The Newsonomics of the November Shuffle, From Forbes to Freedom and Couric to Stelter

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Ah, the pre-Thanksgiving bounty. Those of us who try to chronicle the business end of the news business have seen our plates overflowing lately. Not since the Bezos blitz of August have we seen so many announcements, shuffles, offers to ...

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The Newsonomics of the Surprisingly Persistent Appeal of Newsprint

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Tonnage. The word speaks to a different age of news media when ink, bought by barrel, and newsprint, bought by the ton, ruled. Newspapers — in print — still go out to some 40 million-plus Americans and as many as 1.4 billion worldwide. We ...

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The Newsonomics of the Shopping of Press+ and The Coming of Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   In April 2009, when Journalism Online began operations, its business — providing the backend for websites offering different kinds of paywalls — was largely derided. Two years later, when the company — having largely assumed the ...

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The Newsonomics of 10 Ways We’ll Judge 2014

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab At the World Publishing Expo held in Berlin this week, two CEOs of major international news companies — Andrew Miller of The Guardian and Mathias Döpfner of Axel Springer — were asked a question: On a scale of one to 10, how far along were there ...

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The Newsonomics of Big Sports Money — & News

Both Axel Springer and News Corp, two of the 10 largest publishers worldwide, have merged sports and news pay strategies. Springer’s Bild — Germany’s most popular paper — has nervously launched a paywall, which charges €2.99 on top of €4.99 a month for video access (one hour after matches are ...

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The Newsonomics of John Henry Buying the Boston Globe

But as John Henry takes over the Globe, he’s taking on a business that has done all that. Check, check, check. The Times Co. deserves credit for maintaining a healthy newsroom. The Globe paywall has won 39,000 digital subscribers and priced up print subscribers. It has rolled out a membership ...

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The Newsonomics of the Tribune Detour

It’s a Koch-around. The unexpected, and real, interest of Charles and David Koch in buying all the Tribune papers has set off a public and labor furor ("The Newsonomics of the Kochs Rising and Uprising"). While the AFL-CIO itself has mounted a quite public protest, two of Tribune’s owners — ...

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The Newsonomics of Advance’s Advancing Strategy & Its Achilles’ Heel

The lack of an All-Access model, I believe, looks like the Achilles heel of the Advance strategy, even if that strategy works in other ways. Why? Advance depends and will depend much more on ad revenue than its peers. Many of those peers believe that reader revenue may reach 50 percent of total ...

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The Newsonomics of Climbing the Ad Food Chain

Digital advertising is all about technology in 2013, and you’ll see lots of talk of the ad-tech stack, and who owns it. Google, of course, owns much of it, through its successive AdWords/Doubleclick/AdMob and more creations, acquisitions and integrations. Its stack is so efficient that many ...

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The Newsonomics of Time and Money, and Google Surveys

Welcome to the emerging world of value exchange. It’s not a new idea; value exchange has been used in the gaming world for a long time. As the Zyngas have figured out, only a small percentage of people will pay to play games. So they’ve long used interactive ads, quizzes, surveys, and more as ...

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