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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 hyperlocal […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
