Here’s a newsroom exercise sure to drive a stake of fear squarely into the heart of your circulation manager:
Count the number of obituaries printed in your paper in the last year for local residents over the age of 60.
Now compare that number to your paper’s drop in circulation over the same period.
If you see a [...]
All about news-business
The eleventh obvious thing: Your subscribers are dying
July 16, 2007
I’m exactly as pompous as I sound. No more, no less.
June 14, 2007
If, for any reason, you can’t get enough of me prattling on and on about the future of newspapers in text, you can enjoy 33 minutes of me getting interviewed by Cameron Reilly, who apparently is the king of all podcasting in Australia.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve heard me say all this stuff [...]
Hope for mobile news
June 7, 2007
I’ve gotta admit, when it comes to the question of newspapers adopting new delivery systems, I’m usually the one wagging my finger and saying “You better…”
But John Duncan over at The Inksniffer has a far more hopeful approach when it comes to the prospects for cutting deals with cell phone carriers and getting headlines from [...]
Will the real online news business model please stand up?
April 21, 2007
Terry Heaton’s take on the Yahoo/Amigos deal and other attempts to make up for lost print revenue with online advertising dollars turns on this point:
“…the essential problem for all local media companies is their insistence in the belief that a model of scarcity online will generate the kinds of revenue needed to offset losses to [...]
Imagination is everywhere
March 26, 2007
Scott Karp says part of the problem with the newspaper business has been its lack of imagination:
“Nobody imagined that somebody would be so recklessly uncapitalistic as to create a website where people could post classified ads for free. Nobody imagined that an online software company specializing in information retrieval, but which produced no information of [...]