9 Questions

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 million. Not bad, but only about an 8% increase in reader revenue. I can’t see lots of non-subscribers shelling out $24 a year, but I may be wrong.
Better than charging just for mobile, I still think All-Access is the way to go: Get the Journal (or the Times or Guardian or ?) anyway we produce it, print, desktop, laptop, phone, e-reader, e-edition. And add a $5.95 per month charge for that. All-you-can-eat model that Americans seem to love, if if they don’t often sample the whole buffet.

What is Christine Varney taking from her newspaper industry talks? Obama’s new anti-trust chief has drawn a lot of attention for her interest in Google’s books deal, and beyond that, to Google’s great search dominance. Varney has also been meeting with news industry people, management and labor, getting a sense of what’s wrong in the news business. Publishers of course would love clarity about how much they can work together — on paid models, on negotiations with Google+ — without incurring anti-trust wrath. Varney and her people, of course, haven’t given them the bright line they’d like. Will Varney allow newspapers to get together, cartel-like? Will Google’s dominance in search, and leading role in news search, become part of reinvigorated anti-trust enforcement?

As I train down to D.C. for the Online News Association conference (moderating a panel hopefully titled, Optimize and Monetize, tomorrow; if you’re there, say hello), the dizzying news industry news of the last week raises more questions than answers. Here’s my top nine of the moment. Feel free to add to them: As we [...]

So what do we make of the first half of 2008 in DailyLand? Bad and getting worse. I’ve listened to the CEO webcasts — so you don’t have to! — and must say that there were a couple of eerie echoes of my own suggested remarks, offered a couple of weeks ago ("Candidly, Frankly, Truthfully, [...]