Archive by Author
Next Steps: What We Heard, What We Need
Posted on 19. Nov, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
At the end of our New Business Models for (Local) News Conference last week we asked a question we’ve been asking since our first go-round three years ago: What’s next? What do we, as practitioners of journalism, need to do to help sustain journalism in this new age?
It seems there is still a simple two-word [...]
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Livestream: NewBiz Conference
Posted on 11. Nov, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Our third annual summit on the future of news is getting started. Today it’s all about local. We’ll be tweeting all day, too. Hit us up with questions and comments, the hashtag is #newbiz. Conference details and schedule are here.
UPDATE: For those of you who are wondering, here is a link to the models that [...]
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Two Paid Models for Metro News
Posted on 30. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The debate over paid models has grown heated in recent months as publishers cast about for new revenues to replace declining advertising dollars. But, although asking readers to pay for the news seems to have gained favor of late, publishers are still divided on whether charging for online content is the best approach. Indeed, just [...]
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Counting on Membership, Redrawing our Not-for-Profit Model
Posted on 23. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
We’ve heard a fair bit of criticism in recent weeks that the revenue estimates (mostly in advertising) in some of our for-profit models were far too high. So, we are surprised to hear from Jim Barnett that the membership projections in our not-for-profit model are too low.
By his lights, a not-for-profit like the one we [...]
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The Survey Results
Posted on 17. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The foundation of the business models we built this summer was data culled from an online survey we conducted of web entrepreneurs. We asked online startups from across the country to give us a confidential glimpse at the nuts and bolts of their businesses.
We sent invitations to hundreds of online news organizations, from [...]
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Chi-Town Daily News Aims to Profit
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
The Chi-Town Daily News, the not-for-profit out of Chicago that launched four years ago, announced today that it will become a for-profit venture. Editor Geoff Dougherty announced the move in a post on the site, which has received funding from the Knight Foundation and a host of other supporters.
Dougherty explains the move:
We’ve concluded [...]
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Paid Content, E-commerce and Turning the Knobs Down on Ads
Posted on 11. Sep, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
New plans for paid content platforms, from players as varied as I.B.M., Google and NewsCorp, earned plenty of attention earlier this week. Some have boiled the story down to a potential battle for publisher-clients between Google and Journalism Online, the start up from Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery which has been at the [...]
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New Organizations, New Relationships
Posted on 19. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
We’ve heard a lot about our forecasts for advertising revenues in the New News Organization this week (mostly asserting that our cpm and penetration assumptions are too optimistic). But, it seems our other goal–to envision a sustainable business built on a diversity of revenues–has been largely overlooked.
In fact, in year three of our NNO model, [...]
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Advertising in a Sustainable Not-for-Profit Model
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback to our models, both online and out in Aspen, since we made them public yesterday. Some of the best comments have come from Jim Barnett, who questioned some of the results in our not-for-profit model both in the comments and later in a piece on theNieman Lab [...]
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The Assumptions Behind Our Models
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Some points about the assumptions baked into our models:
We settled on a $12 cpm as a conservative benchmark, based on feedback from a number of news organizations, large and small. Indeed, we commonly heard a range of $15 to $20 cpm. In terms of for-profit startups that replicate what we are calling the New News [...]
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The Models: Hyperlocals & the Framework
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
This set of spreadsheets incorporates two models: hyperlocal and the sales, support, and technology framework that we believe is necessary to optimize businesses in the ecosystem. We believe an organization that enables advertising networks and other services to support the local news ecosystem is both a sustainable business and will make individual hyperlocal news organizations [...]
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The Models: New News Organization
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
This model envisions a new, metro-wide news organization serving a market of five million people that operates on a smaller scale and performs a wide variety of tasks. It will produce original unique beat and investigative reporting and it will also work collaboratively with the other members of the ecosystem and its readers to add [...]
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The Models: Not-for-Profit News
Posted on 17. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
A number of promising not-for-profit news organizations, providing both national and local coverage, have launched recently. We want to show the level of resources that might be available in a given market to augment local news gathering efforts. Researching the available charitable money in a market, we picked a hypothetical bottom line of $3 [...]
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New York Times Trains Local Youth in Blogging Workshop
Posted on 13. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
by Mike Reicher
What do you get when seasoned professional journalists train novice teenage bloggers in the tools of the trade? We’ve started to answer that question this summer at The Local, The New York Times’ collaborative blog covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Since launching in March, one of our goals at The Local has [...]
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News Innovators on the Frontline: Sun Valley Online
Posted on 10. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
Sun Valley Online, a news site covering the ski town of Ketchum, Idaho, launched in 2004. Dave Chase came on board as a business partner in 2006 after spending a number of years at Microsoft and working on various other media/technology projects. He is also a principal at the newly minted local news infrastructure company, [...]
