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 ...

Newsonomics: Four Years In To Their Surprise Marriage, What Has The FT Done For Nikkei, And Vice Versa?

On July 23, 2015, the Financial Times and Nikkei — the leading business newspapers in the U.K. and Japan — shocked the news business worldwide with its own acquisition breaking news. On that date, the two companies announced a tie-up that no one ...

Newsonomics: Nikkei’s Tsuneo Kita: “Without The FT, It Wouldn’t Have Been Possible For Us To Transform Ourselves As We Have”

Four years ago, the Japanese financial news giant Nikkei sent shocked the global media world with a surprise announcement: It had bought the storied Financial Times for $1.3 billion. “Billion” was a pricetag few thought they would see in news ...

Newsonomics: 20 Words That Defined The Bizarre News Year That Was

This is the year America wishes it could take a shower long enough to wash away the scum of daily mud-slinging. Remember 2016? Last year, it seemed as if Tronc was the most memorable word of the news year, a new media name seemingly invented as ...

The Seven Percent Rule: Why A Ridiculously Small Percentage of Digital Audience Drives The Future of News

Written for Traffic, the magazine of paywall provider Piano Media, here I explore in detail how and why less than 10 percent of readers really will make or break a digital news business. Good thinking, and analysis, via Mather Economics, New ...

Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee Moment: Is That All There Is To Reader Revenue?

It’s an age of ready-to-binge whodunits, exported from the Nordic cold onto our heat-seeking laptops and living room screens. So will anyone take up this mystery: Who killed the news subscriber? As print subscriptions have plummeted, ...

Newsonomics: For The Newspaper Industry’s Next Feat, Can It Get Donald Trump To Give It Antitrust Protection?

Sounds like a John Oliver segment, doesn’t it? As we all know from checking our favorite news apps, the line between satire and news has all but vanished anyhow. Last week, in the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, ...

Vanity Fair’s Digital Pay Plans Builds On New Yorker Success

Even as the Trump Subscriber Surge slows some, more and more publishers are asking themselves a renewed question: Can’t we figure out a way to get more revenue from digital readers? On Thursday, Conde Nast all but acknowledged that Vanity ...