Business

Want to get paid for journalism? Don’t be afraid to ask your audience

Published by on May 22, 2013 | Leave a response

It’s easier than ever to create content, including journalism, but it’s more difficult than ever to get paid for it. US public radio’s On the Media looks at this conundrum and finds: “One way to make money: Ask for it”. They look at crowdfunding and speak with Roman Mars of 99% Invisible about how he funded his third season with a Kickstarter campaign. In the end, he found out that asking for money actually connected him even more strongly to his audience. Inspirational.

News, advertising, subsidies and revenue streams: Disentangling products and profits

Published by on April 5, 2013 | 2 Responses

Jeff Israely, of global journalism startup Worldcrunch, pushes back on the idea that journalism has always been subsidised. I think subsidy is the wrong word, but as with many of the current discussions around the business of journalism, we’re getting tripped up by the imprecision of language and some sloppy use of business and economic language. Yes, there is value in the core product of journalism, as Jeff says, but the real question is how to capture value (revenue) to support journalism.

Kickstarter-funded Read Matter finding subs do better than singles

Kickstarter-funded Read Matter finding subs do better than singles

Published by on March 22, 2013

Building sustainable journalism is a topic near and dear to me as it is core to the work that I do now, and Hacks/Hackers London on Wednesday provided one of those rare times when you get to hear someone a real journalism entrepreneur talk about what has worked and what hasn’t with their start-up. Of course, it’s also great to… Read more →

Coming to peace with journalism Part 1

Published by on March 20, 2013 | 1 Response

This is a blog post that has been a long time coming. I simply hadn’t known where to start, and I’m the kind of blogger who doesn’t like to leave threads dangling. I need to get over that, and a journalist in the US inspired me with her courage in discussing why she left news. Allyson Bird, a woman in… Read more →

Print and digital: Managing the crocodile and the mammal separately

Published by on February 15, 2013

I used to be a big booster of print-digital editorial integration, but I’ve had a change of heart for a lot of reasons, reasons which I’ll outline more broadly at some point. When I first got into online journalism in the mid-90s, to be honest, I probably was suffering from a little of resource envy. The legacy business just had… Read more →

Whither hyperlocal? Still in search of sustainability

Published by on October 18, 2012 | 7 Responses

During this period of disruption and transition, we journalists wring our hands about any number of things, and I suppose the thing I do genuinely worry about is local news. I’m not alone, and it’s spawned a huge number of hyperlocal experiments. At the risk of sounding pessimistic, most of these experiments have failed to develop into sustainable models for… Read more →

Digital first: We need to inspire change not just fear

Published by on September 11, 2012

Last week, the Journal Register Company announced their second bankruptcy in three years and I said on Twitter that I worried that digital first, as a strategy rather than the name of JRC’s parent company, was losing any positive connotation for journalists. I fear that “Digital First” has become not a sign of anything positive for journalists but just a… Read more →

Digital advertising does pay, just not for newspapers, yet

Published by on September 9, 2012 | 5 Responses

Last week, WAN-IFRA said what many of us in digital journalism have known for a while, that we’re losing the battle for attention. They said that digital news audiences lack the same “intensity” of print audiences. Put simply, digital audiences are less loyal and spend less time with each digital news source. WAN-IFRA CEO Christoph Riess has put the problem… Read more →

A data first digital strategy?

Published by on August 12, 2012 | 1 Response

Every once and a while reading comments on a good blog is rewarded. I’m an avid reader of Alan Mutter’s Reflections of a Newsosaur. His recent post on Big Data is well worth reading. To date, publishers have applied the same business model to everything from print and the web to the latest mobile and social platforms: Build the biggest possible audience…. Read more →

US humourist skewers newspaper industry

Published by on July 20, 2012

Editor & Publisher interviewed US humourist and syndicated newspaper columnist Dave Berry after he won 2013 Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement award, and the interview was excerpted on the blog Newspaper Death Watch. When asked why newspapers have cut down on their humour columns, Berry responded: Newspapers have had a consistent problem over the past 30 to 40 years that whenever… Read more →