Guiding media innovators toward solutions, around the world
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 […]
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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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 »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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