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Economics Media

Beating a dead horse: another post about newspaper economics

I promised myself I would not step into the latest gnashing of teeth over the future of corporate media, but here I am. About a week ago, David Simon (“creator of The Wire and Treme“), wrote this in the online Columbia Journalism Review: It’s grievous what is happening to regional newspapers, especially. But the whole […]

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Economics Media

Online Revenue Cannot Rescue Newspaper Biz Model

Over the last seven years, for each dollar added to online revenue, the WaPo lost five dollars on print. During that time, the Post has lost $88m of print ad revenue and it improved its online business by only $18m. This leads us to a key realization, a sobering one: there is no hope current online […]

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Economics Media MemeBusting

MythBusters: Subscriptions Don’t Cover Salaries

The money quote from Hal Varian’s presentation to the Federal Trade Commission, according to TechCrunch, was this: “newspapers have never made much money from news.” But for me, the kicker is this data point from slide #3: Subscriptions account for 3% of revenue on average