Newsonomics: 20 Words That Defined The Bizarre News Year That Was

This is the year America wishes it could take a shower long enough to wash away the scum of daily mud-slinging. Remember 2016? Last year, it seemed as if Tronc was the most memorable word of the news year, a new media name seemingly invented as self-parody. In 2017, the memorable words tumble ...

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Newsonomics: Lessons For The News Media From Charlottesville

It’s a new unexpectedly raw moment in America. We find ourselves still able to be stunned, and that in and of itself is stunning given the rapid-fire explosions of news we’ve experienced since the election. For media, the events in Charlottesville have been more on-the-job training ...

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Trump Bump Grows Into Subscription Surge — and Not Just for the New York Times

Publishers are witnessing a baby digital subscription boom, and its parents are that odd couple of our times, Donald J. Trump and John W. Oliver. Their offspring pop not just from the womb of the New York Times (NYT) building at Eighth Avenue and West 40th Street in Manhattan but now from ...

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The Newsonomics of Talking Points Memo’s Native Advertising Shift

Call it addition by subtraction, or deduction over misdirection. The commercial progress of Talking Points Memo is a telling lesson in the maturation of digital native news companies. TPM was born very much a blog, one of those early political blogs built on single-minded strong opinion and ...

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FB, GOOG: MYOB

Follow Newsonomics on Twitter @kdoctor   First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   No, Facebook and Google aren’t practicing mind control on us, are they? That’s just silly. Their business is the highly prosaic selling of advertising, less romantic than Mad Men, more ...

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The Newsonomics of Newsweek’s Pricey Relaunch

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Maybe the third time is the charm. Three years before Don Graham and Jeff Bezos talked about selling and buying The Washington Post, the Graham family bid goodbye to its second favorite son, Newsweek. Sid Harman, then 91, optimistically ...

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The Newsonomics of Big and Little, from NBC News and GlobalPost to Thunderdome

That led Balboni to look for a big brother. While he’d done various kinds of editorial partnerships with CBS and PBS over time, none had produced a game-changing business impact. What GlobalPost needed was two things: An ad partner whose ad technology stack could help GlobalPost better ...

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The Newsonomics of Amazon vs. Main Street

Here’s what most hurts most about the new Amazon threat: It aims directly at the one category of newspaper advertising that has fared the best, retail. Classifieds has decimated by interactive databases. National has migrated strongly digital. Retail, which made up of just 47 percent of ...

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The Newsonomics of Majority Reader Revenue

We’re about to move into a period in which reader revenue surpasses advertising revenue as the main support of many news(paper) companies. It’s yet another kind of profound crossover ("The Newsonomics of Crossover"), demonstrating again how quickly news business models are changing. With ...

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The Newsonomics of Journalistic Star Power

Think of these “star” hires as individual SKUs, “products” whose value can be estimated against the customers they bring in the door. Those conversion customer metrics are evolving. Counting pageviews is the simplest way. Take those views at whatever (premium?) rate you can sell them, and ...

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