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Recently I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Malaga --"The audiences are in charge: Are publishers listening?" The audience had students in their doctoral, master's and bachelor's programs, as well as a number of faculty. Below is a summary of the presentation. 1. The marriage of convenience between advertising and journalism is over. For proof, look no further than the graphic below, which shows that newspapers in Spain have lost more than 500 million euros in ad revenue since 2009, and that includes the revenue they get from digital. (The U.S. is very similar.) In the future, news media will need to develop a deep relationship with their users. The important thing will be not the quantity of eyeballs reached, as measured by page views and unique users, but the quality of the relationship with the users. Versi�n en espa�ol Read more �

Sylvia Chan-Olmsted is one of the leading scholars of media economics, and she stopped by the University of Navarra Dec. 13 to chat about some of the trends she is seeing in the industry. "Media companies need to translate data into intelligence." Chan-Olmsted, a professor at the University of Florida, singled out three trends: 1. There is a new value chain in media. Content is becoming "unbundled", meaning users can buy individual movies, TV shows, or songs without having to pay for products they don't want. Content is becoming crowd-sourced, meaning that consumers are recommending things to each other through social media. And the major media companies are harnessing their data about users to recommend media products and even create content based on their customers' tastes. Media platforms like YouTube , Apple , Amazon , Hulu , and Facebook are all starting to invest billions of dollars in original content to challenge Netflix , whose business model h...

Jarvis: think first of the community Several years ago I was working in Belarus, a former Soviet republic, where independent newspapers have a hard time surviving. The government denies them access to state-monopoly newsstands, overcharges them for their newsprint, and harasses them at every turn. We looked at one publisher's website data to see if he might have an opportunity to generate revenue online. Turns out the website's most popular page contained the community's bus schedules. And what's more, his community spent more time on that page -- 5 minutes, 30 seconds per visit -- than any other. This publisher, a journalist, was humbled to see that a simple list was more important to his readers than the journalism. The Belarus example came to mind as I was reading Jeff Jarvis's new book , in which he talks about a new role for journalists: " Helping a community better organize its knowledge so it can better organize itself." Read more �