I’ve written a lengthy article for InPublishing on the commercial side of data journalism, from increased engagement, hits and advertising opportunities to tapping into latent development talent and selling data itself – you can read it in full here.
For the past few weeks I’ve been casually enjoying Funding Journalism in the Digital Age, a book that surveys the business models underpinning the industry – and those that are being explored for its future. And it’s rather good. The book has four broad parts: the initial 3 chapters provide the current context: a history of news publishing as a
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Last week Karl Schneider, Reed Business Information’s Editorial Director, spent an hour chatting with students in my Online Journalism class. Most of it is available on video here, but of particular interest to me was a point Karl made about how Reed separated its online advertising into a separate company very early on, and are now reaping the benefits (embedded
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Media organisations who only offer partial RSS feeds might be interested to look at a couple of posts from 2 websites with different experiences of monetising their feeds. First, Jason Snell of MacWorld: “RSS doesn’t generate revenue directly. There are ads in RSS, sure, but they’re cheap and lousy and don’t have remotely the return as ads on web pages.”
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The first study (PDF) of magazines and their various approaches to websites, undertaken by Columbia Journalism Review, found publishers are still trying to work out how best to utilise the online medium. There is no general standard or guidelines for magazine websites and little discussion between industry leaders as to how they should most effectively be approached. Following the responses
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A good example of how seeing your website as a platform for other people to do things can lead to one of the oldest business models around: taxes. From TheNextWeb: “Facebook still has one major trick up its revenue-sleeve: taxes. With companies such as Zynga raking in millions from the Facebook platform, Facebook could easily implement a 10% tax with
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This article frames the problem of news dissemination as a problem of market lemons, analogous to the issue raised by George Akerlof in 1970. Framing news as a mechanism of vetting common knowledge as opposed to entertainment allows one to see that instant common knowledge in the byzantine and uncertain way in which humans communicate and live in is unattainable.
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More questions from a student that I’m publishing as part of the FAQ section: 1. If News Corp starts charging for news stories, do you think readers would pay or they would just go to different newspapers? Both, but mostly the latter. Previous experiments with paywalls saw audiences drop between 60 and 97%. And you also have to figure in that
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On 18 September 2009, beloved London evening freesheet thelondonpaper folded. In its wake, London Lite remains. While the closure is part of a larger effort by owners News International to trim the fat from their portfolio and erect paywalls around profitable titles, it also speaks to the future of freesheets on the web. Back in April, thelondonpaper re-launched their web site.
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So, students at CUNY have delivered their much-awaited New Business Models for journalism - four in total, that aim to answer “What happens to journalism in a top-25 metro market if a newspaper fades away. Can journalism be sustained? And how?” The post introducing the models is surprisingly succinct: the real work has gone into 3 spreadsheets which are linked to
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