Hold On, It’s Coming!: New Election Money Could Newly Fund Media

The Supremes’ decision to allow unfettered commercial political speech could be a bonanza….for media companies. Commercial influencers — that would be corporations, and to a lesser degree, big labor — want to reach likely voters, and news media is a great way to find ...

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Nine Questions: New York Times Goes Metered

It's a big bet. The New York Times, which has been thrashing about every possible kind of business model in the last six months, is making the bet on metering, meaning readers will get some number of free articles per month, then be told to pay up to get more. Nine quick questions as we... ...

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Nine Questions: Murdoch’s Lion in Winter, Alicia Calling, Junk Traffic and Negotiating Like It’s 1999

It’s quite a cat-and-mouse game. The cat is Rupert Murdoch, a lion in the winter of his career. Astoundingly, he’s become the leading spokesman for American journalism. The mouse is the crafty Google, adjusting its algorithms and its tactics, faster than publishers can bemoan, “who moved my ...

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The Star Tribune Hears a Who

If Sweeney came concerned, he might have left more worried. Yes, Public Radio’s legacy business is radio, and, more recently, audio, via podcast and streaming. What Sweeney heard, though, was a larger Who, public radio’s nascent attempts to assert itself as a major online (and then presumably ...

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Pocantico Signals New Networked Future for “Watchdog” News Sites

$128 million is a significant number – but it may be just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come. Sources tell me that major foundations – some that have previously considered “news and information” to be fairly far afield from their philanthropic mandates – are talking about the large sums of ...

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It’s Time for a News Corps

Just for starters, let's think of it as News Corps....So let's start with a News Corps of 1000, and a starting wage of $35,000 a year, a decent start and parallel to what TFA provides. That's a tab of $35 million a year, a paltry sum by many measures and one that could be funded by a consortium ...

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News Publishers: New Pay Models May Test Their Q Factor

It's one of many non-newspaper metrics that seem alien to newspaper publishers. In fact, though, some measure of likeability, trustworthiness or other relationship factors may soon prove to be crucial to their future prospects

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Online-Only PI: 22…..and the Rest, Skidoo

Let's figure there are 44,000 journalists left in US newsrooms, an up-to-date tally hard to keep up with. So, if the industry magically flipped that switch tomorrow, we've got an estimate of how many online-only published could pay: 6600 journalists, and that's at the optimistic 15% number. Of ...

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Sarkozy’s French Press Emergency Resonates Here

The world, though, is changing. Talk to daily publishers and their dark humor extends to the transition from profitable to profit-seeking” companies, as papers like the Boston Globe lose as much as a $1 million a week and others have crossed the line into the red. So while the Global Posts and ...

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GlobalPost Launch is Luce-Like in Its Timing

It's a for-profit model, with shareholder stakes for correspondents. As a globally oriented news service, Balboni understands that he's got a huge, potential reader base. The site is targeted to a US reader -- base of 240 million+ -- and then there's that market of 900 million-plus who speak ...

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