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The Business of Digital Journalism

Download the full report "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism"as a complete PDF.

May 10, 2011 10:00 AM
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

A report from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism (PDF)

Introduction

Chapter One News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism

Chapter Two Traffic Patterns: Why Big Audiences Aren’t Always Profitable

Chapter Three Local and Niche Sites: The Advantages of Being Small

Chapter Four The New New Media: Mobile, Video, and Other Emerging Platforms

Chapter...
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May 10, 2011 12:13 AM
Introduction

The story so far: what we know about the business of digital journalism
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
Few news organizations can match the setting of The Miami Herald. The paper’s headquarters is perched on the edge of Biscayne Bay, offering sweeping views of the islands that buffer the city of Miami from the Atlantic Ocean. Pelicans and gulls float near the building; colorful cruise ships ply the waters a few miles away.

And Miami Herald executives...
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May 10, 2011 12:12 AM
Chapter One: News From Everywhere

The economics of digital journalism
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
In early 2005, a researcher at the Poynter Institute published a column that was instantaneously read and—by many—misunderstood.

Rick Edmonds, who studies the financial side of the news business for Poynter’s website, speculated about how long it would take for online newspaper revenue to match the dollars brought in by the print side. He estimated that digital ads accounted...
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May 10, 2011 12:11 AM
Chapter Two: Traffic Patterns

Why big audiences aren’t always profitable
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
At first glance, the numbers don’t seem to add up: The New York Times has more than 30 million online readers and weekday circulation of less than 900,000 newspapers. Yet the print edition still accounts for more than 80 percent of the Times’s revenue. A broader recent study revealed the same phenomenon: It showed that the Internet occupied 28...
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May 10, 2011 12:10 AM
Chapter Three: Local and Niche Sites

The advantages of being small
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
TBD.com went out with a whimper, not a bang. In February 2011, just six months after going live, the Washington, D.C., area’s high-profile experiment in local online journalism announced that it would lay off half of its editorial staff, detach its site from its TV-station partner, and reinvent itself as a culture-and-lifestyle site. Many of those who did stay...
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May 10, 2011 12:09 AM
Chapter Four: The New New Media

Mobile, video, and other emerging platforms
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
News organizations can be forgiven for feeling that they’re in an endless cycle of Whac-A-Mole.

They’ve had fifteen years to get onto the Internet, and for much of that time the experience was limited largely to words and photos on a web page, accessed on a personal computer. But more recently, journalism has been blessed and bedeviled by a...
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May 10, 2011 12:08 AM
Chapter Five: Paywalls

The price tag for information
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves

“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away.... Each round of new devices makes the tension worse,...
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May 10, 2011 12:07 AM
Chapter Six: Aggregation

‘Shameless’—and essential
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
A group of middle school students at Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Academy of Arts and Letters got a special treat one March afternoon in 2011. Just five weeks after the announcement of the $315 million deal in which AOL acquired The Huffington Post, AOL’s chief executive, Tim Armstrong, and Arianna Huffington, HuffPost’s co-founder, came to the school to teach a...
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May 10, 2011 12:06 AM
Chapter Seven: Dollars and Dimes

The new costs of doing business
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
Journalism is expensive and good journalism especially so, but the newsroom usually is not the costliest part of running a news organization. The Commerce Department has estimated that printing and delivery account for up to 40 percent of a newspaper’s costs; a 2007 study found that the newsroom accounts for only about 15 percent of a newspaper’s expenses. (One...
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May 10, 2011 12:06 AM
Chapter Eight: New Users, New Revenue

Alternative ways to make money
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves

“The basic point about the Web is that it is not an advertising medium, the Web is not a selling medium, it is a buying medium. It is user-controlled.” —Jakob Nielsen, web usability expert, 1998

The journalism business these days often seems like a strange new world. As Jack Sweeney, who has been the publisher of the Houston Chronicle...
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May 10, 2011 12:05 AM
Chapter Nine: Managing Digital

Audience, data, and dollars
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
Although all digital news organizations live in a brutally competitive environment, some companies do much better than others because their managers respond more deftly to opportunities.

Arianna Huffington is in that category, and The Huffington Post’s growth in audience and influence is an example of a sustained idea and management attention. The venture capitalist Eric Hippeau was an early...
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May 10, 2011 12:04 AM
Conclusion

Lessons, takeaways, and bullet points
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
"Here’s the problem: Journalists just don’t understand their business.”

That’s the diagnosis from Randall Rothenberg, a former New York Times media reporter who heads the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group representing publishers and marketers.

Whether or not you agree with his sweeping characterization, it’s clear that many sectors of the traditional news industry have been slow to embrace changes...
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May 10, 2011 12:03 AM
Executive Summary

By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
Chapter One

News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism

Large-scale competitive and economic forces are confronting news organizations, old and new. This chapter identifies sixteen features of the digital world that are transforming the business of news, including changes in audience, aggregation, distribution, customer experience, cost structure, innovation cycles, and advertising.

• Companies discussed: McClatchy, The Huffington Post, The...
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May 10, 2011 12:02 AM
Acknowledgements and Credits

For "The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism"
By Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave, and Lucas Graves
Acknowledgements

We owe a great debt to many people who contributed to this report. While we can’t name them all here, we wish to thank some of those most deeply involved. Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia’s Journalism School, hatched the idea for the report and has consistently guided our efforts with wisdom and skill. Jeffrey Frank and Marcia Kramer carefully...
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