The Newsonomics of “Little Data,” Data Scientists, and Conversion Specialists

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab OSLO — Arthur Sulzberger surprised some people recently when asked what he would do differently in the digital transition, given hindsight. Hire more engineers, he said. It wasn’t an off-the-cuff comment. Each FTE is precious at The New York Times and at ...

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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 Big Sports Money — & News

Both Axel Springer and News Corp, two of the 10 largest publishers worldwide, have merged sports and news pay strategies. Springer’s Bild — Germany’s most popular paper — has nervously launched a paywall, which charges €2.99 on top of €4.99 a month for video access (one hour after matches are ...

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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 the New York Times Running in Place

Let’s look at today’s numbers with some peer-group context. Then let’s draw five lessons — in seven-day print trends, the plateauing of all-access subs, the allure of video, the role of events, and the crying need for smart curation — that undergirds this strategy. Three numbers — print ad ...

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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 ...

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The Newsonomics of Shop ‘Til You Hop

What’s most intriguing, I believe, is that the way they each, differently, is trying to change real-world relationships. It is the disintermediators and remediators — the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons, and Microsofts — that have gotten between publishers, manufacturers, retailers, and their ...

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The Newsonomics of Spies vs. Spies, from NSA to Google

Never too far from the action, serial entrepreneur John Taysom was in Palo Alto this week as well. Taysom, a current senior fellow at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative, is an early digital hothouse pioneer, having led Reuters' Greenhouse project way back in the mid-'90s. His list of web ...

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The Newsonomics of Hearst Magazines’ One Million New Customers

Hearst’s strategy here is one to watch. There are good reasons (more on that below) why daily newspapers have opted to go for door number one and get more money from long-time subscribers while making new subs a largely second priority. But they know that’s a two- to three-year strategy. As ...

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The Newsonomics of Climbing the Ad Food Chain

Digital advertising is all about technology in 2013, and you’ll see lots of talk of the ad-tech stack, and who owns it. Google, of course, owns much of it, through its successive AdWords/Doubleclick/AdMob and more creations, acquisitions and integrations. Its stack is so efficient that many ...

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