9 Midsummer, 2017 News Lessons: NYT Subs, Sinclair’s Ascent, DFM’s Long Good-bye, New Antitrust Public Interest Thinking, WSJ Resurgence?

This hardly seems like a beachy, devil-may-care summer. Among fears of North Korean missiles, new Russian menace, and a highly unpredictable Administration, we are a nervous people. For the news media, it’s been a year of two tales. Never has the press been so pilloried, relentlessly, ...

Read More

Newsonomics: For The Newspaper Industry’s Next Feat, Can It Get Donald Trump To Give It Antitrust Protection?

Sounds like a John Oliver segment, doesn’t it? As we all know from checking our favorite news apps, the line between satire and news has all but vanished anyhow. Last week, in the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the News Media Alliance initiative to gain an ...

Read More

Newsonomics: The New York Times’ Redesign Aims To Support Its $500 Million Digital Business

Please sign in. Those three words — a request as old as the web — now drive the strongest strategy of our news era: reader revenue. RELATED ARTICLE Newsonomics: CEO Mark Thompson thinks The New York Times can “aspire to a different order of magnitude” June 9, 2017   Today, The New York ...

Read More

Lipstick On A Fox, The Bill Shine Shake-Up and Myth Of The Sons

Can you put lipstick on a Fox? That’s just one of our immediate questions as time caught up with Bill Shine, long-time Roger Ailes lieutenant. Shine followed Bill O’Reilly out the door on Monday, just two weeks after the cascade of women’s harassment claims made him more of a ...

Read More

Newsonomics: The 2016 Media Year By The Numbers, and A Look Toward 2017

2016 goes down as a memorable year for those in and around the media. Though audience levels have never been higher, the digital transformation burden weighed ever more heavily on news media’s back. Then “the media” saw itself pummeled endlessly in the run-up to the election and even more in ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Seizing The Brexit-Trump Moment, The Murdochs Bid For Sky

No surprise, in this age of rampant private gain over public interest, that Rupert Murdoch has re-emerged. Like a boxer who can be knocked about the ring and to the mat but never knocked out, Murdoch, CEO of 21st Century Fox, now makes a new bid for a company he has long sought to control:... ...

Read More

Covering the Trump Era – with Shrinking Newsrooms

First came the election; now, for the news business, comes the reckoning. The internecine media wars – full of self-criticism and finger-pointing – dominated the online discussions about the business during the two weeks after the election. But many working journalists face a more immediate ...

Read More

Newsonomics: Post-Trump, 3 Truths, 4 Long Years, and An Existential Threat

In the mourning after, it’s not just the journalistic post-mortems about polling malpractice that should concern us. It is the very real question of the survival of American journalism as we have known it over the past six decades or more. Donald Trump’s victory leaves a wobbling press in a ...

Read More

House of Murdoch, Sulzberger Shuffle & The Next Gannett: 10 Storylines into 2017

It’s been a remarkable year for the nation, and its press. Transfixed by the Trump phenomenon, election anxiety has all but consumed us. But soon, what has felt like a national colonoscopy will soon be over, and the press will march (or at least step) forward. As we consider the most ...

Read More

Newsonomics: After John Oliver, The You-Get-What-You-Pay-For Imperative Has Never Been Clearer

    Can John Oliver’s 19 minutes rivet attention as all the bolts and screws continue to come undone in the local news business? That seems a hope against hope — and yet 3.7 million YouTube views of his Sunday evening HBO program say something. Oliver offered no new revelations, ...

Read More