25 years ago, I discovered the Internet

Before Google and Facebook, high-speed fiber-optic service opened up the world A potentially embarrassing exercise is to read articles you wrote a few months or years ago. Sometimes it’s because you made predictions that were way off base. I was recently browsing through some old columns I wrote when I was publisher of the Baltimore […]

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Economists ask, Does advertising actually work?

Groundbreaking research questions the value of this $500 billion global industry My apologies to the Freakonomics Radio podcast for borrowing their headline. But it summarizes perfectly a question on the minds of business people for more than a century. The question is especially relevant for the digital advertising business, which promised to be more measurable, […]

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How AI and data boost journalism sustainability

Big databases help news organizations predict who might subscribe or donate If it seems like this blog is turning into a book review section. It could be because classes have ended here in Pamplona and I am reading more to “sharpen the saw”. (Can you guess which book that quote is from? Answer at the […]

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Tech giants say they’re protecting your privacy: really?

In this post I hope to give you some perspective on big changes under way in how digital advertising works, what it will mean to your online privacy, and how it might affect your media business. When both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Senate take an interest in digital advertising technology, you know we […]

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What we should tell entrepreneurs about risk

Success is really the exception, but there are strategies to make it more likely Recently I read an enlightening book by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel-prize-winning economist–Thinking, Fast and Slow. The book is filled with rigorous economic and psychological studies of how our instincts and reason mislead us, especially when we are dealing with statistics. His […]

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Ad fraud: another reason to have your own salesperson

Digital ad technology aids hoaxes, damages your site’s credibility In my last two blog posts I talked about why independent news sites need to have their own dedicated salespeople and how native advertising fits with that approach. In this post, I want to give you another reason to control your advertising sales. The digital advertising […]

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Why you might hate the news media, and some journalists

Note to readers: I wrote this blog post in November 2018, but it seems relevant today. Lots of people distrust the news media and lots of people distrust the government. And I am not just talking about the U.S. but Spain, the U.K., Italy, etc., etc., etc. This blog post started out as an explanation […]

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