Newsonomics: Tronc & The Daily News, What To Make Of This Out-Of-The Blue Buy

For much of the winter and spring, Michael Ferro was uncharacteristically quiet. Once he’d defeated Gannett’s hostile takeover attempt of his newly named Tronc, Ferro seemed to cease being the center of the news industry storm. Some applauded; others privately told me they missed ...

Read More

Chicago Sun-Times’ Fate Could Be Decided Soon

In Chicago, as post-Independence Day week unfolds, the countdown to the bedrock event in the Chicago Sun-Times’ future begins. While most cities’ last-standing largest dailies have a hard time telling you how they plan to be big and strong a decade from now, the second daily in ...

Read More

Michael Ferro Immediately Redefines Tribune Publishing’s Chairman Role

Companion column: Santa Ana Showdown: Tribune’s Bid for Southern California   Michael Ferro’s new title at Tribune Publishing is “non-executive chair.” Since Ferro’s company, Merrick Media, bought a major stake in Tribune earlier this month, he is behaving more like an executive ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

Nine Questions: Savior Bezos, Chronicle Debacle, Patch Undone, the Long Beach Lunge & More

Is reader revenue one of the answers to the next stage of hyperlocal? The halving of Patch ("The newsonomics of Patch's unraveling", today at the Nieman Journalism Lab) is just another curve on the long road to marry local news and digital. Like Backfence and many newspaper forays, it has found ...

Read More