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Showing posts from May, 2016

12 road maps for sustainable digital media worldwide

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Renaissance maps showed monsters, hazards to avoid. The future of journalism is increasingly digital, mobile, and in flux. It is unexplored territory. Like the explorers and navigators of the Renaissance, various organizations � governments, NGOs, journalism groups, and universities, among others � have been trying to map the most promising routes to sustainability in the new media ecosystem. It's not just about making money; it's about providing news and information crucial to a democratic society. Versi�n en espa�ol (At left, a map from Chet Van Duzer's book Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps . Click to enlarge.) As traditional news media organizations have lost revenues, laid off employees, and reduced coverage, new digital media have emerged as important players in providing public-service journalism, especially on the local level. Databases and promising routes Researchers from a variety of organizations have created databases of thousands of new...

Readers pay for digital news when you sell the value

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NEW YORK -- The big mystery in the newspaper industry has been how to get digital readers to pay for a product they have been getting free for years. Denise Warren The industry has struggled because subscription operations were always loss leaders that didn't pay for themselves. Executives had no idea how to run a profitable subscription operation and have been learning how to do it for the first time, said Denise Warren , who played a major role in the New York Times 's transition to paid digital subscriptions. She spoke May 3 to an audience of professors and industry representatives at the World Media Economics and Management Conference held at Fordham University. Many publishers make the mistake of marketing their digital products on the basis of price and discounts, Warren said, when they should be promoting the unique value proposition of news and information that readers cannot get anywhere else. Read more �