Document details

The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism

New York: Columbia Journalism School, Tow Center for Digital Journalism (2011), 146 pp.
"While this report will examine some traditional, or “legacy,” business models for media, our focus is on the economic issues that news organizations—large and small, old and new—face with their digital ventures. This report focuses on news organizations that do original journalism, defined for our purposes as independent fact-finding undertaken for the benefit of communities of citizens. Those communities can be defined in the traditional way, by geography, but can also be brought together by topics or commonalities of interest. We also look into media companies that aggregate content and generate traffic in the process. We confine our report mostly to for-profit news enterprises. We recognize the outstanding work done by such national organizations as ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as local sites like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost. But for the purposes of this study, we felt it was more valuable to spend our time examining organizations that rely as much as possible on the commercial market." (Introduction, page 3)
1 News From Everywhere: The Economics of Digital Journalism, 7
2 Traffic Patterns: Why Big Audiences Aren’t Always Profitable, 21
3 Local and Niche Sites: The Advantages of Being Small, 39
4 The New New Media: Mobile, Video and Other Emerging Platforms, 57
5 Paywalls: The Price Tag for Information, 69
6 Aggregation:‘Shameless’ – and Essential, 87
7 Dollars and Dimes: The New Costs of Doing Business, 97
8 New Users, New Revenue: Alternative Ways to Make Money, 111
9 Managing Digital: Audience, Data and Dollars, 125
Conclusion 135