Newsonomics: L.A. Consequential

It’s a trademark line of Austin Beutner’s: “I cannot imagine Los Angeles without a vibrant L.A. Times.” As anyone who follows media knows, the Los Angeles Times publisher’s imagination short-circuited the day after Labor Day, when he was fired by Tribune Publishing CEO Jack Griffin (“Tribune to ...

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Jeff Bezos (Finally) Pumps Up the Post with Prime

In a potentially game-changing move, Amazon will begin offering free to dirt-cheap subscriptions to The Washington Post to its tens of millions of Prime members, I’ve learned. The program begins today. While Amazon has never released the number of its Prime memberships, the latest estimates ...

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Newsonomics: “Apple News Changes Everything” & 10 Other Headlines You Could See This Fall

Summer appears gone; prepare to mark the first day of fall in the traditional fashion, with a new set of announcements from Apple. On Wednesday, Apple will dazzles with new iPhones, a new Apple TV, iOS 9, and a few more reveals about Apple News. The event has gotten many in the media business ...

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Newsonomics: Why Native Apps Still Matter in the Age of Distribution

Does a brand still mean anything in news? Ezra Klein bubbled up a provocative question and raised some good points in his recent piece “Is the media becoming a wire service?” In the Age of Distribution, the news body seems destined to be increasingly disconnected from the news head. It seems ...

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Newsonomics: Buying Yelp — and Making It the Next Core of the Local News and Information business

Yelp’s for sale, and the news has generated the usual, now-tiresome lists of potential buyers: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook. It’s like all the money in the business world slid off one end of the table and sluiced down to Silicon Valley. Forget the old spend-a-week-without-the-Internet ...

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Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times Play Facebook’s Ubiquity Game

Intellectually, we all knew that the Internet was so big as to be virtually infinite. But it’s hard to know what to do with that squishy concept. Then BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti outlined his all-in approach in front of a couple thousand nerds at SXSW Interactive last week. He was both ...

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Newsonomics: Single-copy Newspaper Sales Are Collapsing, and It’s Largely a Self-Inflicted Wound

Have you bought a lonely single copy of a newspaper lately, from a newsstand or a newspaper box? Probably not. Neither are many other people. Single-copy newspaper sales — which not that long ago made up as much as 15 to 25 percent of sales — are obsolescent, dropping in double digits per year ...

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Newsonomics: Bill Keller’s Marshall Project Finds Its Legs

The Marshall Project is off to a fast start. Ten thousand people a day now receive its daily summary of the latest news in criminal justice, linking up the best reporting and writing on topics from law enforcement to courts to corrections. It’s already published collaborations with The ...

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The Envelopes Open on the Sale of Digital First Media Newspapers

Valentine’s Day may be coming early for Digital First Media this week. DFM’s board and UBS, its broker, open the envelopes, looking for affection. It’s an uneasy love-me/love-me-not time, newspapers’ version of Match.com. Will DFM’s affection for the open market be returned, or will it be left ...

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The Newsonomics of the Sun-Times National/Local Network Play

Coming, officially today, to your hometown: A templatized, national/local, ready-to-go network of 70 news sites and apps that aim to make use of all the au courant digital news business knowledge of the day. It’s called the Sun-Times Network, and it’s the latest attempt to try to do local news ...

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