Slovakia is latest to prove subscription model online

Home page of Dennik N Contrary to all the predictions about the public’s unwillingness to pay for news when it is freely available online, more publishers of high-quality, in-depth reporting are making money. The latest example comes from Slovakia, as recounted by Rob Sharp in Nieman Lab. The editors of a popular national newspaper there […]

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How digital media monetize their social capital

From GDJ’s Clipart, Openclipart.org Lately I have been reading a lot about a new way of valuing media that would benefit entrepreneurial journalism ventures, which nearly always lack capital to launch and sustain themselves. Sociologists and economists have been writing about it for years — social capital — and I am embarrassed to say that […]

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Honeymoon at the Washington Post: what’s next?

Executive Editor Marty Baron interviews Post owner Jeff Bezos. (Washington Post photo) Note: Marty Baron will be speaking here at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, on Jan. 26.The Washington Post is following the strategy of world domination of its owner, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. In contrast with most […]

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If you don’t have money, use social capital

Image from MCMcapital.com Digital media entrepreneurs often lack the financial capital and business savvy to launch and sustain a high-quality news operation. They could improve their reach, impact, and sustainability if they knew how to harness social capital in the form of partnerships with universities, broadcasters, foundations, for-profits, and nonprofit organizations. Most digital media startups […]

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Forget about the big numbers; go for loyalty, trust

Anyone who has studied the metrics of the internet in any detail knows about the Big Lie: those big numbers of total users and page views that everyone relies on are practically meaningless. More than half of the visitors to websites stay for less than 15 seconds.  Three-fourths of the users of the most important […]

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Spain’s most successful digital journalism startup

In our search for the next big thing, we often overlook some of the steady innovators who grow organically without millionaire investors or crushing debt loads. Alfonso Vara-Miguel of UNAV One such example is El Confidencial of Spain (their slogan: “The preferred daily of influential readers”). This is a digital news publication whose value proposition for […]

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