between a newspaper subscription and a membership that gets you “free” media?

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Digital Do-Over Time: Consortium Aims to Get the Next Generation Right

Many of us shared the three-minute Sports Illustrated tablet video over the last week, and now watched at least a quarter million times. It was an ah-ha moment, amid the rat-a-tat-tat of daily digital news, moves and announcements. We could see a different kind of news reading future, one that ...

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