Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Search for a New Business Model

Rosenstiel, Tom, Mark Jurkowitz and Hong Ji. "The Search for a New Business Model." Journalism.org, March 5, 2012.

From the summary: "A new study, which combines detailed proprietary data from individual newspapers with in-depth interviews at more than a dozen major media companies, finds that the search for a new revenue model to revive the newspaper industry is making only halting progress but that some indqa`ividual newspapers are faring much better than the industry overall and may provide signs of a path forward.

In general, the shift to replace losses in print ad revenue with new digital revenue is taking longer and proving more difficult than executives want and at the current rate most newspapers continue to contract with alarming speed, according to the study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Cultural inertia is a major factor. Most papers are not putting significant effort into the new digital revenue categories that, while small now, are expected to provide most the growth in the future. To different degrees, executives predict newsrooms will continue to shrink, more papers will close and many surviving papers will deliver a print edition only a few days a week." Read more

See Also
Rosenstiel, Tom, Mark Jurkowitz and Hong Ji, The Search for a New Business Model: An In-depth Look at How Newspapers Are Faring Trying to Build Digital Revenue, prepared for the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism, March 5, 2012.