newspapers

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 their […]

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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 […]

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Microsoft’s top Intellectual Property chap, Tom Rubin, had some interesting points to make at the UK AOP:
Starting back in the early 1990s, some leading Internet pundits espoused the motto “information wants to be free” and implored content owners to simply give away their content and monetize it through secondary means – such as concerts and tee-shirts […]

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In case you happen to be a journalist and Jeff Jarvis still has you thinking that newspaper problems are your fault, take a look at the New York Times from July, 1980 (and if you like catchy headlines, they don’t come much catchier than this):
First U.S. Experiments in Electronic Newspapers Begin in Two Communities; 13 Newspapers […]

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About twenty years ago, I went to a farewell dinner for a young man who was leaving the UK to head for Korea. As a news action junkie, I was baffled. The Soviet Empire was in crisis. The Middle East in turmoil. And this guy was going to Seoul for the Financial Times?
Still, gnawing away was […]

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