Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
Gannett’s announcement that it will establish paywalls at its 80 community newspapers is the latest sign that the newspaper industry believes it has found practical technology to charge for its content. But these are not really solutions so much as experiments. Every newspaper will have to test reader response to the various subscription offers and adjust […]
Read More »If you are running a news organization, you have much in common with the coach of a sports team, the director of a ballet or the producer of a hit comedy. The issues are the same. Motivating people. Encouraging creativity. Developing people’s talent to its highest level. Maintaining the discipline to meet deadlines and stay within […]
Read More »Here in China, one of my guilty pleasures is watching DVDs of old episodes of “Mad Men,” the cable television hit about the glory days of advertising and mass media in the 1960s. In one episode, when Don Draper’s advertising firm loses the multimillion-dollar Lucky Strike cigarette account, he takes out a full-page ad in […]
Read More »At first it seems an unlikely place for an expensive paywall business model to work — Nova Scotia. Nearly 6,000 subscribers are paying $360 a year for access to the AllNovaScotia.com website, according to Tim Currie’s story in Nieman Lab. That’s about $2 million and represents 80 percent of the revenue of the site. How […]
Read More »Samuel Palmisano, I.B.M.’s outgoing boss, used four questions to guide his company’s strategy over the past decade, according to an interview in the New York Times. All of them are questions that digital media entrepreneurs should be asking themselves every day: “Why would someone spend their money with you — so what is unique about […]
Read More »A news story from the 2005 archives in which a psychology professor called homosexuality a disease recently rocketed to the top of the most-read list of El Pais, one of Spain’s leading newspapers. The strange incident demonstrated several things: what you produce on the Internet never goes away; in social networks the readers, not the […]
Read More »Veteran journalist Tom Stites writes on the Nieman Blog that new digital media might be overlooking a venerable method of sustaining themselves — the cooperative. The cooperative is defined as a business organization owned and operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit. Today we might call it crowd-funding. When the market fails […]
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