Tags

Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Business of News

1. September 14, 2011 10:28 AM

   Adventures With E-books, Kindle Single Edition

   By Felix Salmon

   Ryan Avent’s 90-page Kindle single, The Gated City, is a bargain at $1.99. It was produced in close consultation with the Kindle Singles editor, David Blum — the gatekeeper who determines what gets chosen to be a Kindle Single, and what gets relegated to the long tail of Kindle Direct Publishing. We’re running a great excerpt of Ryan’s book at...

   Continue reading
2. September 21, 2011 06:53 PM

   Audit Notes: Bloomberg Headlines, Bad Ad News, Wall Street Protests

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Audit has a love-hate reading relationship with Bloomberg News's wacky headlines. Here are a few we've flagged over the years: Savannah Cries Over Bicycle Lost After Subprime Reset Profit `Not Satanic,’ Barclays Says, After Goldman Invokes Jesus Think About Sin When Bonuses Are Revealed Marijuana-Like High Helps Ex-Trashman’s Syn Battle Solid Sex Darth Wall Street Destroying Debtors With Credit-Default...

   Continue reading
3. December 23, 2011 05:05 PM

   Audit Notes: Newsstand Success, Paywalls and Tacos, WSJ on Debt Collectors

   By Ryan Chittum

   How much has Apple's Newsstand increased sales of magazine apps. It's hard to say, but Peter Kafka posts a chart showing Popular Science, at least, has clearly benefited: That spike toward the end coincides with the launch of Newsstand, which looks to have sent Popular Science app subscriptions roughly a quarter to a third above the trendline. As it stands,...

   Continue reading
4. October 20, 2011 10:26 PM

   Audit Notes: Paying for Newspapers Edition

   By Ryan Chittum

   I may have spoken too soon when I said to expect The New York Times's paid subscription growth rate to continue to decline this quarter. Poynter's Jeff Sonderman reports that Newsstand, the long-awaited feature in Apple's newly released operating system for iPhones and iPads is causing explosive growth in news app downloads. A stunning 1.8 million iPhone users downloaded NYT's...

   Continue reading
5. October 28, 2011 07:39 PM

   Audit Notes: The Occupy-Rwanda Connection, Reckless Blame, Jarvis For Dummies

   By Ryan Chittum

   Speaking of Fort Smith's City Wire, the website reports on a talk by former Alltel CEO Scott Ford to the local Chamber of Commerce. Ford formed a coffee company that does business in Rwanda. That might at least begin to attempt to explain why he compares the Occupy movement to the genocidaires in Rwanda: Ford compared the “We are the...

   Continue reading
6. September 30, 2011 09:32 AM

   Business Insider and Over-Aggregation

   By Felix Salmon

   Henry Blodget has a long and detailed response to Marco Arment, which is fascinating to anybody interested in the nuts and bolts behind a modern for-profit blog. If you boil Blodget’s 4,000 words down to a single idea, it’s basically this: over-aggregation. Now the concept of over-aggregation is not well defined, and means different things to different people. To Ryan...

   Continue reading
7. August 15, 2011 02:22 PM

   How the NYT Paywall Is Working

   By Felix Salmon

   When I wrote about the success of the NYT paywall last month, I got a lot of pushback in the comments and on Twitter. Here’s a sample: “The fact people pay speaks more people’s average techno-illiteracy/laziness about how to change a link address in their browser than anything else.” “Add ?ref=fb to the base link of any NYT article...

   Continue reading
8. February 23, 2012 07:56 PM

   Matter’s Vision for Long-form Journalism

   By Felix Salmon

   Yesterday morning, a very exciting new journalism project was launched on Kickstarter. It’s called Matter, and it’s going to be home to long-form investigative narrative journalism about science and technology. “No cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists,” they promise. “Just one unmissable story.” They hit a nerve: as I write this, some 31 hours after the...

   Continue reading
9. November 17, 2011 02:28 PM

   Nonprofit News and the Tax Man

   The IRS questions whether journalism startups qualify for tax-exempt status

   By Ryan Chittum

   The future of nonprofit news organizations has hit an unexpected roadblock in the agency that determines their tax-exempt status: The Internal Revenue Service. Nonprofit news organizations applying for tax-exempt status are running into long delays as the IRS bundles them together as “precedential” and studies whether they qualify for the status under 501(c)(3). While animal protection and “fostering national or...

   Continue reading
10. January 17, 2012 01:21 PM

    Paywalls: Maybe Not So Complicated After All

    Thinking over Clay Shirky's piece on the success of the NYT model

    By Ryan Chittum

    Clay Shirky, a leading paywall skeptic, deserves credit for grappling with what is now generally conceded to be the clear success of The New York Times's digital pay model. Shirky makes the counterintuitive argument that NYT’s success, coupled with the supposed failure of the Times of London own paywall, "are a blow to the idea that online news can be...

    Continue reading
11. July 22, 2011 08:14 PM

    The NYT Paywall Is Out of the Gate Fast

    281,000 paying digital subscribers in three months show readers will pay for quality news

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Wall Street Journal has long had a successful online paywall. The Financial Times has one, too. We can confidently say now that The New York Times will be the third major newspaper success. The Times Company as a whole had poor second-quarter earnings yesterday, with print ads continuing to decline and digital ads weighed down by a terrible performance...

    Continue reading
12. June 20, 2011 11:23 AM

    The Hamster Wheel and the AOL Way

    By Ryan Chittum

    Audit Chief Dean Starkman's "Hamster Wheel" piece has now been enshrined in the lexicon of the bureaucracy with the release of the FCC's big report on "The Information Needs of Communities." But, you know, the big wheel keeps on turnin', and though periodically hamsters tire and fly off into the wood shavings, they're replaced by fresh hamsters from whom at...

    Continue reading
13. February 1, 2012 06:41 PM

    The Old-School Value of Facebook

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times's curtain-raiser on the Facebook IPO this morning asks, "Personal Data’s Value? Facebook Is Set to Find Out." But is that really what Facebook is set to find out? The Times says about all this private data: "It is a siren to advertisers hoping to leverage that information to match their ads with the right audience." You...

    Continue reading
14. August 15, 2011 02:32 PM

    Why the NYT Paywall Isn’t Like the FT’s

    By Felix Salmon

    Fred Wilson has nice things to say about my analysis of the NYT paywall—thanks, Fred!—but it’s worth teasing out one area where he and I might differ. Fred says that the NYT “went with the FT’s model”, and I’ve also heard privately from another person making an impassioned case that the NYT and FT models are basically the same. But...

    Continue reading