I’ll go out on a limb and say it flat out: paywalls are a clear sign that the news publisher doesn’t yet understand digital news revenue and where the industry needs to turn for online profits. And no, “online profits” is not an oxymoron (see my previous posts about John Paton and what you can do to drive plenty of online revenue). Yes, banner network advertising pays out next to nothing. Dumping cheap banner ads is the first thing a publisher should do. But going to paywalls is a mistake. Publishers have rarely derived significant revenue from news consumers; most revenue has been from advertising, and will continue to be. And there is plenty of money to be made in digital advertising, if you are willing to look at how businesses are spending their (growing!) advertising budgets. Let’s think about the paywall model a bit. Pundits (and desperate publishers) like to cite The Wall Street Journal as an example of a paywall that works. Well, unless you are publishing a financial journal, forget about the comparison. Subscribers themselves rarely foot the bill for their WSJ subscriptions: the subscription fees are subsidized. How? Because you can take WSJ as a corporate expense. Heck, you can take it off on your taxes as a business or professional expense (in the US, it’s a legitimate “unreimbursed employee expense” for many people). But who is going to let you put your hometown newspaper (or the New York Times for that matter) on an expense report? It just isn’t a business periodical. Some of us read with interest the story about Piano Media, the initiative where content from all nine news publishers in Slovakia are delivered under one national paywall. (Here is one article about it from Columbia Journalism Review: http://bit.ly/HOgrWW.) Is this a model for the free world? Consider this: if you want news content in your native language, and someone holds a monopoly on all news in your language, then yes, perhaps under these artificial circumstances, a paywall will work: “With all the major newspaper publishers (and one broadcaster) involved and little Slovak-language competition from outside the nation’s borders, readers would seem...
Read MoreHow to Drive Online News Revenue
It breaks my heart when I read articles like a recent one by Michael Wolff of The Guardian describing the news industry’s “imploding business model” and “portending, once again, the end of the world as we know it.” (http://bit.ly/HiLIk3) His article describes why the growing trend toward mobile news is going to kill the news industry, because it will further erode revenue from CPM (impression-based) banner advertising. As if banner ads were a viable model for news regardless. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by the report; last month John Paton (CEO of Digital First Media, the second-largest media company in the US) said “And for God’s sake stop listening to newspaper people. We have had since the mid-90s to get this right and clearly we are no good at it. Put the digital people in charge – of everything. They can take what we have built and make it better. It is so very important we get this right – not just for the industry and investors – but for our communities.” (http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/) As one of those “digital people” I’ve been working to transform the news industry by introducing digital media innovation, both on the newsroom and the sales revenue side. I generally work with clients to help them tailor a sales strategy that will work with their market and their editorial focus, but I thought I had better discuss in this blog some of the tangible options that a newsroom can bring to bear. And none of them are banners or paywalls! If there is one thing I have learned from 20 years working in Silicon Valley, it’s that you have to follow the money: in this case, you have to analyze where businesses are spending their ad budgets. And so that’s where I started, by looking at business advertising spend. For the past 3 years I have focused on local and specialty news outlets: those news and magazine publishers whose target demographic is either geographically local or psychographically tuned to both their audience and their advertisers. (In other words, where the advertisers are targeting, in the publication’s readership, a highly qualified demographic of consumers.) So if my suggestions below seem too focused...
Read MoreDon’t Build Your Own Newsroom
I recently spoke to several publishers at Publishing Expo in London about their content management systems, and a few gave me the usual sad story about trying to build a newsroom in-house. This is more than a “build vs. buy” issue, especially for newsrooms where the CMS is critical to the entire business operation. Failure in the newsroom is not only expensive, it can spell disaster for the company as a whole. IT project failure rates are the stuff of legend. The Standish Group, a Boston-based IT consulting firm, is famous for its annual CHAOS Report, documenting IT project failure rates (which hover around a shocking 30% success rate, with over 2/3 of the projects “Failed” or “Challenged” according to the report criteria. Statistics like these are well known to the IT and bespoke development community in the corporate IT world. But lessons from corporate IT don’t seem to have trickled into the publishing world, so let me offer a few insights into project failure and why you don’t want to build your own newsroom. First, newsroom systems are complex pieces of software; they are not simple document management systems of the kind a clever IT organization could reasonably be expected to design and build. Today’s newsrooms manage workflow, multimedia management, complex information architectures, analytics, multi-platform delivery, social media integration, and a host of other features that make them pretty complicated machines. But instead of going into the complexities of these systems, the more important insight is in understanding the difference between software developers and IT staff. A software developer is an engineer; they are trained to design and build software. IT professionals are trained to install, manage, customize, and integrate software, but they are not trained to conceive, design, and build it. The best analogy is from the automotive industry: software engineers are like automotive engineers, the folks who design cars and motorcycles for manufacturers. IT pros are mechanics, the folks who repair, maintain, and sometimes modify the cars and motorcycles designed by automotive engineers. Software engineers generally go to college to learn engineering or computer science. IT staff may well have engineering degrees, but many are vocationally...
Read MoreDigital Editions and Portable News
I just returned from Publishing Expo 2012 in London, where I was interested (among many other things) to see what newspaper and magazine publishers were doing in the area of offline delivery, or content-to-go. Print has long had the advantage of being able to travel easily with the reader. So in the transition from print to digital delivery, the ability to save stories on a device for offline viewing (available when there is no Internet connection, such as in a subway or on an airplane) is still a necessary requirement. It’s worth mentioning that subway systems and airlines are already experimenting with wireless Internet, so “offline storage options” can be considered a transitional technology until the day, not too far off, when the Internet cloud will available almost everywhere. When that happens, offline portability of news will cease to matter. This is already a vision that companies like Microsoft and Google are touting for corporate information and office applications. But today I am interested in what publishers are doing with digital editions–the online version laid out more or less precisely like their print edition–and how many are moving toward tablet and mobile apps capable of storing articles on the device. Last week I received an email from Ziff-Davis, a reasonably forward-thinking magazine publisher, announcing that they were abandoning digital editions for one of the titles I subscribe to: “To ensure we focus our innovation on channels that have proven most useful for our readers, we will no longer be sending .pdf versions of CIO Insight, otherwise known as Digital Editions. We experimented with this over the last few months and have now decided to put it on hold. We expect you will continue to enjoy our always improving content through the major channels highlighted above.” Those “major channels” included their web site content and their tablet and mobile editions. In a recent post I wrote about how different media need to be supported by different interface models; online is a very different user experience from print, and just placing the print edition online (as a PDF) isn’t really a valid model for the way people want to consume articles online....
Read MoreWhy Photos are Critical to Online News
As newspapers make the transition from print to online, they need to understand the importance of adjusting their editorial style to fit the new medium. I should quote Marshall McLuhan, but years ago I worked with tech writer and information architect Freda Salatino, who used to say (in her Long Island accent), “When you create an online help system from a user guide, don’t just schlep the book online.” Like McLuhan, her point was that online is used differently from print, and that certainly holds true for news as well. The easiest and most important lesson is in how you use images. Print papers don’t put a photo with ever story. With online stories, photos should be the rule, not the exception. Online is now a multimedia experience. This is in part why forward-thinking news executives like John Paton issued Flip video cameras to all his journalists, and why every reporter in the DNAinfo newsroom carries a camera. With smartphones now boasting high-resolution cameras and high-def video, there is no longer an excuse for a journalist not carrying a camera in his or her pocket. Why can’t you ignore putting photos on the bulk of your stories? Here are a few good reasons: Every story is your home page—your front page. Unless you are a hugely trusted brand, up to 90% of your online traffic is coming from search engines. (Don’t believe it? See my previous post about what you can learn from site analytics and go check for yourself.) Even if you are a trusted brand, meaning that you have a huge number of repeat visitors to your home page, it still means that perhaps 50% of your traffic is coming from a search engine. This means that your readers are first seeing your site from the perspective of a story page. Would you ever have a front page with no photos? I don’t think so. There are also significant search engine optimization (SEO) benefits in putting images on every story. Search engines like Google give higher ranking to web pages with photos, as long as the photos are properly tagged with metadata (the title and alt tags...
Read MoreSite Analytics: Intelligence Gathering for News Sites
Analytics Overview Late last summer the good folks at MSN invited me to give a talk on “Conducting Effective Market Landscape Assessments and Intelligence Gathering” where I discussed techniques for gathering competitive intelligence for MSN.com. One of the important topics I covered was how analytics–research based on observational data gathering–is critical to understanding visitor and market behavior. There are actually a few types of analytics. Web Server Log Reports (site statistics) are the oldest form of analytics, typified by products like WebTrends and a host of Open Source products like AWStats. These systems report on the data collected in log files maintained by your webserver, logs that track the time and date stamp of every web page and every image served up by the webserver. Site stats deliver reports such as most popular pages on your site, top entry pages, top exit pages, overall pages served, and overall number of “hits” (the number of resources served by the webserver, now considered an almost meaningless metric, since these days a single web page with 4 javascript calls and 12 images represents 17 hits). Path Analysis is used to track every individual who comes to a site, and every page they visit. This type of analysis, performed by products like Adobe/Omniture SiteCatalyst and iMedia Analytics, collects a lot of data and delivers a lot of intelligence, including: heat maps, reports that tell you which links on any given page are getting the most clicks, page-dotting, the tracking of every variable in the visitor’s web site session, which can tell you things like which items they abandoned in their shopping cart, click-path analysis, or the most common paths that users are taking through your site, providing insights into things like user interface strengths and deficiencies, and real-time story trending, the ability to see almost instantly which of your stories is “going viral” and which are languishing. Another category is what I call Broad-spectrum External Analytics, which collect a certain amount of page data (generally less than the other methods, but still enough to deliver powerful reports), by adding a bit of code to your web page that sends data to an external, third...
Read MoreHow To Do SEO Right
In two previous posts I wrote about why you need to optimize for search engines and what that means. In this post I give a series of checklists for what editorial, marketing, and technology needs to do to boost readership using SEO. SEO Part 3: How To Do SEO Right SEO is often delegated to the technology team, with the instructions “just optimize the site for SEO.” There are certainly technology best practices in SEO, but they tend to be easily implemented by any reasonably good dev team. The bulk of SEO work is actually in marketing, content production, reporting, and analysis. You can’t just hand SEO over to developers expecting them to drive more search traffic to the site, or to magically raise the page rank. A lot of the responsibility belongs to marketing and editorial. Since this is a blog and not a book, I’ve broken out the “How to SEO” into three sets of simple checklists, for editorial, marketing, and technology: Editorial SEO Search engines use programs called “crawlers” or “robots” to analyze your site. These crawlers are not very smart; they don’t look for Pulitzer prize-winning stories. They only check for new pages, see what pages have been updated, and most important, they look for keywords and rank content by keyword relevance. Your stories have to be tagged; tags are your search keywords, and are important both for readers, who search using keywords, and for robots, who index you in a search engine using those same tags. Make sure that tags reflect actual page content. Remember all proper nouns (People, Places, Things, Events), synonyms, and even common permutations. Some clever taggers even include common misspellings (not necessarily a good idea when tags are prominently displayed in a list next to your story, like HuffPo does). Remember that keywords are the words a person might type into a search engine; don’t choose phrases no one would ever actually type, and don’t pick phrases that are popular but would cause them to be dismayed that they linked to you. So if the story isn’t really about Lady Gaga, don’t add her as a tag, even if it might...
Read MoreFrom Newspapers to Digital Media: Follow John Paton
I have to take a short break from my SEO series to comment on an article that appeared this past Saturday in the Irish Times: “Narrowing the gap between old and new media is the future.” This article compares and contrasts “old media traditionalist” Alan Crosbie, chairman of Thomas Crosbie Holdings (Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post) against “new media messiah” John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media (the second-largest U.S. media chain). The Irish Times article is unrelentingly harsh in its portrayal of Alan Crosbie, who does have a few legitimate reasons for his fear and loathing of new media and the Internet. After all, TCH hasn’t been that effective in tapping into digital revenue, and free online news without a revenue model can undermine the value of print newspapers. But Crosbie’s concerns seem to be more directed at preserving quality reporting and what he calls “provenance,” which I call the responsibility and accountability expected of journalists, especially in terms of unbiased reporting and fact-checking. It reminds me of the book by Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. In an interview on the PBS News Hour, Keen said: “The key argument is that the so-called ‘democratization’ of the Internet is actually undermining reliable information… with user-generated content, we’re actually doing away with information, high-quality information, … and replacing it with user-generated content, which is unreliable, inane, and often rather corrupt.” (18 September 2007) The Irish Times reporter Shane Hegarty goes on to extol the approach taken by John Paton, who has gained a reputation not only for embracing digital media, but for inviting the barbarians–citizen journalists–into the keep. Paton is a remarkable figure, and is a likely hero in the drama that pits traditional print against new media. His blog Digital First documents his progress in the turnaround of Journal Register Company (and now Digital First Media) over the past year, and provides candid, transparent insights into his thoughts and approach. It is a remarkable journey well worth reading by anyone in the newspaper industry. I very much admire Paton: his fearless dash into the digital world, his unflinching belief in online news revenue, his...
Read MoreWhat is SEO?
In my previous post I discussed why you need to optimize for search. In this next installment of the SEO series, I explain a bit about what SEO really is. SEO Part 2: So what is SEO? Search engine optimization is the art and science of making your web pages rank as high in the natural search rankings as possible. Google is the largest search engine, with Microsoft’s Bing a distant second. Your placement on a search engine, or “page rank,” is a complex algorithm generally based on these attributes: Age of site (time since the site was established) Number of hits to the site (overall site traffic) Popularity (number of unique visitors and repeat visitors) Number of inbound links (links to your site from other sites) Quality of inbound links (high page rank sites will increase your page rank; low page rank sites not so much) Keyword density (based on keyword relevance as discovered by search crawlers, aka robots) Secondary characteristics like media, type, source, and domain Page rank is a measurement of the relative importance of your site according to the search engines. Like the Richter scale, it is a logarithmic scale, meaning that a rank of 5 is ten times higher than a rank of 4. For example, here are the page ranks of several major news sites: The New York Times: 9 The Wall Street Journal: 8 The Guardian: 7 Irish Independent: 7 The top 100 bloggers range from page rank 8 for blogs like The Huffington Post, Gawker, and The Onion (all 3 use a blogging platform for their CMS and are considered blogs) to page rank 6 for today’s #100 spot, a popular fashion blog. These are updated daily on http://technorati.com/blogs/top100. Secondary characteristics are very important, and include: Media: Search engines like rich media, especially video. As we’ll discuss in an upcoming posting, video and images can increase your “Google juice.” Type: News itself gets special treatment in a search engine; blogs and social networking also increase Google juice. Source: Official news agency sites (especially government and community sites) typically get higher rankings as trusted sources. Domain: Your domain name (including your subdomain and...
Read MoreSEO and SEM for News
In Blogging Writes thus far I have discussed the state of the newspaper industry, and started to present some of the innate strengths that the industry can leverage in order to survive. But I also want to dedicate a good few postings to very practical matters, balancing between those that drive news revenue and those that drive visitor traffic and reader engagement. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and its paid counterpart, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), are critical for the success of a news site. They are one of the primary drivers of online traffic (circulation). No matter how good the editorial product, word-of-mouth viral growth will always need a boost from SEO. There are many web sites that discuss SEO, and there are many especially bad how-to sites (based more on myths and just plain voodoo than on fact). As an SEO expert it’s tempting to write about SEO generically and try to dispel some of the common misconceptions, but that’s likely to drive some controversy and confuse the point of this blog. Instead, I’m going to focus on the art and science of SEO as it relates specifically to the news industry. This will be a multi-part series, covering the following topics: Why optimize for search? What is SEO? How to SEO The Art of Tagging Photos, Video, and Google Juice Paying for Clicks: Search Engine Marketing Part 1: Why optimize for search? Search, the act of looking something up on a search engine like Google or Bing, ranks second to email use as the most popular activity online. Over 50% of Internet users perform a search on a typical day. In fact, search is well ahead of other popular internet activities, such as checking the news, which 39% of internet users do on a typical day, or checking the weather, which 30% do on a typical day. (source: Jim Jansen, Pew Research/Internet and American Life Project, 2010, based on original research by Deborah Fallows, PhD. ) Why is this relevant to news? Search has become increasingly important as the starting point for news consumption. As early as 2010 the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism reported: “Younger generations especially begin their...
Read MoreTrusted Advertising: The Value of Newspaper Web Sites
In 2010 comShare published a study titled “Site Matters: The Value of Local Newspaper Web sites” (sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America, representing some 2000 US newspapers) that “measured consumer attitudes and behaviors regarding local newspaper Web sites and content compared with other online sources of local news and information.” While the study discussed which types of online content consumers most trusted for local information, one remarkable fact emerged that bears discussion in this blog: Newspaper web sites ranked highest in terms of the credibility and trustworthiness of their advertising. This is an important fact missed by many newspapers; the fact that their web sites are more capable of selling than any other local sites. Someone please alert the newspaper sales department! Newspapers are not only themselves trusted brands, as discussed in my previous post. They are also purveyors of trust: some of the faith that people have in the reliability of local news rubs off on the newspaper’s advertising as well. Place an ad in your newspaper’s web site and people will more likely believe the message. When you add to this the fact that local news consumers are also well-qualified leads–they live, work, and make purchase decisions in the same market area as the newspaper advertiser, you start to realize the extremely high value of newspaper advertising. In other words, newspaper consumers are also, demographically, the most likely consumers of the advertiser’s goods and services. It is great news for newspapers that their web sites are the most trusted sources of advertising. But they now need to (1) market this message to their advertisers, (2) position themselves as a high-end advertising solution, and (3) price themselves accordingly. This means using a “page sponsorship” model, not cheap banner ads. Sponsorship is an old and well-tested model. Newspaper web sites can charge advertisers a fixed fee, not based on ad impressions, but on visibility to the highly qualified local consumer community, for a range of sponsorship placements. These placements can be anything from a logo appearing beside the mast, to co-branding the daily email newsletter, to display ads that follow standard IAB banner sizes but are not sold by ad impressions. Sponsorship ads...
Read MoreCapitalizing on News Assets
Noted journalist Bob Garfield is the author of The Chaos Scenario, a 2009 book about the collapse of traditional media. Garfield was recently interviewed by Peter Conti, EVP of Borrell Associates, an advertising and media industry research and consulting firm. (Garfield will be presenting the keynote address at Borrell’s annual Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City.) The interview, available on YouTube, is titled ‘The future isn’t in hyper-local news’ (an admittedly disheartening title for those of us in the local news industry). Mr. Garfield says: “The combination of incredible fragmentation, which limits your audience size, and the inexorable downward trajectory of advertising prices, means that nobody, nobody is going to have the critical mass to professionally and profitably deliver news. In my opinion, the future isn’t in hyperlocal per se, as a standalone operation. In my opinion, weirdly, the answer is going to be in consolidation. I believe that in every market, the winner will be the entity, whether it’s a local TV station, a public radio station, a local newspaper, a series of hyperlocal sites banded together, or some parties as yet unthought of, to form strategic relationships for content and for revenue, with other players in that market. And the combination of organizations that get there first, and create revenue streams while simultaneously becoming the central hub for news and information culture, in their communities, they win, they scoop the pot, and everybody else just disappears. Weirdly, paradoxically, this vast, vast fragmentation is going to lead to consolidation, and I believe, in market after market after market, winner takes all.” First, the assumption that advertising prices are in a downward trajectory isn’t entirely true. Banner advertising is certainly in a downward trajectory, as “banner blindness” and poor click-through rates show it to be ineffective advertising. But advertising models that pay off remain quite valuable to businesses. The winner in a news catchment area needs to be offering effective advertising, the kind that reliably and measurably delivers customers. Second, while Garfield speaks about markets being too fragmented to support hyperlocal news, he also notes that advertising will coalesce around one entity (local TV, public radio, or the local newspaper) that wins all the marbles. In this...
Read MoreWhere Did Newspapers Go Wrong?
About a decade ago, newspaper agencies began to lose sight of what advertisers were asking for, and at the same time they failed to monetize valuable online content, focusing almost wholly on one of the worst forms of online advertising: banner ads. They also ceded revenue from areas like classifieds and job postings to Internet competitors, and missed new online opportunities in areas like coupons, business directories, video infomercials, and email direct marketing. It’s little wonder then that newspaper revenues are shrinking. The question persists, how is it that Silicon Valley 20-somethings found it so easy to eat the newspaper industry’s lunch? Why was the industry so slow to adapt? This blog is about forward-thinking solutions, so I am not eager to dwell on what has already happened. The lunch has been eaten; it’s time to get a new one. Hindsight, as Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his essay “Connecting the Dots,” is subject to “’creeping determinism’–the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable.” (Although, dear reader, I do look forward to your comments in this regard.) Let’s just say for now that newspapers were neither staffed nor prepared to embrace digital innovation. But that time has passed, and digital opportunity is readily available, and comparatively inexpensive, to whose who reach for it. It’s instructive to look at the habits of advertisers, since advertising represents 50% to 75% of a newspaper’s overall revenue. While newspaper sales departments are still trying to sell print ads, local business advertisers have moved on to new and better ways to connect with their customers: Facebook business pages, YouTube branded channels, mobile business apps, email campaigns, online coupons, and much more, almost all of it online. Advertisers are spending money; record amounts of it. In fact, online ad spending has finally surpassed print ad spending. Just not at the newspaper. This has to change. It’s not an inevitable trend, it’s a blind spot that must be addressed. The 2012 projections are now in, following a substantial rise in 2011: “US online ad spending will post growth well above 20% again this year to reach nearly $40 billion, eMarketer estimates, as the...
Read MoreThe Fall of the Newspaper
For generations, local businesses relied on newspapers as the mainstay of their advertising budgets. In fact, until 1992, when TV and cable overtook them, newspapers were by far the largest source for overall US advertising spending, representing 37% in 1949 and dropping steadily to under 15% in 2008. And with that, the pundits began sounding the death knell for newspapers. Advertising Media Share chart by Martin C. Langeveld But for small and mid-size businesses, who cater to a more geographically local market, local newspapers continued to linger on as a critical source for advertising. After all, local news readers are well-qualified, targeted local business customers. The person reading the news is more likely to clip a coupon, read about your business, and walk into your store. Today, the local paper is itself no longer the primary focus of local business advertising spend. Newspaper agencies have seen their profits eroded as advertisers move away from traditional print advertising in favor of online, mobile, and social media. (In upcoming posts I’ll discuss where that ad spending has headed, and what newspapers can do to survive and even flourish in the digital age.) According to a 2010 report from Pew Research and the American Society of News Editors: “…the leaders of America’s newsrooms are nonetheless worried about the future. Fewer than half of all those surveyed are confident their operations will survive another 10 years—not without significant new sources of revenue. Nearly a third believe their operations are at risk in just five years or less. And many blame the problems not on the inevitable effect of technology but on their industry’s missed opportunities.” Newspaper Association of America print and online ad revenue chart 2010 With print revenue dropping, and online revenues almost flat, newspapers indeed seem to be headed for extinction. Hundreds of fine papers, large and small, have vanished in the past few years. The search for profitable models continues. Millions of dollars worth of “news experiments” have been funded by the likes of the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. A 2010 Pew Research report states: “Jan Schaffer of J-Lab estimated that since 2006, more than $141 million in...
Read MoreWhy Blogging Writes?
When I first conceived of this blog I had intended to write about the remarkable technical work that rocketed DNAinfo.com, the hyperlocal Manhattan news site, from 0 to 1.2 million visitors/month in about 18 months–something of a record in a town known for the competitiveness of its news outlets. (Here’s a link to an article that gives context for how my alma mater is faring in the battle for New York.) I can’t lay claim to the real driver of DNAinfo’s success–the remarkable editorial quality that made it so popular among New Yorkers. For that I have to credit the editorial staff, especially Leela De Kretser, who now runs the show. But like a proud father I had “bragging rights” to the technology that enabled that content. After all, while content is king, you can’t leave orbit without a rocket ship. (And while I may mix metaphors on occasion, I do know how to build those web-enabled rocket ships.) Technology almost always serves a greater business purpose. I’ve been a consultant to the Fortune 1000 for many years, and I’ve always told my clients that, before we embark upon a web or mobile project, we first need to look at the business case. We have to make sure we are solving the right problem; too many projects are completed successfully yet without actually making the business more successful. So I decided to turn that business thinking to the newspaper industry, and last year I co-founded iMedia Revenue in order to pursue not just technology, but to solve the real problems faced by struggling newspapers who must learn to think like digital media outlets (or face extinction). Blogging Writes is therefore a business blog, about the news industry, for the news industry. Technology is just one important component. What I propose are largely online (web, mobile, tablet) solutions, so whether you are an online news outlet looking to support yourself with online revenue, or a print newspaper looking to survive in the digital age, you’ll find more than valuable insights in this blog: you’ll find real actionable solutions. In Blogging Writes we’ll look at trends, business drivers, revenue models, and the technologies...
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