Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
elDiario.es, a startup in Spain, ranks among the leaders in audience and paid reader support in that country. James Breiner Originally published Jun 27, 2024 You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models. The 2024 Digital News Report of the Reuters Institute for the […]
Read More »
Few believed a subscription-only website of investigative journalism could survive Why write about “reasons for optimism” when so much is going wrong in our politics, economy, and environment? Optimism gives us confidence we can make things better. As I like to say, it’s another day of opportunity. Conventional wisdom predicted failure for the French startup […]
Read More »
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 […]
Read More »
Find out what matters to your community; it might not be your news stories This week’s post focuses on examples of successful business strategies for local news publishers. The strategies have become ever more critical as local news organizations have suffered mightily in the covid-19 crisis. Several years ago I was working in Belarus, a […]
Read More »
Reduced university subsidies and digital competition threaten their survival The explosive growth of academic research and the need of researchers to publish their findings have contributed to a financial crisis in the ecosystem of academic publishers. The causes and solutions were debated during an online roundtable sponsored by Spain-based CRECS (International conference of journals of […]
Read More »
Publishers are figuring out how to generate revenue with data, machine learning The covid-19 crisis has accelerated trends away from advertising and toward reader revenue for news publishers. And now everyone is talking about how to use data from online reader behavior and tastes to drive the business models for quality journalism. At an academic […]
Read More »
Mediapart’s digital subscription model succeeded slowly, then spectacularly The French digital news startup Mediapart’s five founders—well known journalists from the venerable publications Le Monde and Libération— defied conventional wisdom of the time when they launched the investigative journalism site in 2008. The media industry graveyard was already littered with examples of failed subscription models for […]
Read More »