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Five ways media companies can build paywalls around people instead of content
With a few exceptions, the paywalls and subscription plans that have been erected by hundreds of newspapers and other publications over the past year share one quality — namely, they ask readers to pay...
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Newspapers that aren’t dying: Four success stories and four lessons
The pain that the newspaper industry is going through is well known by now, a generational shift driven by massive declines in print advertising revenue and a continued slide in circulation that is...
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Are comments a wretched hive of scum and villainy or an underused resource...
There seem to be two competing views of website and blog comments at the moment: By far the most popular one is that reader comments — particularly on traditional media sites — are useless cesspools...
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What Nextdoor is doing right with hyperlocal and Patch is doing wrong
Serving hyperlocal community-level or neighborhood-level markets with news and information is a tough business — just ask NBC, which recently closed the doors on its EveryBlock unit, or AOL, which is...
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Why a Dutch publisher launched a mobile app with subscriptions for individual...
As we argued in a recent post about how publishers can make the most of their star writers — including offering “pay walls” around specific authors — the way we consume news and other content is...
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Tesla, the New York Times and the levelling of the media playing field
If you’ve been following the back-and-forth recently between pioneering electric-car maker Tesla Motors and the New York Times — which published what the company thought was an unfair review of its...
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The NYT is doing something smart by using Twitter trends to target ads
We spend a fair amount of time criticizing traditional media players like the New York Times for not being innovative enough, relying too much on paywalls for revenue growth, and other perceived...
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Just as companies and even armies are becoming media entities, so are...
We’ve written about how social media and the “democratization of distribution” that the web allows has turned companies like Tesla into media entities in their own right, and has done the same thing...
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The massive advertising shift that Twitter is trying to capitalize on with...
Much has been written about the disruption taking place in the media industry as a result of the web and the atomization of content, but less has been said about how the advertising business — on which...
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Marco Arment’s digital magazine and the paywall vs. sharing problem
When it comes to new-media players worth watching, Marco Arment’s iPad-only publication — known simply as “The Magazine” — is at or near the top of the list, if only because it is a totally new,...
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Google may be winning battles with publishers, but it is losing the war
Google is clearly trying hard to portray a new German law involving the republishing of news as a victory, and some observers seem to agree, saying the company “defeated” publishers who wanted it to...
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Why the Washington Post is smart to try sponsored content, and why others...
Like virtually every other traditional media outlet, the Washington Post has been squeezed hard by the decline in print advertising revenue and the inability of digital ad revenue to fill that gap....
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If Facebook builds a personalized newspaper, will it suffer the same fate...
In a presentation on Thursday about the latest updates to the Facebook news feed, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly used the metaphor of a newspaper, saying the giant social network wants...
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State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also...
If you’ve been following the media industry over the past year, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you the waves of disruption continue to increase in both height and frequency — so the news that...
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The monetization dilemma for media: Paywalls on one side, advertising on the...
In its recent analysis of the state of the media industry, the Pew Center noted how large numbers of newspaper publishers had put up paywalls or subscription barriers around their content — a group...
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The “barbell problem” in media: The ends are fine, but the middle is getting...
While in New York this week for a GigaOM event, I had coffee and lunch with a number of media-industry insiders and observers, including Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky – two people I think are among the...
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The Orange County Register’s new owners want to reinvent newspapers from the...
The new owners of the Orange County Register don’t have a background in newspapers or journalism: between them, Aaron Kushner and his partner Eric Spitz have built a number of online businesses,...
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Why I admire the OC Register, even though I disagree with almost everything...
In a post earlier today, I took a look at what the new owners of the Orange County Register have been doing to try and revive the newspaper, based on a long interview I had with co-owner Eric Spitz — a...
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A majority of the biggest newspapers in the country now have paywalls
Click to enlarge Several hundred newspapers now have paywalls of some kind, but for the most part, it’s the small and mid-size papers that have been the early adopters. Last year, for example, Gannett...
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Why is it so hard for us to imagine that a site like BuzzFeed could do...
BuzzFeed may be known to most for its “viral” posts about dogs who look like Richard Nixon and other ephemera, but the site has been making some significant moves into more serious fare over the past...
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