The newsonomics of Pricing 101
When the price of your digital product is zero, that’s about how much you learn about customer pricing. Now, both the pricing and the learning is on the upswing. The pay-for-digital content revolution...
View ArticleMinnPost tracks new (and stalled) laws with Bill Explorer
Politics often gets framed in sports metaphors. For journalists, maybe that means it’s worth thinking about the merits of a good scoreboard — or, in newspaper terms, maybe the agate page from the...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of trust, news trusts, and Murdoch trustworthiness
Trust. It’s the foundation of the news business. We’d like to believe that readers trust us to deliver accurate and fair-minded news. We’d like to believe that we can trust each other in the press to...
View ArticleReport: The IRS’s “antiquated and counterproductive” rules are hurting...
The IRS is applying “an antiquated and counterproductive standard to a dynamic sector” in limiting the growth of nonprofit news outlets, erecting “serious and unnecessary obstacles to critical...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls, and investing in the newsroom
Noteworthy in the 2013 Pulitzer announcements are the multiple winners. The New York Times won four and the Star Tribune two. Having just wrapped up a session on paywalls at the NAA mediaXchange...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post
It is a thunderbolt. If not tossed down from Mt. Olympus, it is thrown from Mt. Amazon, not far from Washington’s beatific Olympic Mountains. Jeff Bezos’s surprise buying of the Washington Post...
View ArticleWhat does sustainability look like in nonprofit journalism?
What, exactly, does a healthy nonprofit news site look like? If you’re a national site like ProPublica, is the metric winning major awards and changing policy through your reporting? If you’re a...
View ArticleMinnPost funds reporting through new donor-backed beats
MinnPost is trying to make a love connection between beat reporting and funders. The Minnesota-focused nonprofit news site has embarked on a new fundraising plan that directly ties donated dollars to...
View ArticleKnight Foundation launches $1 million fund to help nonprofit news get closer...
You could think of it as a sort of long-term tough love. Lots of nonprofit news organizations were started with seed money from the Knight Foundation. Now, Knight wants to help them get a step closer...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of the for-profit move in local online news
Josh Fenton is an ad guy running a local news startup. Therein lies our tale. GoLocal24 is a different kind of online startup. It’s for-profit, unlike so many of the city startups we’ve seen. It’s...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of measuring the real impact of news
Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Tweet Button. What if you could tap me and unlock a brand new source of funding for startup news sources of all kinds? What if, even better, you the...
View ArticleA club that will have me as a member: Voice of San Diego and MinnPost are...
About 300 people filled an event space in San Diego a couple weeks ago to take part in a discussion sponsored by Voice of San Diego on innovations with origins in the area. The assembled crowd served...
View Article“Can Philanthropy Save Journalism?”
Philanthropy Magazine, the magazine of the Philanthropy Roundtable, dedicated its newest issue to a question very familiar to Lab readers, albeit usually expressed in a less absolutist form: “Can...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of European crowds, funding new news
VIENNA — A small roar erupted in the crowded workshop. Krautreporter, with hours to go, had met its crowdfunded goal, gaining a commitment of €60 each from what would turn out to be 17,000 people. The...
View ArticleRefocusing on revenue: How The Lens is dealing with budget shortfalls in New...
Most students in New Orleans now attend charter schools after the widespread damage caused to the city from Hurricane Katrina. That presents a challenge for most news organizations because there are...
View ArticleThe Texas Tribune is 5 years old and sustainable. Now what?
The newsroom of The Texas Tribune is buzzing in the waning days of the 2014 election. Covering political contests takes a kind of muscle memory, something the nonprofit news site has accumulated since...
View ArticleThe newsonomics of Talking Points Memo’s native advertising shift
Call it addition by subtraction, or deduction over misdirection. The commercial progress of Talking Points Memo is a telling lesson in the maturation of digital native news companies. TPM was born very...
View ArticleVoice of San Diego, 10 years old today, is rethinking its editorial and tech...
Voice of San Diego editor in chief and CEO Scott Lewis finally has everything he wants. “I got the website I wanted, I got the money I wanted, I got the staff I wanted,” Lewis told me. “I’ve got no...
View ArticleIn the world of nonprofit news, different paths to sustainability for local...
As the world of nonprofit news matures, the good news is that more news organizations are creating ways to increase their revenue and expand their audience. The bad news: They’re still heavily reliant...
View ArticleMinnPost introduces members-only content with MinnPost+
Minnesota’s nonprofit news outlet MinnPost hopes to show that membership has its privileges. Starting tomorrow, the site is launching MinnPost+, a new tier of “bonus content” only available to people...
View ArticlePolitico will be in every American state capital — plus lots of world ones —...
Politico plans to have operations in every U.S. state capital and many other world capitals within five years, according to an internal memo obtained by the Huffington Post. The expansion plans hardly...
View ArticleA changing of the guard at nonprofit MinnPost, a bright spot in sustainable,...
After nine full years dedicated to the site, MinnPost founders Joel and Laurie Kramer are officially handing over the reins today. The steadfast Minnesota-focused nonprofit, often named by observers of...
View ArticleAfter 5 years, San Antonio’s Rivard Report finds that being a nonprofit is...
By 2015, four years after it was conceived, the Rivard Report was at a crossroads. The San Antonio news site — founded by Robert Rivard, who spent 14 years as the top editor of the San Antonio...
View ArticleNewsonomics: 15 terms that summed up 2017 in news and news coverage
This is the year America wishes it could take a shower long enough to wash away the scum of daily mud-slinging. Remember 2016? Last year, it seemed as if Tronc was the most memorable word of the news...
View ArticleFor news nonprofits, the tax overhaul is bringing new uncertainty about...
There are still a lot of open questions about the effects of the tax bill passed in December, but for nonprofit news organizations, the biggest concern is what kind of impact the new law will have on...
View ArticleA look at how foundations are helping the journalism industry stand up straight
Foundations across the U.S. are helping journalists watchdog the powerful — but who’s watching the foundations? The state of the journalism industry might be much more tattered right now if not for...
View ArticleHere are the local news organizations boosted in Facebook’s membership...
After leading a cohort of metropolitan newspapers through a subscriptions accelerator this year, Facebook is now kicking off its next round, focused this time on membership in nonprofit and...
View ArticleSahan Journal wants to be a “one-stop shop” for immigrant news in Minnesota
The state of Minnesota is home to nearly 500,000 immigrants, and the state has a much larger proportion of Asian and African immigrants than the rest of the United States: It is the home of the largest...
View ArticleFundraising like reporting: How eight nonprofit newsrooms majorly increased...
If you put no money into getting more money, then you will have no money. A new report from the Institute of Nonprofit News examined the investments made into major gift procurement by eight nonprofit...
View ArticleThe local news crisis will be solved one community at a time
Local journalism is in crisis. “America’s local news has reached its death spiral phase” proclaimed the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018. Two years later, an oft-cited study out of the University of...
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