Amid more gloomy news about newspaper advertising, this nugget on the experience of the NYT paywall to date: 100,000 subscribers signed up. What I really want to know is how many signed up for the print as well. (Since it’s actually cheaper to get the Sunday with online access included than it is to buy [...]
In theory, taxonomies beat categories hands down for organizing content. The main advantages are flexibility and precision. With taxonomic tagging, you describe content on an atomic level, very precisely, and then you build queries get lists of the stories (or photos or whatever) that you want. And because a true taxonomy maintains a parent-child relationship [...]
I’ve started a page of useful tools & sites for online journalists. It’s a work in progress, and still a bit of a grab-bag list, but you’re sure to find something interesting there. Over the next few days & weeks I’ll dig deeper into my bookmarks and try to annotate, illustrate and organize it. Suggestions [...]
It’s painfully apparent that digital revenue cannot yet support substantive professional journalism for smaller daily newspapers. I don’t know that it ever will, either. Fortunately, it does not necessarily follow that community newspapers are doomed. If the goal is to find a near-term replacement for all the revenue necessary to support a newsroom and newspaper [...]
Thanks to Steve Yelvington for unearthing a prescient piece by Philip Meyer. In AJR, back in 1995, Meyer predicted much of the disruption now shaking the news industry. Reading it today is fascinating, both for what he hit and what he missed. First, a quibble. Meyer talks about newspapers as high-turnover operations, similar to supermarkets, [...]
Writing about Patch last week got me thinking again about one of the perennial challenges that online sales managers face: Finding the right balance between simplicity and complexity in designing your sales plan. When I was publisher of the Monitor, we worked with an outside sales consultant on a couple of occasions. Before bringing him [...]
The Index-Tribune’s abandonment of its paywall illustrates the challenges news organizations face as they move toward paid-content models in competitive information markets. And it suggests that many, or even most, will ultimately fail.
Deconstructing Patch’s business model. The prospect? Iffy.
See main post, “Patching together a hyperlocal business model.” One of the best looks at Patch’s business model comes from Ken Doctor on Seeking Alpha. The Atlantic Wire raises some key questions about the Patch model and links out to some good resources. Business Insider’s early take, “AOL’s Patch Revenue Model Makes No Sense,” has [...]
Thanks to Alan Mutter for his update on recent newspaper advertising revenue trends reported this month by the Newspaper Association of America, where he observes that the ad revenue rebound experienced by other media has largely bypassed the newspaper industry. Smaller newspapers, especially those in relatively isolated markets, probably have done better than the industry [...]