Jeff Nolan's take on innovation, entrepreneurship, tech and stuff that interests me
I’ve seen this on more than a few occasions and find it very disturbing. So, the Washington Post published a story on its website, revised the story to omit details that appeared in the relevant piece, and yet did not disclose these facts to the Post’s online readers. Isn’t this a problem? There may well [...]
I don’t think anyone would deny that good journalism is both disciplined and increasingly not the domain of newspapers and broadcast media, but I find it interesting that the President would specifically latch on to the notion of a newspaper bailout by the Federal government as a potentially necessary step to combat the blogosphere. “I [...]
Mike is correct to assert that many U.S. and international newspapers are structurally impaired and should simply disband but the debate in newspapers has shifted away from print vs. digital to one focused on digital monetization. The data is what it is, newspaper websites continue to grow traffic by double digits yet the incremental increases, [...]
If you are at all interested in the economics of online newspaper efforts, by all means read Martin Langeveld’s detailed look at how the numbers stack up. Really good stuff. Daily print is not a long-term sustainable model, and forward-looking newspapers, rather than exploring an online paywall, should explore transitioning to a once- or twice-weekly [...]
The Seattle P-I went web only today, ending a 146 year run as a print newspaper. What is the key lesson to learn today? If anything it is that the current newspaper business model is unsustainable and building an online presence with the goal of supporting the print business is a loser, it prolongs death [...]
I don’t think any informed people who comment on this industry are saying newspapers are dead because people are not consuming their products, print or otherwise. I have written many posts about the fact that they continue to grow their online product at a rapid clip but suffer from a business model that translates poorly [...]
Nielsen reports that newspaper web traffic grew 16% in December. Great news, but it doesn’t matter what their traffic is, the underlying advertising model is broken and it won’t heal itself. I wrote about this phenomena back in June last year and NOTHING has changed. More web traffic won’t close the revenue gap to offline [...]
As I offered in my predictions post, 2009 will be devastating for newspapers. We will see big newspapers liquidated and it is not wildly speculative to suggest that a major city will find itself without a daily newspaper this year. Hearst Corp. put Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, up for sale Friday, saying that [...]
You may be wondering why I post so many items about newspapers and the web. Simply put, this is one of the most fascinating business stories of this decade, about how an industry that even today generates a significant percentage of original online content continues to frustrate itself through a reflexive tendency to want to [...]
08Dec
Posted by Jeff as Management
I looked back at what I wrote when Zell first announced the deal to buy the Tribune Company. I was cautious at the time to not offer an opinion about the sanity of a newspaper company at that time, instead focusing on the fact that the guy staked the entire deal with $315m of his [...]