The Business of Digital Journalism
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May 10, 2011 10:00 AM
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism
A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism (PDF)Chapter One News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism
Chapter Two Traffic Patterns: Why Big Audiences Aren’t Always Profitable
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May 10, 2011 12:13 AM
Introduction
The story so far: what we know about the business of digital journalism
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Few news organizations can match the setting of The Miami Herald. The paper’s headquarters is perched on the edge of Biscayne Bay, offering sweeping views of the islands that buffer the city of Miami from the Atlantic Ocean. Pelicans and gulls float near the building;... -
May 10, 2011 12:12 AM
Chapter One: News From Everywhere
The economics of digital journalism
In early 2005, a researcher at the Poynter Institute published a column that was instantaneously read and—by many—misunderstood.Rick Edmonds, who studies the financial side of the news business for Poynter’s website, speculated about how long it would take for online newspaper revenue...
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May 10, 2011 12:11 AM
Chapter Two: Traffic Patterns
Why big audiences aren’t always profitable
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At first glance, the numbers don’t seem to add up: The New York Times has more than 30 million online readers and weekday circulation of less than 900,000 newspapers. Yet the print edition still accounts for more than 80 percent of the Times’s revenue.... -
May 10, 2011 12:10 AM
Chapter Three: Local and Niche Sites
The advantages of being small
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TBD.com went out with a whimper, not a bang. In February 2011, just six months after going live, the Washington, D.C., area’s high-profile experiment in local online journalism announced that it would lay off half of its editorial staff, detach its site from... -
May 10, 2011 12:09 AM
Chapter Four: The New New Media
Mobile, video, and other emerging platforms
News organizations can be forgiven for feeling that they’re in an endless cycle of Whac-A-Mole.They’ve had fifteen years to get onto the Internet, and for much of that time the experience was limited largely to words and photos on a web page, accessed on...
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May 10, 2011 12:08 AM
Chapter Five: Paywalls
The price tag for information
“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension...
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May 10, 2011 12:07 AM
Chapter Six: Aggregation
‘Shameless’—and essential
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A group of middle school students at Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Academy of Arts and Letters got a special treat one March afternoon in 2011. Just five weeks after the announcement of the $315 million deal in which AOL acquired The Huffington Post, AOL’s chief executive,... -
May 10, 2011 12:06 AM
Chapter Seven: Dollars and Dimes
The new costs of doing business
Journalism is expensive and good journalism especially so, but the newsroom usually is not the costliest part of running a news organization. The Commerce Department has estimated that printing and delivery account for up to 40 percent of a newspaper’s costs;
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May 10, 2011 12:06 AM
Chapter Eight: New Users, New Revenue
Alternative ways to make money
“The basic point about the Web is that it is not an advertising medium, the Web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled.” —Jakob Nielsen, web usability expert, 1998
The journalism business these days often seems like...
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May 10, 2011 12:05 AM
Chapter Nine: Managing Digital
Audience, data, and dollars
Although all digital news organizations live in a brutally competitive environment, some companies do much better than others because their managers respond more deftly to opportunities.Arianna Huffington is in that category, and The Huffington Post’s growth in audience and influence is...
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May 10, 2011 12:04 AM
Conclusion
Lessons, takeaways, and bullet points
"Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”
That’s the diagnosis from Randall Rothenberg, a former New York Times media reporter who heads the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing publishers and marketers.
Whether or not you agree with his sweeping characterization, it’s clear that many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace...
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May 10, 2011 12:03 AM
Executive Summary
Chapter One
News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism
Large-scale competitive and economic forces are confronting news organizations, old and new. This chapter identifies sixteen features of the digital world that are transforming the business of news, including changes in audience, aggregation, distribution, customer experience, cost structure, innovation cycles, and advertising.
• Companies discussed: McClatchy, The Huffington Post,...
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May 10, 2011 12:02 AM
Acknowledgements and Credits
For "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism"
Acknowledgements
We owe a great debt to many people who contributed to this report. While we can’t name them all here, we wish to thank some of those most deeply involved. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, hatched the idea for the report and has consistently guided our efforts with wisdom and skill. Jeffrey Frank and Marcia Kramer carefully...
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Gapper on SOPA, Japan’s Papers, Credit Card Antitrust
- Will Fact-Checking Go the Way of Blogs?
The Observatory Science
- Critical Juncture for HuffPo Science With new section, David Freeman has an opportunity to raise the bar
- Media Made Hawking Famous Amid 70th birthday adoration, reporters ignored their role in the physicist’s celebrity
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Medicare Vouchers Explained A conversation with the Brookings Institution’s Henry Aaron
- The Out-of-Context Quote as Gaffe A closer look at coverage of “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me’”
