Elephant Diaries: The Railroad Metaphor

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 …

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Elephant Diaries: What Happens When a Newspaper Stops Printing Itself

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 …

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Elephant Diaries: The Business Model

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, …

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Elephant Diaries: Checking in on the Comics

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. …

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Elephant Diaries: The French Model

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 …

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