A milestone reached as the world of old media continues its push in a digital direction: the storied, pink-sheeted daily newspaper the Financial Times, read by 2.1 million readers daily, today said digital subscribers now outnumber those in print, and that digital revenues now account for half of all sales in the FT Group. And what’s more, sales actually grew rather than declined.
The FT says… → Read More
It’s been said before, but it needs saying again (and again and again): PRINT IS DEAD. Across the publishing industry, year-over-year declines in revenue, subscriptions and circulation, are well documented. Yes, there have been a few quarters of blood stanching flatness (yay!), but – you heard it here first (or few weeks ago from The Annenberg School, or over the summer from Clay Shirky) –… → Read More
The Philadelphia Media Network has had an ambitious summer: in July, the company announced their intention to sell subsidized Android tablets with subscriptions to the digital editions of Philly’s two daily papers. August was presumably spent sourcing hardware and working on the apps, and now that summer is over, PMN is ready to reveal the fruits of their labor. → Read More
Remember film? Remember when “cut and paste” actually involved scissors and glue? Remember when typewriters didn’t have a 1 key? Probably not, right? I’m old and I barely even remember that stuff.
Well a group of students at Florida Atlantic University had to learn the old ways again in an end-of-school-year experiment. They used 35mm film, actual typewriters, and an old-style paste-up to put… → Read More
How is the New York Times doing with the new digital paywall it put up last March? We found out a few details today when the New York Times announced second quarter earnings. All together, the New York Times counts a total of 1.1 million digital subscribers, but only 281,000 of those are currently paying (756,000 are existing print subscribers who get digital access with their existing… → Read More
How much pricing power exactly does Apple have over publishers desperate to figure out a digital strategy that results in paying subscribers? A hell of a lot—at least that is what Apple is betting with its new subscription billing service. Apple is taking a 30 percent cut of all digital subscription revenues. Just take a moment to think about that for a second.
Up until now, Apple took a 30… → Read More
When Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily launched last week, Apple’s VP Eddy Cue got on stage to announce one-click subscriptions for iPad publications through iTunes. The Daily already has the one-click billing option as a feature, and Cue promised it would be made available to other iPad newspaers and magazines soon. Cue then started to make the rounds of print media companies in New York City to… → Read More
If newspapers came with warning labels, they might look something like the ones Tom Scott came up with. The British “geek comedian” created warning stickers you can print out and put on newspapers (PDF below). They include:
Warning: This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.
Warning: This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia. → Read More
Sometimes it is obvious where the world is headed, but some people and industries become frozen in place and time. They are like the duckbilled dinosaurs happily munching on the still-abundant plants around them when the meteor strikes instead of the small furry mammals underfoot who take cover every day by natural habit. In the print newspaper industry, it’s the same story. Everyone wants to … → Read More
Another day, another electronic book reader not called the nookor Kindlegets a content deal. The Entourage eDGe has signed a deal with Newspapers Direct, giving it access to papers like The Daily Mail, Marca(!), and The Washington Post. This is a great day for people who were waiting to read Real Madrid gossip on the eDGe. → Read More
Earlier today, Google chief economist Hal Varian gave a presentation to an FTC workshop on the changing economics of the newspaper industry. We all know that newspaper ad revenues have been falling off a cliff for years. Many media companies blame Google and are trying to put the genie back in the bottle with partial metered models for online news.
Google is understandably on the defensive… → Read More
Google’s been taking a beating from the newspaper industry lately, and Rupert Murdoch in particular. But the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal let Google CEO Eric Schmidt respond today in an Op-Ed piece which basically says: Hey, we know the Internet is killing your business, but don’t blame us. Google is here to help.
Google sends news sites 4 billion clicks a month, and Schmidt says it wants… → Read More
Local news always seems to get the short end of the stick, both in terms of coverage and advertising dollars. And as the entire newspaper industry continues to struggle for survival, the prospects for local news looks particularly bleak. It just doesn’t pay to have a reporter cover a neighborhood farmer’s market when she could be covering the Mayor’s office or something with broader appeal. And… → Read More
Remember the Printed Blog? It was a newspaper – on actual glossy paper – that would syndicate posts from the Interwebs. Josh Karp founded it six months ago and he ran through 16 issues and 80,000 copies – all on his own dime. And now it’s dead.
The paper was published and distributed in Chicago and raised quite a bit of slightly laudatory prose from folks like the NYT and BusinessWeek. As far as… → Read More
Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has to be the most jaw-dropping. He suggests that linking to copyrighted material should be outlawed.
No, Posner does not work for the Associated Press (which also has some strange ideas on linking). He is (normally) considered to be one of the great legal… → Read More
At last week’s hush, hush meeting of newspaper execs on how to monetize content and save a dying industry, the American Press Institute presented a white paper that offers a step by step plan of how newspapers should move forward with paid content. Nieman Journalism Lab posted a downloadable copy of the report, which has some interesting recommendations. Poynter also provided a comprehensive… → Read More
How is the Kindle DX going to save the newspaper industry when Amazon demands a whopping 70 percent of all revenue, plus the right to license that content (“the mayor said something important today at City Hall”) wherever it chooses? Such is the plight of the Dallas Morning News, and, presumably, other, smaller (compared to the New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) newspapers. → Read More
The newspaper industry is making a lot of noise these days about the Web “stealing” its content and destroying its business. Invariably, the newsmen point their ink-stained fingers at blogs, which are nothing more than “parasites”, or at Google, which is supposedly aiding and abetting in the wholesale theft of the newspaper’s precious words. Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and… → Read More
Last year was the worst on record for the U.S. newspaper industry. Total advertising revenues (both print and online) declined 16.6 percent to $37.85 billion, according to the latest figures from the Newspaper Association of America. That is $7.5 billion less than in 2007. Print advertising alone declined 17.7. Classifieds were down 29.7 percent. And even online advertising was down 1.8… → Read More
Even though we’re losing newspapers left and right in the U.S., people ought not be afraid for the future of news, journalism, etc. So says Steven Johnson, author of, among other things, The Invention of Air. Johnson, speaking at a panel at SXSWi, tried to allay the fears of every kid in journalism school—and those of us who recently graduated, lol!—by saying that people need only look… → Read More
Google’s dreams of world domination may be dwindling (at least its dreams of ruling the advertising world). Today, it announced that it will no longer be selling print ads in newspapers. (Yes, Google sold contextual ads that appeared in 800 papers. It also sells radio and TV ads). In a blog post, Spencer Spinnell, Director of Google Print Ads, writes: → Read More
News Flash: More people get their news from the Web than from newspapers. While this hardly counts as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center is surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of… → Read More
Newspapers are still lurching their way around the Web, a new study finds, but at least they are making some progress. The Bivings Group released a study today that quantifies the Website features of the top 100 newspapers in the U.S. Among the findings: Nearly every newspaper site has reporter-written blogs and some form of video; features that elicit content from readers are on the rise… → Read More
Google’s plans for global empire, by way of digitizing a bunch of dusty old newspapers, received a strong boost today, now that Mountain View has secured the archives of paperofrecord.com. Paper of Record has been digitizing entire newspaper archives, including the Toronto Star as well as other international newspapers, for some time now. With those archives now under its control… → Read More
She’s on the left Is electronic paper ready to hit the big time? Plastic Logic is set to unveil a version of electronic paper at Demo (a tech trade show in San Diego) today, one that the reeling newspaper industry desperately wants to succeed. The device still doesn’t have a name, nor will it have a price—we’ll have to wait until CES to find out what it costs (provided it… → Read More
[photopress:nydn.jpg,full,right] The New York Daily News constantly plays second fiddle to the New York Post. The Post has the trashiest headlines you’ll ever see and the Daily News tries to play catch up. Not next Sunday! Next week, the Daily News teams up with EMI, the first record label to go DRM-free way back in the iTunes Plus days, and will give away three whole songs out of a… → Read More
If you love newspapers but hate inky fingers and creepy delivery people, you might be interested in taking a gander at NewspaperDirect’s PressDisplay.com Website. Touting “500 newspapers from 70 countries in 37 languages,” just as they appear in print, PressDisplay.com is now available free for a month for iPhone users. “The iPhone is the perfect mobile platform for… → Read More
People who read while in the bathroom should be made to take a long walk off a short pier. I realize my opinions are controversial, but I apologize to no one, especially to Loo Read users. It’s a full table that you set up inside the bathroom to get some reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmatic done. And unlike half the stuff I write about nowadays, this is actually real. Not only real… → Read More
Fasten your seat belts, ladies and germs, for the Wall Street Journal‘s Andy Kessler is going to tell you how to fix the so-called dying newspaper industry. Wait, as a matter of fact, it’s not dying. Newspapers, because they’re harder to copy and pirate à la music and video, will be here for a little while longer. Great! Why hop online to get all my news, from numerous… → Read More
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