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 Outrageous Confidence

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab   Who expected a virtual coming-out party for the newspaper industry in late 2013? In the past several weeks, we’ve seen new newspaper owners proudly raising the flags of their new enterprises, speaking grandly of their futures and spouting that ...

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It’s Not Quite Facebook, But Mark Thompson’s NYT Can Say “Up”

We’re still taking single digits here, but the single digits — at least for the third quarter — are black, rather than red, at the New York Times Company. That’s a signal change from the first half of the year (“The New York Times: Running in Place“). 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 Jeff Bezos’ (and Warren Buffett’s) “Runway”

What do all of these newspaper buyers have in common? They don’t have to look back at loss and what used to be. They’ve bought strong brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of reader/customer relationships and thousands of advertising relationships. Those are the kinds of assets that a ...

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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 Patch’s Unraveling

Overall, Patches have proven out a truism: More news coverage is better than less news coverage. Patch has added content to the mix that its competitive dailies missed. Now many of those will be gone, along with all the uncountable coverage losses driven by the loss of those 17,000 largely ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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The newsonomics of 2013’s second half, from ad depression to day dropping to real estate as destiny

The newest News Corp sets sail. Cast adrift — but with a handy $2.6 billion in cash and no debt, making its peers oh-so-envi0us — the world’s largest newspaper company is in the midst of furious change. At the flagship Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, it’s tough to find anyone in management ...

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