Newsonomics: How Will The Pandemic Panic Reshape The Local News Industry?

McClatchy’s bankruptcy is barreling to a conclusion. Tribune’s quietly trimming its board to prepare for a merger. Google and Facebook face unprecedented calls to pay up on at least three continents. And all the while — wait for it — Alden Global Capital’s Heath Freeman is joining the fray, ...

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Newsonomics: Here Are 20 Epiphanies For The News Business Of The 2020s

It is the best of times for The New York Times — and likely the worst of times for all the local newspapers with Times (or Gazette or Sun or Telegram or Journal) in their nameplates across the land. When I spoke at state newspaper conferences five or ten years ago, people would say: “It’ll... ...

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Newsonomics: The Perils — And Promises — Of New Gannett

  There’s the megamerger, and then there are the numbers: $1.8 billion, 11.5 percent interest, 5 years, $300 million, 18 percent…and many more.   RELATED ARTICLE Newsonomics: The GateHouse/Gannett newspaper megamerger could be announced as soon as Monday morning August 4, 2019 ...

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Newsonomics: The New York Times Puts Personalization Front And Center — Just For You

  Remember The Daily Me? Not just the startup that came and went trying to provide a personalized product — I mean that original dream/nightmare of the golden news site that gives the reader what she wants, first voiced ages ago by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. In the archives of news dreams ...

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Newsonomics: What The Anonymous New York Times Op-Ed Shows Us About The Press Now

In 1954, at the moment history tells us that Sen. Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt had already lost some of its power, he still held a 35 percent approval rating among Americans, down only 10 points from four years earlier. Twenty years later, after the Senate Watergate Committee opened its hearings ...

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The Seven Percent Rule: Why A Ridiculously Small Percentage of Digital Audience Drives The Future of News

Written for Traffic, the magazine of paywall provider Piano Media, here I explore in detail how and why less than 10 percent of readers really will make or break a digital news business. Good thinking, and analysis, via Mather Economics, New York Times, Washington Post, Tronc, Star Tribune, ...

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Who Will Buy Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Time and Two Major Cox Newspapers?

It’s time to reset the clock on Time Magazine, as well as its sister publications Fortune and Sports Illustrated. As Meredith Corp. announced its ability to close its long-anticipated buy of Time Inc.., , one door closed, but another opened. Though Meredith CEO Steve Lacy has ...

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Newsonomics: A Q & A With NYT’s Mark Thompson 2020, A Half Billion In Digital Revenue And Thinning Competition

Five years is a long time, especially in the media business. It was five years ago this week that Mark Thompson took on the top job at The New York Times Company. It was an enterprise still wobbling from the effects of the Great Recession, its new paywall only a year old. The Huffington ...

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Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee Moment: Is That All There Is To Reader Revenue?

It’s an age of ready-to-binge whodunits, exported from the Nordic cold onto our heat-seeking laptops and living room screens. So will anyone take up this mystery: Who killed the news subscriber? As print subscriptions have plummeted, digital subscriptions have slowly emerged. It’s ...

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Newsonomics: Facebook Subscriptions: ‘Tokenism’ or A Real Test?

As Facebook Inc.  faces challenges on multiple fronts — legal, regulatory, political and competitive — it’s nurtured high hopes for its new news subscriptions initiative. Facebook is likely to formally announce the new program this week, and as soon as later on Thursday, Sept. ...

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