April 28, 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.
Follow Newsonomics @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Look at The New York Times Co.’s Q1 earnings report, released and webcast today, this way: The Times — for now — is doing an above-average job of managing the print-to-digital transition. Several ...
Read MoreQuite literally, significant newspaper nameplates (and, more significantly, the real estate those nameplates rest uneasily on) are going for the prices of mansions in many communities. So why buy? Sometimes, it’s simple: You get a great deal. That’s what Warren Buffett got in his purchase of ...
Read MoreKramer inherits a widely known brand — maybe not really “The Nation’s Newspaper,” but in its hotel and airport ubiquity, a mark seared into the minds of many. Yet it’s oddly a mid-market, Middle America medium with Flyover Country warmth. Being stuck in the middle isn’t a good place in the ...
Read MoreFor now, let’s boil it down the how to 5 P’s: People: As in customers. Few newspapers — probably a dozen or fewer in the U.S. — know their combined print and digital audiences as a single audience. It takes a lot of technology moving to get a single, whole view of a customer, matching the ...
Read MoreThe next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in ...
Read MoreOverall, what a next recession would do is accelerate most the current trends. We’d see some impact in the fourth quarter, but most of it in 2012, as those budgets are now warily being planned. We’ll beginning asking the question — again — of which companies can survive and under whose ...
Read MoreIf close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.
Read MoreStill, those numbers are bound to chill many a journalist. You think posting reader metrics in newsrooms is still a point of contention — wait ’til story cost accounting becomes mainstream. And it will. It’s just simple manufacturing, and like it or not, that’s what the news business has long ...
Read MoreNow, let’s do the new digital-only pricing plan math. The Times gives me tablet and online (desktop, laptop, but not smartphone) access for $20 every four weeks, or $260 a year. Why not pay $68 less, and get the Sunday paper in addition to the tablet access? How many print subscribers have ...
Read MoreIt’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge — see Test 5 below — against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it ...
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