Category Archives: newspapers

New media valuations metrics

September 26, 2010 – 5:18 pm

TweetOn September 22, the Norwegian media group Schibsted announced a transaction to make it the sole owner of the French free classifieds site LeBonCoin.fr. The valuation for the deal? €400m ($540m). I must admit it : I fell from my chair(*). Not that I look down at Le Bon Coin, au contraire. In a previous [...]

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Too many journalists ?

July 11, 2010 – 9:37 am

TweetAn unpleasant question: Do we have an excess of daily press journalists? And, if so, how does the surfeit vary from country to country? Two years ago, Earl Wilkinson, the managing director of the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA), produced a chart showing how the growth in the number of journalists employed by US dailies [...]

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Le Monde’s escape velocity

June 27, 2010 – 4:17 pm

TweetIn rocket scientist parlance, escape velocity is the speed needed to break free from Earth’s gravitational field. Last Friday, by an overwhelming majority, Le Monde’s staff voted to escape the black hole of French politics — or, at least, to give their paper the  best chance to do so. Disassembling the utterly complex chain of [...]

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Le Monde on The Brink

June 20, 2010 – 11:19 pm

TweetWithin two weeks, the French newspaper Le Monde will run out of cash. By this Monday at noon, candidates to the takeover of the most prestigious French daily will have disclosed their offers. By June 28, the staff will vote and make the final decision for the fate of the 66 years-old paper. More importantly, [...]

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Managing the magazine component of newspapers

March 21, 2010 – 8:42 pm

TweetThis is the second part of a series about the evolution of print media. Part I here. A few years ago, the founder of the French daily Liberation was asked what he would do if he had unlimited resources to run his paper: “I would do a magazine everyday”, he said. During the late 80′s, [...]

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Euthanazing the paper? Not yet.

March 14, 2010 – 6:10 pm

TweetI 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 [...]

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The 2010 Media Watch List

January 3, 2010 – 6:22 pm

TweetNo 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 [...]

Edited by Frédéric Filloux | Also posted in advertising, magazines, mobile internet, online publishing | Tagged , | Comments (13)

Young readers: already hooked on subsidies

November 15, 2009 – 6:49 pm

TweetI 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 [...]

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Negative-sum games

November 9, 2009 – 9:01 am

TweetAs 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: [...]

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The Cash Is In The Topics

October 12, 2009 – 5:05 pm

TweetAll 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 [...]

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