Newsonomics: Amid Screaming Alarms, Consolidation Mania Turns Feverish

Alden’s going to snatch Gannett! No, Gannett’s going to turn the tables and buy Alden’s Digital First Media! But wait, Gannett will reject Alden — is that a real offer? — and turn its attention to merging with Tribune! No, Tribune — having dispatched its CEO Justin Dearborn to clear the way for ...

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Newsonomics: Newspapers In Name Only & Who’s Going To Build What Comes Next In Local?

Neil Chase knows the painful realities of managing and motivating a daily newsroom in 2018. “You can’t ask dedicated, veteran career journalists to completely change the way they work without explaining why,” the Mercury News executive editor said at a panel discussion I moderated at Stanford ...

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Newsonomics: “Digital defeats print” Is The Headline As Gannett Steps Away From Printed Election Results

Editors have long had to battle deadlines on election nights across America — pushing press runs to the last possible moment in order to get the most complete results into the next morning’s paper. Print is many things, but it isn’t a great real-time medium. Now, though, Gannett is throwing the ...

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Newsonomics: With An Expanding Wirecutter, The New York Times Doubles Down On Diversification

Imagine a world in which Donald Trump is no longer President.       No, really. Okay, if that concept’s beyond your immediate comprehension, let’s make the question a bit more concrete: Imagine what’ll happen to the news business in a world in which Donald Trump is no longer ...

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Newsonomics: The Washington Post’s Ambitions For Arc Have Grown — To A Bezosian Scale

In the blink of a digital era, The Washington Post’s Arc publishing platform has sprinted from an experiment to a full-on strategic business. Arc is now used by more than 30 clients operating more than 100 sites on four continents. It’s not the industry standard, but it’s not too early to call ...

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Newsonomics: The Ins And Outs Of A Potential McClatchy-Tronc Merger

Could McClatchy unexpectedly join Gannett and GateHouse as survivors in the game of the American daily newspaper consolidation? Could California become a new epicenter of the American local newspaper business? Could Patrick Soon-Shiong have found a bigger lab to test his theories of AI-enhanced ...

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Newsonomics: What The Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed Shows Us About The Press Now

In 1954, at the moment history tells us that Sen. Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt had already lost some of its power, he still held a 35 percent approval rating among Americans, down only 10 points from four years earlier. Twenty years later, after the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings ...

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Newsonomics: Newsprint Tariffs Gone, Print’s Heavy Boot Remains

The newspaper tariffs are dead. How big a difference will that make to those whose businesses still depends on dead trees?   RELATED ARTICLE Newsonomics: Newsprint tariffs are a Black Swan event that could speed up the death of U.S. newspapers July 20, 2018     On Wednesday, the ...

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Newsonomics: It Looks Like Tronc Is About To Be Chopped Up And Sold For Parts

While it still requires some deal jiu-jitsu, Tronc looks to be on the brink of being broken up. Will Wyatt’s new Donerail Group, several confidential sources tell me, has now gotten the financing in place to do a deal to buy Tronc. Donerail would purchase Tronc’s 10 daily newspaper properties, ...

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Newsonomics: Facebook’s Follies And The Perils Of Unwanted Attention

Attention. Attention! The digital cognoscenti long ago figured out that consumers of “digital” services paid not in dollars but in attention. We laughed about the monetizing of eyeballs. We joked about the devilish bargain we’d made with “the platforms,” even as some conjectured that those ...

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