The San Francisco Chronicle has been one of the newspaper industry’s great web successes. Its on line audience is among the largest in the country. By the end of the year, it could cease to exist. Just a reminder, this is not about figuring out how to get news delivery right on the web. The …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: add the Chron to your list’ »
h/t Nora
There’s a cliche that keeps popping up in the discussion of newspapers’ futures that links the fate of my business today with railroads of old. Railroads, the argument goes, lost out to the trucking industry because they thought they were in the railroad business, rather than the transportation business. Newspapers, by analogy, are failing because …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Railroad Metaphor’ »
Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like, but remember that dinosaurs roamed the Earth for millions of years. NYT Managing Editor Jill Abramson (h/t Tweets of the Times)
Alan Mutter argued yesterday that newspapers’ print products are central to driving traffic to their web sites – that a significant fraction of the web audience overlaps print, and that the loss of print “stripped of the advantages that formerly differentiated it from all other rivals, would become just one of thousands of URLs competing …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: What Happens When a Newspaper Stops Printing Itself’ »
If you’ll indulge me, a big Inkstain hug for hug for Bob Brewin: I’m a reluctant blogger and know that good reporting will always beat any blog, as this Albuquerque Journal story illustrates. The Journal is a privately owned, independent newspaper (a rare item in these times) and is struggling to survive in an environment …
Here’s the ticket to big time business success on the Internet. Find some way to put your ads next to content created by someone else. Keep all of the money. Profit! The beauty of the model of Google is the way they’ve they leveraged their investment in engineering talent to, at relatively small marginal cost, …
Kelsey Atherton pokes at the newspaper elephant from the vantage point of the comics page: Then, in 2007, webcomic Diesel Sweeties actually made the jump. The creator opted to create a separate print version, so as to keep his main comic and main revenue stream separate from the confines of print. Read that sentence again. …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Checking in on the Comics’ »
The French seem to really love their newspapers. At least, their government does: The French state will help provide free newspaper subscriptions to teenagers for their 18th birthdays, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced Friday. But the bigger gift is for France’s ailing print media. Sarkozy also announced a ninefold rise in the state’s support for newspaper …
Brad Delong on the news of the New York Times’ financing deal, which sounds a bit like the Gray Lady went to one of those brightly painted car title loan places you see in former gas stations: Good God almighty! 14% interest with short-term inflation at zero plus a share of the upside if the …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Economies of the Times’ »