The Newsonomics of the New Chattanooga (Events) Choo-Choo

Aim as much at non-advertisers as advertisers. The remodeler is like most local businesses: a non-advertiser. Taylor says the events business has exposed the paper to a large new set of businesses, a number of whom are now also buying ads as well as event sponsorships. That means new ”indirect ...

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The Newsonomics of Why Paywalls Now?

Why paywalls now? Why weren’t paywalls put into place in 2007, or 2002, or 1997? Might such paywalls have prevented the massive loss of reporting that local papers — and local readers — have suffered? Would they have saved a good number of the more than 15,000 newsroom jobs (a 28 percent ...

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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 Defense and Offense

It’s the offense that represents a problem. Most pay tests have yielded relatively little new revenue. Digital circulation revenues, if broken out, would be minuscule for most, leaving publishers underwhelmed. While buoyed by the defensive wins, without significant new circulation revenue, ...

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Boston.com’s New Strategies: Retention and Switch

The idea, then, in Boston, is to rebuild, over time, that strong two-legged business. In short, this is two-headed strategy: retention and switch.

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Community Daily Pay Walls: A Tourniquet?

In some sense, just as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, though still printed on newsprint, are no longer the same category of newspaper companies as the Philadelphia Inquirer or San Francisco Chronicle, neither is the Inquirer or the Chronicle really in the same business as the ...

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Nine Questions: Rupert’s Dollar Sale, Self-Service Ad Revolution, the California Watch Model and JO’s Tech Friends

Charging for non-desktop/laptop access should be a new revenue stream for news publishers. The math, though, isn't huge. Who is most likely to pay for Journal mobile? Presumably it's online subscribers, of whom there are about a million. So $12 a year, if all of them signed up, would be $12 ...

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