The Newsonomics of How the News Industry Will Be Tested in 2014

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   Our 2014 stage is set, and oh what a marvelous assortment of characters will be walking across it. Many of these characters — the Bezoses, Henrys, Kushners, Omidyars, and Buffetts — are new non-newsies thrusting themselves into the ...

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The Newsonomics of the Shopping of Press+ and The Coming of Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   In April 2009, when Journalism Online began operations, its business — providing the backend for websites offering different kinds of paywalls — was largely derided. Two years later, when the company — having largely assumed the ...

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The Newsonomics of Outrageous Confidence

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab   Who expected a virtual coming-out party for the newspaper industry in late 2013? In the past several weeks, we’ve seen new newspaper owners proudly raising the flags of their new enterprises, speaking grandly of their futures and spouting that ...

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The Newsonomics of David Pogue and the Pujols Effect

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab Divorces can be such fun, especially media divorces. This week, David Pogue and The New York Times split after 13 years. Last month, The Wall Street Journal couldn’t renew their vows with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Over the past year, Nate Silver’s ...

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The Newsonomics of 10 Ways We’ll Judge 2014

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab At the World Publishing Expo held in Berlin this week, two CEOs of major international news companies — Andrew Miller of The Guardian and Mathias Döpfner of Axel Springer — were asked a question: On a scale of one to 10, how far along were there ...

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The Newsonomics of the German Press’ Tipping Year

The sense of decline and chaos here stands in sharp contrast to even four years ago. Then, when you talked to German publishers, they’d commiserate with their American counterparts, expressing disbelief at the more than dozen bankruptcies that were sweeping chains well known to Europeans. They ...

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The Newsonomics of Selling More Stuff

This new strategy will be significantly fueled by developments at two of the U.S’s top papers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. From the Times, we’ll soon see a spate of new products, individually priced and targeted at niche audiences, as CEO Mark Thompson acts on his belief that ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos’ (and Warren Buffett’s) “Runway”

What do all of these newspaper buyers have in common? They don’t have to look back at loss and what used to be. They’ve bought strong brands with tens or hundreds of thousands of reader/customer relationships and thousands of advertising relationships. Those are the kinds of assets that a ...

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Nine Questions: Savior Bezos, Chronicle Debacle, Patch Undone, the Long Beach Lunge & More

Is reader revenue one of the answers to the next stage of hyperlocal? The halving of Patch ("The newsonomics of Patch's unraveling", today at the Nieman Journalism Lab) is just another curve on the long road to marry local news and digital. Like Backfence and many newspaper forays, it has found ...

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The Newsonomics of Jeff Bezos Buying the Washington Post

First published at Nieman Journalism Lab It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post whipsaws media, and a media-watching world, intrigued by Red ...

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