Newsonomics: As News Guard Gets Funded, Will An Ad Play Lead It To Success?

The latest Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz startup (which I described in detail last fall) takes an easy-to-understand traffic light approach to combatting the scourge of fake news. Its promised green/yellow/red signals seem like they should be brain-dead simple for even the least brand-aware of ...

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Newsonomics: Will Facebook or Google Adopt The Brill/Crovitz News Vetter, News Guard?

Can trust be monetized? That’s just one of the intriguing questions around the mid-2018 launch of News Guard, being brought to audiences everywhere by that veteran New York media production team of Steve Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz. The business partners foresaw the land rush toward daily ...

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Paywall Tech Roll-Up Continues as Piano Courts TinyPass

The paywall tech industry has seen plenty of consolidation but another big merger may be in the offing. Last fall, Piano Media’s acquisition of industry leader Press+ created the largest company in the trade (Newsonomics: The Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech ...

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The Newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech Company

 How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world? This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have ...

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The Newsonomics of Pulitzers, Paywalls, and Investing in the Newsroom

Let’s look then at the newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls, and investing in newsrooms, and think about whether our intuition has any basis in provable fact. If even 20 percent of expense devoted to newsroom seems like a low number, consider that the industry average is about 12.7 percent for ...

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The Newsonomics of Pricing 201

Circulation has turned from a means (getting ad-rich papers to shoppers) to an end unto itself, actually getting readers to pay a significant share of the journalism costs. It’s a simple proposition: You ask the people who really value you and your journalism to pay you more. Surprisingly to ...

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The newsonomics of good news

2. Digital circulation vastly improves circulation revenue margins. Last week, faced with a Wall Street Journal renewal notice, I opted for digital-only for the first time, knowing that WSJ’s tablet format and easy right-hand navigation makes it far quicker to read than the paper version. That ...

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The Newsonomics of Overnight Digital Customers

That’s right. You’re no longer a “user”, a hateful term if ever one were invented, or a “visitor,” or a brother from another digital planet. Overnight, you’re a customer again. In this psychology, a news company has put a value on what it produces. You, the customer, now are being shown that ...

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Nine Questions on the Tablet and the News Industry Future

The Apple model, in a sense, just sets a new cost-of-distribution. While web distribution has been free-plus, the cost of Apple distribution – if you charge for news products – is a predictable, and seemingly stable 30%. Just give me 30% off the top, says Steve Jobs. Ironically, that 30% is ...

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Oracular Vernacular? Murdoch, Paid Content and the Emergence of All-Access Pricing

If there's a better realpolitiks player in the news industry than Murdoch, please stand up. If not, Murdoch knows that News Corp putting up a pay wall would be akin to unilateral disarmament -- and that's something only pinkos do. Put on up a pay wall when many others improve their ...

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