With Yahoo Win, Verizon Sidles up to Google, Facebook

Those legions of followers in the old Verizon “Can you hear me now?” ads (now hijacked by Sprint) seemed to be coming for your ears, but it turns out they wanted your eyeballs. In an anti-climactic announcement expected Monday morning, Verizon will make it official that it has finally nabbed ...

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What Does Verizon Want With Yahoo?

When you’re the 15th biggest business in the U.S., you don’t need to execute deal gymnastics like the Reverse Morris. Verizon can leave that tactic to others (like Cerberus-controlled YP Holdings, which may use the technique as it teams with Goldman Sachs to pursue Yahoo) as it bids for Yahoo’s ...

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Yahoo: Who’s Ready To Take On A Legacy Digital-Native Media Turnaround?

Which picture would you like to see on the wall of digital media history alongside that all-time classic, Time Warner’s Jerry Levin half-smile as he brought new partner, AOL chief Steve Case, into the fold as the companies completed their $160 billion merger in 2000?       As ...

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The Newsonomics of GoLocal’s for-profit move into Portland, Providence and Worcester

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab Josh Fenton is an ad guy running a local news startup. Therein lies our tale. GoLocal24 is a different kind of online startup. It’s for-profit, unlike so many of the city startups we’ve seen. It’s fueled solely by advertising revenue, ...

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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 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 hyperlocal’s next round: Patch, Digital First, and more

“Everyone wants us to fast-forward to the end of the movie,” Webster notes. He has a sensible point. Given how each Patch rumor — two sites consolidated here, freelance budgets cut back there — is treated as forensic evidence, Webster is in relatively hardy form. He admits that Patch, with its ...

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The Newsonomics of the New York Times’ CEO Search

The next CEO is a big roll of the dice, as the gaming table shrinks. There’s little room for error. Pick the right new leader and the Times has improved its chances for survival; pick wrong and these key years of 2012-2014, as news crosses over into a mainly digital business, will be cited in ...

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Nine Questions for the Cusp of 2012: NewsRight, Erin Burnett’s Screens, Gail Collins’s Emergence & Smart Cookie Arianna

Getting All-Access right -- pricing, real tablet- and smartphone-appropriate apps, customer ease, giving subscribers cross-title benefits -- is one of the biggest tasks for news and magazine publishers this year.

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The Newsonomics of the Next Recession

Overall, what a next recession would do is accelerate most the current trends. We’d see some impact in the fourth quarter, but most of it in 2012, as those budgets are now warily being planned. We’ll beginning asking the question — again — of which companies can survive and under whose ...

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