Newsonomics: 10 Top Snapshots on Larry Kramer’s USA Today

Kramer inherits a widely known brand — maybe not really “The Nation’s Newspaper,” but in its hotel and airport ubiquity, a mark seared into the minds of many. Yet it’s oddly a mid-market, Middle America medium with Flyover Country warmth. Being stuck in the middle isn’t a good place in the ...

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The Newsonomics of Trust, News Trusts and Murdoch Trustworthiness

One reason News Corp. may move forward with the trust idea rather than a sale of the properties is that it may meet a market without buyers. With the Times’ losses, it’s tough to come up with logical buyers for the papers. Why mess with the market, though, if you can both perform an act of ...

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The Newsonomics of News U

At first glance, the question of whether professors and journalists are in the same business seems almost absurd, doesn’t it? We know what a college is, and we know what a newspaper is. One’s got ivy-covered walls, demands on-site instruction, costs tens of thousands of dollars a year, and ...

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The Newsonomics of Pricing 101

Let’s start with this basic principle: People won’t pay you for content if you don’t ask them to. That’s an inside-the-industry joke, but one with too much reality to sustain much laughter. It took the industry a long time to start testing offers and price points, as The Wall Street Journal and ...

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The Newsonomics of Risking It All

Funding the journalism business isn’t like funding Sears and Kodak or other fading institutions. It’s not even about saving a perhaps-vital American industry, like the auto industry.It’s about keeping a lifeline of funding open so that our best reporters can do their jobs.

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The Newsonomics of 100 Products a Year

The 100-product-a-year model is a much-needed growth model. We can see how it fits nicely with all-access subscriptions, and together we have two interconnected Lego blocks of a new sustainable news model. We have two essential parts of a crossover model ("The Newsonomics of Crossover") that ...

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The Newsonomics of This American Life and Mr. Daisey’s Media Blur

The 39-minute Daisey piece did what dozens of previous stories on Foxconn’s massive manufacturing of our Apple (and other) wonders hadn’t accomplished: It captured listeners’ imaginations. Why? Daisey turned our portable pleasures to guilty ones. Then, within two weeks, The New York Times began ...

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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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The Newsonomics of the Global Media Imperative

Consider how much revenue each of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon earned from outside the U.S in the first three quarters of 2011: Google: 54 percent Apple: 54 percent Facebook: 38 percent Amazon: 46 percent

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The Newsonomics of Signature Content

Forget “content wants to be free.” Now content wants a fee. And everyone from Time Inc to The New York Times to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to Hulu’s co-owners (Fox, Disney, and Comcast) see gold. They see another digital revenue stream, in addition to advertising or to cable subscription ...

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