Newsonomics: Tomorrow’s Life-Or-Death Decisions For Newspapers Are Suddenly Today’s, Thanks To Coronavirus

As local newspapers’ businesses hit the skids, they’re finding themselves careening right now into a future they’d thought was still several years away. “We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week. At ...

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Newsonomics: What Was Once Unthinkable Is Quickly Becoming Reality In The Destruction Of Local News

As words like “annihilation” and “extinction” enter our news vocabulary — or at least move from debates over the years-away future to the frighteningly contemporary — it’s helpful to start out with the good news. Maybe even an old joke. What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”? ...

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Turns Out Warren Buffett Won’t Be The Billionaire Who Saves Newspapers Either

By JOSHUA BENTON AND KEN DOCTOR  Circa 2012, one of the most popular lines among American newspaper journalists went something like this: “Newspapers can’t be that terrible of a business if Warren Buffett, the smartest investor in the world, wants in.” That was the year that Buffett’s Berkshire ...

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Newsonomics: The Gannett–GateHouse Merger Is Really Happening, And Expect To See More Than 10% Of Jobs Cut Off The Top

The megamerger is really happening. Expect the new Gannett — the brand that will survive that chain’s acquisition by GateHouse Media — to officially take wobbly flight soon, perhaps around Thanksgiving. Both companies, the country’s No. 1 and No. 2 newspaper publishers, say it’s full speed ...

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Newsonomics: Patrick Soon-Shiong On The L.A. Times’ Transmedia Future, French-Fry Tweets, And Modernizing The “Newspaper” Business

It was a single weekend phone call three years ago that set Patrick Soon-Shiong on an unexpected path. It was Michael Ferro, whom he barely knew, calling in spring 2016, telling him he’d make the medtech billionaire a “partner” in Tribune Publishing — if he agreed to invest $70.5 million (at a ...

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Newsonomics: Inside The New L.A. Times, a 100-Year Vision That Bets On Tech And Top-Notch Journalism

  Read all of Ken Doctor’s series on the new L.A. Times:     Look past the view of the 105. Beyond it is the unfolding of the 21st century, delayed but now in full force at the Los Angeles Times. That’s my big takeaway from a visit to Patrick Soon-Shiong’s new temple to ...

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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: 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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