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 …

Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: ‘Net Hugs’ »

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, …

Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Business Model’ »

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 …

Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The French Model’ »

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’ »

I have no reason to think Albuquerque will become a no-newspaper town, but the set of questions confronting civic life in Seattle as the P-I goes down and the Times teeters are nevertheless worth thinking about in our own context. In that regard, I’ve been following the discussions my old college chum Chuck Taylor and …

Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Affirmative Answer to a No-Newspaper World’ »

The standard critique at the interface between the dying dinosaurs of print and the whip-smart web is that newspapers simply did not understand and embrace the web, and are doomed as a result. If newspapers would only do “X” – and among Internet cognescenti, “X” has many definitions – newspapers would be able to thrive, …

Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: My Semi-Charmed Life’ »

ht Nora