Audience Revenue Won’t Save Journalism If People Don’t Have Money to Spend

By Simon Galperin

31 March 2018

The journalism industry is pivoting to audience revenue. It is a fundamentally different pivot than those of recent years. Those pivots have been to different news products. This a different way of funding all of those news products. Where once journalism businesses courted advertisers, they must now court their audiences.


Rise of Subscriptions and the Fall of Advertising

By Bob Gilbreath

1 April 2018

We talk a lot about how individual startups disrupt existing business models — such as Airbnb vs. hotels or Craigslist vs. newspaper classifieds — but we sometimes fail to appreciate the more massive disruptions that cut across many industries at once. Ecommerce is one example: People increasingly choose to purchase everything from airplane tickets to underwear via digital storefronts. Consumer habits are slow to change, but when they do change they cut across categories — and even iconic companies with hundreds of years of history can fall away.


To Understand Digital Advertising, Study Its Algorithms

30 March 2018

Alan Mislove studies algorithms. Recently, his research at Northeastern University, in Boston, has shown that Facebook’s software was leaking users’ phone numbers to advertisers. He has also found new ways to audit that same software for racial bias. But work like his faces challenges. Scraping data from public-facing websites often sails close to breaching their terms and conditions. And the companies those websites belong to are generally unwilling to give researchers more direct access to their systems.


Could French Independent Publisher Mediapart Be a Model for the Whole News Industry?

By Bertrand Pecquerie

25 March 2018

Mediapart is a strange one. Very French — I would say typically French — but also a model for the whole news industry. Mediapart is a participatory media organization exclusively funded by subscriptions. Today, it is trendy and not very original, but ten years ago it was pioneering and very few publishers or editors believed in this business model.


Why a Spotify for News Can’t Fly

By Frederic Filloux

5 March 2018

Periodically, I hear someone say, “Oh, I intend to be the Spotify of news,” or, “What the news industry needs is a Spotify-like platform!” In fact, it is far from certain that the news industry could pull out a profitable model based on Swedish streaming. Why? Because, after ten years of operation, Spotify’s future is still uncertain, and a news version of would face the same issues.


Yes, There’s a Crisis of Trust in Journalism. But It’s Inside Newsrooms, Too

By Heidi N. Moore

2 March 2018

Journalists in America’s major newsrooms are asking a question of their bosses: Is anyone in charge here?

Turmoil is currently engulfing The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Time Inc., NPR, and others—enough in fact to mark this moment as one in which internal civil wars are threatening to break out unless something changes. And the only thing that will fix it is a wholesale reckoning with newsroom culture that many newsrooms have long ignored and only just started to address. (Here’s a hint: It starts with something media executives are not particularly practiced at, which is listening to staff instead of talking at them).


Reinventing Journalism for a Murky Era

By Maria Teresa Ronderos

1 March 2018

In the last few weeks, we confirmed that one country can indeed derail the public debate of another during the critical election period, infesting the information waters with piranha-like social media bots and fake profiles carefully crafted to deepen divisions and erode faith in democratic systems.

It’s no wonder that media, as protagonists of this muddled ecosystem, are particularly worried about losing trust. In the last two years, universities, philanthropic and non-governmental organizations, and digital platforms have been developing diverse projects to study how media loses the public’s confidence, and finding practical ways this trend could be reversed.


Americans Struggle to Navigate the Modern Media Landscape

By Jeffrey M. Jones and Zacc Ritter

30 January 2018

As the information available to news consumers has expanded greatly in recent decades, Americans believe the media landscape is becoming harder to navigate. They say the increase in the information available today makes it harder (58%), rather than easier (38%), to be well-informed because people have to sort through lots of information to determine what is true or important.


Why Community Journalism May Be the Future of News

By Caroline Scott

17 January 2018

Community journalism, the local news coverage typically focused on neighborhoods, suburbs and small towns, helps to address gaps in the mainstream media, providing increased diversity, greater depth and context to reporting in any particular area. With the advancement of technologies such as virtual reality (VR), live-streaming capabilities, 8K video footage and 5G internet, it’s never been easier for local news organizations to get eyeballs on stories outside of the mainstream, national news agenda. Read the story in Journalism