newspapers

Hav­ing writ­ten a book about trust in the media, I tend to keep track of the end­less trust polling that pours forth. Here’s the latest from TNS. When it comes to news­pa­pers TNS observed that less than a quarter (23%) of UK respond­ents ‘highly trus­ted’ news­pa­pers. In fact the UK gave the low­est score in this respect with an […]

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I’ve been pon­der­ing the rela­tion­ship between journ­al­ism and demo­cracy of late, and so too have the aca­demic com­menters gath­er­ing at the blog of Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil boss, Craig Cal­houn. Cal­houn asks the ques­tion Sam Zell has already answered — What is the future of news­pa­pers? And when social sci­ent­ists smell blood, they’re mostly rubbing […]

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Newspaper cost structure

December 10, 2008

Being a TV per­son, I’m curi­ous about the cost struc­ture of print news­pa­per oper­a­tions. Over at the Monday Note, Frédéric Fil­loux writes: In a typ­ical oper­a­tion, the biggest costs are indus­trial ones: around 25%-35% for paper and print­ing; another 30%-40% for dis­tri­bu­tion; around 18–25% for edit­or­ial; the remain­ing 10–15% are for admin­is­trat­ive and mar­ket­ing expenditures.

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There’s an inter­est­ing look at the prob­lems of news­pa­pers online by Robert Ivan at Seek­ing Alpha, focus­ing on the New York Times. I don’t know about the assump­tions — I’ve seen the cost of the NYT’s news­gath­er­ing put at $200m — and I’ve sim­pli­fied it a little, but here it is: Des­pite the highest read­er­ship of any newspaper […]

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