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: Tomorrow’s Life-Or-Death Decisions For Newspapers Are Suddenly Today’s, Thanks To Coronavirus

As local newspapers’ businesses hit the skids, they’re finding themselves careening right now into a future they’d thought was still several years away. “We are all going to jump ahead three years,” Mike Orren, chief product officer of The Dallas Morning News, suggested to me last week. At ...

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Newsonomics: What Was Once Unthinkable Is Quickly Becoming Reality In The Destruction Of Local News

As words like “annihilation” and “extinction” enter our news vocabulary — or at least move from debates over the years-away future to the frighteningly contemporary — it’s helpful to start out with the good news. Maybe even an old joke. What’s black and white and now deemed “essential”? ...

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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: Patrick Soon-Shiong On The L.A. Times’ Transmedia Future, French-Fry Tweets, And Modernizing The “Newspaper” Business

It was a single weekend phone call three years ago that set Patrick Soon-Shiong on an unexpected path. It was Michael Ferro, whom he barely knew, calling in spring 2016, telling him he’d make the medtech billionaire a “partner” in Tribune Publishing — if he agreed to invest $70.5 million (at a ...

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Newsonomics: Inside The New L.A. Times, a 100-Year Vision That Bets On Tech And Top-Notch Journalism

  Read all of Ken Doctor’s series on the new L.A. Times:     Look past the view of the 105. Beyond it is the unfolding of the 21st century, delayed but now in full force at the Los Angeles Times. That’s my big takeaway from a visit to Patrick Soon-Shiong’s new temple to ...

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Newsonomics: Can The New York Times Avoid A Trump Slump And Sign Up 10 million Paying Subscribers?

Be sure to read the Mark Thompson Q&A that accompanies this story. RELATED ARTICLE The New York Times’ Mark Thompson on how he’d run a local newspaper: “Where can we stand and fight?” February 22, 2019     Mark Thompson’s nautical and military metaphors have generated some ribbing ...

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Newsonomics: With An Expanding Wirecutter, The New York Times Doubles Down On Diversification

Imagine a world in which Donald Trump is no longer President.       No, really. Okay, if that concept’s beyond your immediate comprehension, let’s make the question a bit more concrete: Imagine what’ll happen to the news business in a world in which Donald Trump is no longer ...

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Newsonomics: The Washington Post’s Ambitions For Arc Have Grown — To A Bezosian Scale

In the blink of a digital era, The Washington Post’s Arc publishing platform has sprinted from an experiment to a full-on strategic business. Arc is now used by more than 30 clients operating more than 100 sites on four continents. It’s not the industry standard, but it’s not too early to call ...

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