Trump Bump Grows Into Subscription Surge — and Not Just for the New York Times

Publishers are witnessing a baby digital subscription boom, and its parents are that odd couple of our times, Donald J. Trump and John W. Oliver. Their offspring pop not just from the womb of the New York Times (NYT) building at Eighth Avenue and West 40th Street in Manhattan but now from ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Your Gannettenfreude Will Only Take You So Far

It seems to be going around this week, but try not to catch it: Gannettenfreude. While it might seem like a great, borrowed-from-the-Teutonic word for a soap opera-like, mangled newspaper M&A mess, Gannettenfreude may be even more pernicious. Gannettenfreude is the taking of delight in the ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Public Radio’s All-in-One Tablet Strategy

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   It’s a tablet experiment in cross-pollination. How do you use the 48 square inches of an iPad to expose the depth of public radio — thousands of hours of national programming, local shows, and community news that add up to a ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of 2013 Wizardry: Tribune, Buffett, Murdoch, Paton, Bloomberg, and more

Today, though, most of the reporting power, much of the brand power, and thepolitical power still resides in big companies and their leadership. We may well get our strongest display of that early in 2013: In Washington, the FCC cross-ownership debate may move to center stage in January. And ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Trust, News Trusts and Murdoch Trustworthiness

One reason News Corp. may move forward with the trust idea rather than a sale of the properties is that it may meet a market without buyers. With the Times’ losses, it’s tough to come up with logical buyers for the papers. Why mess with the market, though, if you can both perform an act of ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

Instant Expectations in the Age of Streaming MPR, WBUR, KQED and MSNBC

It comes down to something old-fashioned: News judgment. MPR had the same access to NPR's feed of the press conference as other stations, I'd presume. Yet, it was the only I found (perhaps there were others) that handled the news best and largely smoothly (I even enjoyed the French lessons for ...

Read More

“Public Media” $100 Million Plan: 100 Journalists Per City

One hundred "public media" reporters and editors in a market is a huge increase. Among those four stations, the news staff would now range from 12 to 30 each, among them. It's tough to count because these are legacy radio operations and radio requires different job descriptions than digital ...

Read More

MPR’s Bill Kling Steps Down — and Up — From Public Radio

Kling didn't really care about the nuances of non-profit and for-profit; that's why he had well-paid lawyers. What he cared about was building a public radio station, and then a nationwide network, that had impact. If he and a number of associates did pretty well for themselves financially, why ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Membership, Part 2

“The difference is that public radio has a ‘barker channel,’ meaning they have the radio megaphone to get people to come into the tent or become members in the first place during membership drives in which they can withhold the programming,” he says. “That barker channel is great for public ...

Read More