Nine Questions on the Tablet and the News Industry Future

The Apple model, in a sense, just sets a new cost-of-distribution. While web distribution has been free-plus, the cost of Apple distribution – if you charge for news products – is a predictable, and seemingly stable 30%. Just give me 30% off the top, says Steve Jobs. Ironically, that 30% is ...

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AP Gateway: Learning from AP Mobile

Aggregation, as nurtured through the News Registry ingestion-and-tagging process, is the key, and that's been largely proven out. Among the big challenges is creating a compelling user experience that transcends old news conventions. Give AP Mobile a B here; what's needed is an A product;AP ...

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Arthur and the Blue People

So, as the Times reorganizes its digital business operations, add something new to the Times woes' of downsized ad spend, too great a cost structure and little way to gain other than ad revenues digitally until at least 2011 given its go-slow approach to metering. Add the forest people, the ...

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The Times Meter: Why 2011?

Why 2011? That’s a compelling question about the New York Times’ metering announcement, one that I somehow missed in my list of nine (“Nine Questions: New York Times Goes Metered” ).  It’s a good one, given that making a mid-January announcement of a 2011 business move is highly unusual ...

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Nine Questions: On Tablet Dreams, Schemes and Screens of Hope

How does the tablet blur own notion of what's a book, what's a magazine and what's a newspaper? The web atomized everything, and the tablet is one form of reordering. Each device though -- a Sony Reader, a Kindle, a Nook, a JooJoo, an Adam, an Ultra, whatever -- will have a singular interface, ...

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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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9 Questions: EveryBlock’s New Location, Do-Over Strategies, Sly Sports Moves and Madeleine Brand

If it fact, the ability to charge -- and get paid -- is based on having a good degree of proprietary content, then maybe it is the weeklies who have a better chance of bundling print and online than city dailies. Those that have websites or e-editions have seen them mainly as print retention ...

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Oracular Vernacular? Murdoch, Paid Content and the Emergence of All-Access Pricing

If there's a better realpolitiks player in the news industry than Murdoch, please stand up. If not, Murdoch knows that News Corp putting up a pay wall would be akin to unilateral disarmament -- and that's something only pinkos do. Put on up a pay wall when many others improve their ...

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Journalism Online: Part of the Web $2.0 Goldrush

I see a theme here. No, of course, Journalism Online hasn't brought in David Boies with the notion of litigating. After all, it's a company that is in the talking stages, first with publishers, but presumably soon with search aggregators. You don't even have to mention "anti-trust" to Eric ...

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Google and Newspapers: Fairplay, Fair Share and Fair Use

I think it's time we get beyond this tired storyline and confront the realities of the moment. Just as God didn't ordain that newspapers should drive 25%+ profits from their daily monopolies, God didn't set the pay-out rules that drives current web business models. It's time to re-boot the ...

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