Mentors 2: On teachers and being a great one

The best ones demanded our best and left us with words to live by You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models. This is the second of a series about mentors — whether friends, family, coaches, guides, or teachers — and how we can […]

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‘Friends’ support investigative news site through 8 years of losses

Spain’s infoLibre increases subscribers, staff, audience during Covid crisis The name of one of Spain’s notable survival stories in public-service journalism–infoLibre–contains the essence of its guiding principle. It literally means “free information”–that is, free of undue influence from political and business interests. In his annual public letter, Jesús Maraña, editorial director, attributed the publication’s financial […]

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Three businesses help users find trustworthy information

As we all struggle to make sense of the flood of disinformation and misinformation in digital media, some entrepreneurs are developing businesses to help us identify the good stuff, the credible stuff. At the heart of one of the three business models is transparency–full disclosure–to increase our trust of particular media. And the other two […]

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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 winning business strategy builds on relationships

This blog entry was written for IJNet.org, Tips for Journalists in 2020  from other Knight International Journalism fellows. The losing strategy that seeks mass audiences and mass advertising as measured by unique users and page views has led many media to chase clicks with ever-more sensationalistic content about celebrities, sports figures, imprudent politicians and sex […]

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Why most publisher paywalls are destined to fail

Picard: News organizations need to focus on creating value for users Now that Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms have taken away most of their ad revenue, news publishers are realizing they need to get revenues from users to stay afloat. Well, good luck with that. Most of the paywalls or freemium products they have […]

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