Digital natives still depend heavily on grants, advertising

Public-service mission fuels business models in Africa, SE Asia, and Latin America What follows is an edited excerpt of the Business Models chapter of SembraMedia’s Inflection Point International study of 201 digital native media in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Read the full report here–also in Spanish and Portuguese. It is republished under Creative Commons […]

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12 revenue sources for digital news organizations

One of my most popular blog posts from 7 years ago is still surprisingly relevant This article first appeared on my website in 2014 and it remains one of the most popular. The revenue sources are still relevant, and so are the business principles behind them. For this post, I’ve updated some of the text […]

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Dirty words that journalists have to say without blushing

A popular blog post from 2018: how to think like a businessperson Author’s note: This month, I am re-publishing some popular posts. This article first appeared on my website in 2018 and is one of the most popular from the past decade. Many of the circulation and revenue numbers in the text and the links […]

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For-profit publishers race to collaborate

Local and national competitors adopt previously unthinkable sharing tactics Recently I have been doing a lot of research about how news organizations have turned to collaboration rather than competition as a business model. This would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Editors and publishers jealously guarded their exclusive stories and competed to unearth […]

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Sustainable news media: 5 short video tutorials

Build a community based on relationships, not a mass audience In this video you will learn how to build an online community, deepen the relationship with them, and finally monetize the relationship. Here are some articles with more and deeper information about the topic: These metrics predict which users will pay for news These are […]

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What 35 hyperlocal news sites in Europe can teach us

We see lots of hand-wringing about the sorry state of local news organizations because of digital disruption of their financial models. I just happened on a 2016 study by Clare Cook, Kathryn Louise Geels, and Piet Bakker that finds reasons for optimism while realistically assessing the problem. Their study, Hyperlocal revenues in the UK and […]

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The lies that we journalists tell ourselves

And the reasons why those lies make us blind to the true opportunities we have. Lie No. 1. The news we produce is valuable. The Truth: Not really, at least in economic terms. Once we publish the news, everyone has access to it. For example, take the headline, “Michael Jackson is dead.” The first news […]

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