Apollo Withdraws from D.F.M. Deal, John Paton Leaves

As of today Apollo Global Management won’t meet Digital First Media’s price. That price tag of $400 million (“What are they thinking? Apollo’s acquisition of Digital First Media”) had been wavering as Apollo did its continuing due diligence over the last two months. “We have concluded we are ...

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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 ...

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The Newsonomics of Big and Little, from NBC News and GlobalPost to Thunderdome

That led Balboni to look for a big brother. While he’d done various kinds of editorial partnerships with CBS and PBS over time, none had produced a game-changing business impact. What GlobalPost needed was two things: An ad partner whose ad technology stack could help GlobalPost better ...

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The Newsonomics of Crossover

What percent of print ad loss is made up by digital ad gain? This is the crossover metric driving much of John Paton’s Digital First Media/Journal Register Company strategy. With print advertising down now more than 50 percent in 10 years in the U.S., and even diving more quickly now in some ...

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The Newsonomics of the Death & Life of California News

All we can say with certainty: we’re witnessing the death and life of California news. Who will own the biggest news media? Who will manage the biggest news media? How much of a life in print will be left for newspapers as they go digital? And, of course, how many journalists will be paid to ...

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The Newsonomics of the Next Recession

Overall, what a next recession would do is accelerate most the current trends. We’d see some impact in the fourth quarter, but most of it in 2012, as those budgets are now warily being planned. We’ll beginning asking the question — again — of which companies can survive and under whose ...

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The Newsonomics of U.S. Media Concentration

Is it just imported theater, though? We have to wonder how much the cries of “media monopoly” will cross the Atlantic. Is there much resonance here in the States for the outrage about media power in the U.K.? Will the sins (its newspaper unit now being called to account by a Parliamentary ...

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The Newsonomics of Reuters’ Americanization

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: ...

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