The Newsonomics of Digital Marketing

Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.” Within that simple word change, we see a world shift, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

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Media News, Bankruptcy and the Fog of Media War

Who will be next? And is the mating of banko companies the look of the next year? Dean Singleton bit the bitter bullet last week. After staving off bankruptcy for all of 2009, telling MediaNews execs that the company would not need to take that route, the company succumbed. MediaNews is ...

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Circ Math 101: Less is Less

Look at some of the individual results, and you understand why the New York Times just announced that it is taking another 100 jobs out of its newsroom and why other newsroom (and, of course, wider) cuts may increase -- not decrease -- as Wall Street indicates that an overall economic recovery ...

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Nine Questions: A “Recovery” Damage Assessment Quiz for Publishers

By my calculation, readers (print and/or online) of news from U.S. newspaper companies will see about three quarters of a million stories fewer in 2009 than they did in say, 2006, before this big round of cuts began. I get to the number starting with ASNE's census number of 8300 newsroom jobs ...

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Can You Feel the Bottom? Born-Again Cost-Cutting Leads Back to Profitability

What the predictions failed to get right was how deeply newspaper companies have cut expenses. Consider these cuts, 2Q, 2009 compared to 2Q, 2008: * McClatchy: 29% * Gannett: 20% * Media General: 23% * New York Times: 20% It is these cuts -- coming on a base that has been shrunken quarter by ...

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Yahoo & AT&T Market Moves Show Perils of Partnership

If ad sellers think they have a puzzle to figure out, think about the ad buyers. Now there are many more people knocking on their doors, offering them "consultation" on marketing their goods and services. In the end, they'll want to rely on only one or two "consultants," and the battle is on to ...

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Forget Newspapers’ Local-Local: Think Location, Location, Location

Hard as it may be to believe, we may have entered a new rocky period for newspaper companies. It would be a period in which the real estate on which they sit determines their market value. Consequently, their real estate value may determine who wants to sell the newspaper property and who wants ...

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Goodwill Hunting: How to Really Value News?

We're fumbling for words, non-profit, for-profit, angels, foundations, funders, members. Those are all means to do good journalism. We just need to focus on the end -- paying experienced and newbie journalists to do good work -- and get less caught up in the cross-fire of the how. There won't ...

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How Well Does Fox News Mix with Reality?

One question not posed lingered with me though: Since Fox is both a news channel with pretensions of journalistic authority and credibility and an anything-goes entertainment provider, we see how it is just getting harder and harder to separate out real journalism from everything else.

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Sam Zell’s Plan D: It’s All About Buying Time

Buying time, though, is what everyone in the newspaper industry is doing. The New York Times did it today as well, mortgaging its landmark building for $225 million. Scripps is doing it by "selling'' the Rocky Mountain News. All the companies are doing it as they refinance their businesses with ...

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