Newsonomics: Seven Big Questions As Meredith Digests Its Time Inc Buy

Des Moines takes Manhattan? The pride of Iowa publishing, Meredith Corp,, looks like it has finally put Time Inc. out of its 20-year print-to-digital agony. On Sunday, Nov. 26, as expected, Meredith agreed to buy Time. While this has been a deal long expected to find a way toward completion, ...

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Newsonomics: A Q & A With NYT’s Mark Thompson 2020, A Half Billion In Digital Revenue And Thinning Competition

Five years is a long time, especially in the media business. It was five years ago this week that Mark Thompson took on the top job at The New York Times Company. It was an enterprise still wobbling from the effects of the Great Recession, its new paywall only a year old. The Huffington ...

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MEDIAMASH: CNN, NBC Phone Home; NYT’s “The Daily” Pod; The Promise of Polgreen; Partly Cloudy in Tronckadelphia and the Oxymoronic Facebook Journalism Project

MEDIAMASH is Newsonomics’ new, occasional, quick take on the media business.     Could Two Phone Companies Own (TV) News? In addition to all its other delights, the Trump era looks like it will lay down a broad red carpet for more BIG, more corporate consolidation. We already knew that the ...

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Behind The New York Times’ Surge To 2.5 million Subscribers: Toughening The Facebook Wall Helped.

It’s the 10,000-subscriber-a-day march. As the full meaning of a Donald Trump presidency preoccupies American minds, The New York Times has seen a more-than-tenfold increase in daily subscription sign-ups, far surpassing any other news medium.   First published at POLITICO Media on Dec. 5, ...

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Newsonomics: Macy’s Cuts $120 Million Out of Its Newspaper Advertising

In 1858, R.H. Macy, learning from his failed dry goods businesses in Massachusetts, opened R. H. Macy & Co. on Sixth Avenue between 13th and 14th streets in Manhattan. One year earlier, across the continent, the Sacramento Bee was born. One year later, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News started ...

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Newsonomics: With New Roadblocks for Digital News Sites, What Happens Next?

At BuzzFeed, a 32 percent miss in 2015 revenue and a halving of its 2016 revenue target, according to the Financial Times. At Mashable, a massive layoff after the company failed to sell itself. At Yahoo, an upcoming sale of its news-producing assets, portending great uncertainty for journalists ...

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Newsonomics: 10 Questions into 2016, Including Ad Blockers, Watson, TPUB and Particles

Everyone’s got questions. CNBC’s crew faced the Republican Ten for about an hour last evening until finding themselves in a no-man’s land. In front of them were the candidates who turned the tables on them, asserting that old standby “media bias.” Behind them was a very un-Boulder-like audience ...

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Newsonomics: The Thinking (and Dollars) Behind The New York Times’ New Digital Strategy

It was a quiet manifesto — an 11-page document that unofficially serves as The New York Times’ follow-up to the much dissected Innovation Report (Nieman Lab’s story about the Innovation Report is the most popular story in its history) of May 2014. (Look at the signatures at the bottom of this ...

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Newsonomics: La Presse’s Bet on Tablets and Its Crossover Calculus

News of the tablet first came from the west. Steve Jobs celebrated the beginning of this decade with a few thousand of his fans: “We want to kick off the year and introduce a truly magical and revolutionary product.” Then it came from the East, with Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily, the first ...

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Apollo Withdraws from D.F.M. Deal, John Paton Leaves

As of today Apollo Global Management won’t meet Digital First Media’s price. That price tag of $400 million (“What are they thinking? Apollo’s acquisition of Digital First Media”) had been wavering as Apollo did its continuing due diligence over the last two months. “We have concluded we are ...

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