April 27, 2024
In five languages (English, Mandarin, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian) and two U.S. printing, “Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get” is the first Ken Doctor book. Sign up here for notice of the new Newsonomics Readers.
Have you bought a lonely single copy of a newspaper lately, from a newsstand or a newspaper box? Probably not. Neither are many other people. Single-copy newspaper sales — which not that long ago made up as much as 15 to 25 percent of sales — are obsolescent, dropping in double digits per year ...
Read MoreHow big a hole is the U.S. daily newspaper industry in? We know the toll in newsroom jobs — about 20,000 lost in a little under a decade — and the fact that the industry as a whole took in about $26 billion less in 2014 than it did a decade earlier. We’re used to,... Read More
Follow Newsonomics @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab As we approach the middle of the 2010s, where do newspapers fit in the battle for America’s largest ad sector — digital? And how well are all those paywalls doing? Two reports tumbled into the ...
Read MoreThe 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 ...
Read MoreRenamed NewsRight, it was an industry consortium, and here a truism applies: It’s tougher for a consortium — as much aimed at defense than offense — to innovate and adjust quickly. Or, to put it in vaudevillian terms: Dying is easy — making decisions among 29 newspaper companies can be ...
Read MoreLet’s look then at the newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls, and investing in newsrooms, and think about whether our intuition has any basis in provable fact. If even 20 percent of expense devoted to newsroom seems like a low number, consider that the industry average is about 12.7 percent for ...
Read MoreIt's incredibly sobering to remember that three of 10 readers have abandoned news outlets. That's a reflection both of those newsroom reductions, which have removed three of 10 journalists, and how newspapers still spend way too much money in ways that don't improve the product. Newspapers ...
Read MoreWhy paywalls now? Why weren’t paywalls put into place in 2007, or 2002, or 1997? Might such paywalls have prevented the massive loss of reporting that local papers — and local readers — have suffered? Would they have saved a good number of the more than 15,000 newsroom jobs (a 28 percent ...
Read MoreWhat 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 ...
Read MoreWe can point to three major phenomena that profoundly changed the news landscape this year. Each offers up its own half-formed metrics for that magic formula in process, and each has dramatically changed the possibilities of news, each largely positive: 1) The transcendant transformative age ...
Read More