I love this year-old Warren Buffet quote: “If Mr. Gutenberg had come up with the Internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century, and for 400 years we had used the Internet for news and all types of entertainment and all kinds of everything else, and I came along one day and [...]
January 3, 2010 – 6:22 pm
No predictions, just a few of many hot topics for the newborn year.
Paywalls. 2010 could see a significant number of newspapers jumping into the paid-for option. Among the conditions to be met:
- Grouping around a toll collector. It could be Journalism Online in the US, a big media group in Europe, or even Google [...]
November 15, 2009 – 6:49 pm
I love my country. Among many things, I enjoy its business attitude. In the media sector, it is an unabashed mixture of entrepreneurship, bold risk-taking and fearless independence. You can’t spend a week here without someone telling you : “Hey, you know what? We’re about to send some of our journalists, paid by the Ministry [...]
November 9, 2009 – 9:01 am
As if current economic conditions weren’t dire enough, several forces conspire to push the media sector’s financial performance further downward. These factors are an obsession with market share, price wars, and first movers’ ability to set the tone, often for the worse.
Take the iPhone application market as an example. At first, publishers were elated: [...]
October 12, 2009 – 5:05 pm
All conversations I keep having about the economics of a news web sites revolve around two key ideas: how to increase both the duration and the depth of a visit. In this respect, much work remains. For August 2009, here are the numbers of page views, as measured by Nielsen Net Ratings on the French [...]
October 5, 2009 – 3:47 am
“Free”, as a business model, is a figment of the imagination. In itself, “Free” is not a business model, it is only a component of broader revenue system. Unlike Chris Anderson, author of the book “Free” ($18.00) — a bestseller not a bestfreebie — I happened to actually practice the free “model”. Between 2002 and [...]
September 20, 2009 – 11:08 am
Let’s start with a counterintuitive move: At a time when, all over the world, publishers are tired of the red-ink their printing plans produce and dream of dumping the dinosaurs, the historic French daily Le Figaro fires up this Monday a brand new €80M printing facility to launch a redesigned edition. Behind this apparently irrational [...]
September 13, 2009 – 8:43 pm
An idea is gaining momentum: online readers must open their wallet. In recent weeks, several suggestions for moving from wish to implementation have popped up. The latest one comes from Google. The company proposes to give a boost to its not-so-successful Checkout service by harnessing it to online newspapers interests. Quite a change here. Only [...]
August 31, 2009 – 8:10 am
Here is the Indian newspapers price problem: at the kiosk, you face a multitude of titles (roughly 4700 dailies across the country) including about 60 in English. Prices range from 1 to 3 rupees ($0.02 to $0.06). Even by Indian standards those are untenable rates: they cover only about 10% of variable costs. Finnish newsprint [...]
August 23, 2009 – 9:47 am
In today’s context of massive revenue depletion, everyone (almost) agrees on one thing: digital media revenue sources will have to be diversified. There is no magic bullet, no dominant model that will guarantee, by itself, a sustainable revenue stream. Time to think the hybrid way. Free will coexist with paid-for, different users (occasional vs. intensive) [...]
A well-established brand is supposed to be a key asset. Everybody keeps dreaming of building a long-lasting brand with lots of positive attributes. How true is it for media ? In the rapidly changing environment, in the massive shift towards electronic media (and the vaporization of value that goes along with it), how relevant is [...]
Updtated with a video on PolitiFact Guide to Fact-checking
The idea for this column came to me last March; I was flying back from Stockholm. Schibsted, the Norwegian media group I work for, had asked me to be part of the jury for its yearly Schibsted Journalism Award. I was both honored and curious to be [...]
“If they start making products people don’t want, and start losing users, then Apple’s strategy will run into problems.” You can see the full NYT Business section story here. My wife and I love to read the papers in the morning. French-born, we still marvel at this American icon: the newspaper route, the nice deliveryman [...]
From multimedia productions, to Computer Assisted Reporting
Last Thursday, I presented a series of great news related multimedia productions before a group of students of the Sciences Politiques School of Journalism where I happen to have a small gig. I was curious to see their reactions. Too often, journalism students are mostly interested in the pursuit [...]
22% of Internet users in the United States said they stopped their subscription to a printed newspaper or a magazine. Why? Because they could access the same content online, according to a study released last week by the Center for the Digital Future. And it was only one in a string of bad news for [...]
