Bay Area Online News Renaissance: 7 Pointers Forward

For daily newspapers, the growth of alternative journalisms is both a promise and a threat. It's a promise of getting high-quality, low-cost (California Watch charged even large metros just a few hundred dollars, though it is reviewing its business models going forward), without having to pay ...

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Pocantico Signals New Networked Future for “Watchdog” News Sites

$128 million is a significant number – but it may be just a drop in the bucket of what’s to come. Sources tell me that major foundations – some that have previously considered “news and information” to be fairly far afield from their philanthropic mandates – are talking about the large sums of ...

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Rocky Shutdown, by the Numbers

So the Rocky's final daily circ will come in at 210,000, more or less. That would make it the biggest paper shutdown since the columnist-rich Chicago Daily News, which folded in 1978 with a circulation of about 327,000. The last big shutdown metro that came to my mind was the Dallas Times ...

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Chronicle Crackdown Prompts Question: Where’s the Bay Area Online Super Startup?

Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don't expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has ...

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How Will Carol Bartz Feel About Consorting with the Press?

The fact that Carol Bartz' first act was to announce that Sue Decker is out undoubtedly sent a shiver down newspaper spines. Decker and her protege Hilary Schneider, late of Knight Ridder Digital, have been the high-profile champions of the consortium. So after the Decker shoe dropped, the next ...

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APT Launches. Now Let’s Track the Yahoo Bump

Open your windows, and you can almost hear a muted "Yahoo!," wafting out of the windows of many newspaper buildings across the land this week. "Yahoo!," as in the long-awaited launch of the ready-for-newspaper-integration ad platform has begun. Though I have doubts that this ...

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Nine Questions on Newspapers’ 2Q Reports

So what do we make of the first half of 2008 in DailyLand? Bad and getting worse. I’ve listened to the CEO webcasts — so you don’t have to! — and must say that there were a couple of eerie echoes of my own suggested remarks, offered a couple of weeks ago ("Candidly, ...

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