Tag Archives: Business

Nieman: How the FT’s business model is more online retailer than publisher

Fascinating article on Nieman Journalism Lab from Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics, looking at how the Financial Times, its website and its business model take inspiration from internet retail and not publishing.

Internet retailing — think Amazon — seems like a very different business than publishing. In the endlessly measurable digital age, though, the parallels are striking. It’s not in what you are selling – books, electronics, or news stories – it’s what you know about your customers, their habits and wants.

(…) In addition, analytics support the FT’s eight-member strategic sales team as it customises marketing approaches for firms and their agencies. Grimshaw says that by early 2011, advertisers themselves will get some access to FT audience data.

Full post on Nieman Journalism Lab at this link…

News Corp gives to Republicans, but who’s giving what to Democrats exactly?

Responding to News Corporation’s donation of $1 million to the Republican Governors Association in the US announced earlier this week, the Business Media Institute (BMI) reports on figures released by the OpenSecrets website that show significant political donations to the Democrats from other media organisations.

Delving into the numbers, the BMI looks at who’s donating what and where, including stats on News Corp.’s previous donations to the Democrats – asking if those criticising the corporation for this latest sum are missing out some vital, balancing figures.

Full story on Business and Media Institute website at this link…

Arkansas Business: US TV journalists fired over YouTube news spoofs

Arkansas Business has the story on four employees – three reporters and a photographer – at Central Arkansas TV station KARK, who have been fired after posting two spoof behind-the-scenes videos of life in their newsroom.

The “profanity-laden” videos have since been removed from YouTube, but Arksanas Business has one at this link.

Full story on Journalism in the Americas at this link…

Next Generation Journalist: the portfolio career

This series of 10 moneymaking tips for journalists began on Adam Westbrook’s blog, but continues exclusively on Journalism.co.uk from today.

Adam’s e-book, Next Generation Journalist: 10 New Ways to Make Money in Journalism is on sale now.

09. the portfolio career

Here’s a key thing about the Next Generation Journalist which separates them from the rest of the crowd: they have more than one stream of income.

This is a new way of adapting to freelancing life in the 21st century, where journalists need to be more than a sole traders pitching ideas to every editor in town. They should be their own business, with their own brand and a multitude of revenue streams.

The Portfolio Career, or as some call it in other fields the Renaissance Career, was much more difficult before the internet. The web makes it easier and cheaper both to set up a business and to maintain more than one. The web has also made it easier to develop a passive income: the right business ideas can bring in money without a proportional amount of work.

A portfolio career is a great option for journalists because it enables us to use our different skills in different ways. I know radio newsreaders who have a sideline doing voice over work, a reporter who designs websites in her spare time; there are journalists who teach, train, lecture and sell stuff online. You can play at Mr. Bet casino online at the link on your phone. To do this you will need to download and install the application on your phone. This format has all the same bonuses, promotions, offers and games as the regular version. Installing the Mr Bet casino app on your phone is completely free.

The portfolio career…

  • provides you with more than one revenue stream, protecting you from unemployment or a quiet month
  • allows you to pursue several passions at the same time
  • is now easier than ever thanks to the internet

To make this work you’ll need a good brand and a good portfolio presence on the web, two things covered in detail in Next Generation Journalist.

It’s something young people are already familiar with. A survey called Creative Graduates, Creative Futures published in January 2010 questioned 3,500 UK students on creative or media courses: 48% of them had already developed a portfolio career, while studying!

Those who do it say it’s very fulfilling. Nick Williams is a London based career coach who helps people develop their own portfolio careers. “We can design our portfolio life to give us space and time in which to reflect” he says “and in which to start developing new projects, products and services.”

To find out more about Next Generation Journalist: 10 New Ways to Make Money in Journalism – click here.

Radio 4: Peter Day on business media’s struggle for survival

Last week’s Radio 4 In Business programme looked at business newspapers and how some of the world’s best known-brands are struggling to compete with online rivals and in the face of the economic downturn.

Well worth a listen at this link, it includes interview with representatives from the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, Bloomberg and Bloomberg Business Week.

FT.com: Thomson Reuters’ video product Insider to launch on 11 May

Thomson Reuters is planning to launch a series of new web products and overhaul its markets division as part of plans to streamline the company and reach growing audiences of younger, web-savvy readers and smaller business customers.

Among the developments:

  • An “enterprise platform” offering faster delivery of data to clients and online training and customer service support to smaller customers;
  • The launch of online video product Insider on May 11, which it has been testing since last year;
  • A new desktop platform, Eikon, to launch in autumn, offering a wider range of data and personalisation features.

Full story at this link…

Advertising Age: US newspapers cut 109,500 jobs in past five years

Advertising Age’s article from earlier this week on the difficulties faced by media advertising staff making the transition from selling print space to going digital is worth a read – not least for the statistics it offers on media job cuts in the US:

Between January 2005 and January 2010, newspapers eliminated 109,500 jobs and magazines shed 19,400, according to an Ad Age DataCenter analysis of Bureau of Labour Statistics’ jobs data. During that same period, jobs at internet media companies, portals and search engines grew by 18,300.

Full story at this link…

Must-read: PEJ’s annual State of the News Media report goes live

Each year the US Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) produces a report on the State of the News Media, aggregating other reports on what has happened to news organisations during the previous 12 months and providing its own research into what lies ahead.

The 2010 report weighs in on paywalls, and why there’s still a “hill to climb”; the increasingly niche-focus of both traditional news organisations and new online-only players; and features a special report on the state of community media or citizen journalism projects.

It’s an incredibly thorough survey – featuring figures on changes in advertising spend across all sectors and analysis of news sites’ traffic figures – and is best read in full at this link.

Some highlight quotes:

Advertising:

  • 79 per cent of those surveyed said they had never or rarely clicked on an online ad.

News content:

  • “When it comes to audience numbers online, traditional media content still prevails, which means the cutbacks in old media heavily impact what the public is learning through the new.”
  • Online news coverage is still geared towards breaking news. New technologies for live reporting can provide a less vetted version of releases/press conferences;
  • BUT: “While technology makes it easier for citizens to participate, it is also giving newsmakers more influence over the first impression the public receives.”
  • News organisations are becoming disseminators rather than gatherers of news, and becoming more reactive than proactive.

Social media:

  • Eventually, the news operations that develop social networking strategies and distribution mechanisms well might be able to convince advertisers that they have special access to attractive news consumers – especially those who influence the tastes of others;
  • Blogging, amongst news consumers, is declining in frequency;
  • 80 per cent of links from blogs and social media sites studied are to US legacy media.

Niche news:

  • “Old media are trying to imagine the new smaller newsroom of the future in the relic of their old ones. New media are imagining the new newsroom from a blank slate.”
  • “Online, it is becoming increasingly clear, consumers are not seeking out news organisations for their full news agenda.”

More on the report’s take on niche news at this link…

TheBusinessDesk expands with iPhone app for regional business news

Regional business news network TheBusinessDesk.com has launched a free-to-download iPhone app.

The smartphone application will complement the network’s three websites, which cover the north west, Yorkshire and West Midlands. To use the app, readers will have to be registered on one of the three sites.

“Having built up more than 35,000 registered users across our sites, it is important that we continue to innovate and make it as easy as possible for our users to access up to the minute regional news whether in the office or out and about,” says Chris Barry, north west editor of TheBusinessDesk.com, in a story on the site (registration required).

Launches for Blackberry handsets and other mobile apps are planned.

What’s the average cost of a news article?

Media journalist Patrick Smith asks on this blog today How much is an article worth? His answer, as far as likely online readers are concerned, is very little.

This got me thinking. How much does a news article cost to produce? Journalism.co.uk is an online-only operation – a bootstrap operation as Kevin Anderson once called it – and obviously has much lower overheads than London-based national newsaper businesses. But if we could work out the cost-per-article for our own business, then that would at least provide a baseline guide to the likely costs to Murdoch et al.

Taking into account wages, expenses and a percentage of overall overheads (rent, bills etc), but discounting non-news-related administration, aggregation, tip of the days etc, we calculated the average cost of an article (feature, news story or blog post) to be around £37.00.

We have no intention of erecting a paywall around our news content, but if we were to, just to recoup that expenditure we would need 370 people to pay 10p each to read each article, or 3,700 to pay 1p each. In 2009, the average number of page views per article on our blog and main site was 440 (this includes all our aggregation posts, which probably skew the figure downwards slightly) but that means at current traffic levels we would need a model of 10p per article to be paid for by 84 per cent of our current readers.

Factoring in the much greater overheads of national newspaper publications, I would guess that the cost per article could be as much as 10 times the cost to us, perhaps around the £400 mark. I could be wildly off, and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has actually analysed this properly, but I think it is pretty obvious that there is a serious problem with the paywall model as a sole path to profitable news production.