In most businesses, not knowing how well a particular product is performing would be almost unthinkable. But newspapers have always been a peculiar business, one that has stubbornly, proudly clung to a sense that focusing too much on the bottom line can lead nowhere good. more…
Tag: Newspapers
To put it mildly, Dean Mostofi is a minor player in the blogosphere. A self-employed loan auditor in Rockville, Md., Mostofi maintains a primitive website where he posts press releases and newspaper articles about the financial industry, the law and other things that interest him. more…
Shaun Higgins, who directs digital operations at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., watches with bemusement as the newspaper industry tiptoes into experiments with limited pay walls.
His paper has had a system in place for roughly five years that offers 90 percent of website content for free but fences off the other 10 percent for especially motivated audiences willing to pay. In essence it delivers the results The New York Times and others are aiming for in developing a so-called “metered model” – but without the meter. more…
Newspaper consultant Jim Chisholm has looked five years into the future and sees the industry’s best bet for vitality in digital shopping.
Updating a futures report he did 18 months ago for the Newspaper Association of America, Chisholm predicts nominal growth for the industry (3.4 percent, probably less than inflation) through 2014 more…
Public notice legal ads have long been a moneymaker for local newspapers, and they’ve helped keep many afloat in recent years as traditional display and classified advertising have dwindled. (One publisher last year told me, grimly, that the housing bubble’s implosion more…
There’s two very obvious choices when you’re looking for online apartment listings. Obviously, every web site will claim that they’ve got the best listings, but in some cases they’ll only have a small fraction of the available apartments. Ideally you’d want to visit a single destination where you could review everything that’s available, all in one visit. more…
Although they are slowly and steadily improving, a lot of work still remains. The key driver of the problem is that the majority are trying to solve the internet problem themselves. They impose print mentality on an entirely different medium. more…
Last year, there was a seemingly endless parade of stories on how aggregators, search engines and news blogs were apparently killing newspapers that publish original content. This year, add the rise of “content farms” to the list. Riding to the rescue, or so it hopes, comes Perfect Market and its new search marketing tool, “The Vault.” more…
You’ve heard it all before. “It’s the end of print.” “Newspapers are obsolete”… or the ubiquitous “I get all my news from the Internet.” Where do newspapers fit in today’s web-enabled, mobile-device toting, instant news world? Aren’t they a thing of the past? more…
Recently I was in London, speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum. From my perspective, it was an ideal event: large enough to have a critical mass of interesting vendors and attendees, and small enough to support quality conversation. If you’ve been to any of the large U.S. cloud shows, you’ll know how hard it is to accomplish the latter quality at them – they’re packed and conversations are reduced to sound bites. more…
BooCoo.com launched on Monday with a unique model – it has entered into exclusive deals with over 280 newspapers around the country that will advertise the new auction site in return for a cut of the revenue. eBay and Craigslist have siphoned away business from newspaper classifieds more…
When the weather’s clear, yard sales and garage sales spring up around most neighborhoods like weeds. Bargain hunters and fans of reusing and recycling know that these sales are great places to shop for kids’ clothes, furniture that can be repainted or restyled, paperback books, and even collectibles which may be diamonds in the rough.
But you have to shop savvy to get the most out of yard sales. They’re not as predictable as the mall, so you need to plan ahead. more…