[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh]
Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself [...]

[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the [...]

By now, many thousands of you have had a chance to play Paywall!, the web game sweeping the newspaper industry. But some of you have asked whether you could rewrite its rules — to mess around with some of the underlying assumptions and run the maths your own way.
That all sounded like fun to us, [...]

The New York Times’ announcement that it would be charging for some access to its website, starting in 2011, rekindled yet another round of debate about paywalls for online news. Beyond the practical question (will it work?) or the theoretical one (what does this mean for the Times’ notion of the “public”?), there remains another [...]

It’s not just newspapers struggling to find their way in the digital era. Many content companies — broadcasting, film, music, publishing, and gaming — are grappling with the same business model uncertainty.
In a recent survey (pdf), the consulting firm Accenture asked 102 content-industry leaders to pick the biggest hurdle they face. Overwhelmingly, executives pointed to [...]

[I've asked Seth Lewis, a former Miami Herald editor and smart journalism professor-in-training at the University of Texas, to join our cast of occasional commentators here at the Lab. One of his primary focuses will be looking at the changing world of journalism schools. Here's an introduction. —Josh]
Last year saw no shortage of future-of-journalism conferences. [...]

The Apple tablet

It’s entirely possible that The New York Times will net a profit from their newly announced paywall, set to debut in a year’s time. But it’s by no means guaranteed. Even (momentarily) setting aside the journalistic or civic-minded concerns about shutting some readers out of the news, the whole idea makes little sense if the [...]

It’s annual report time, and our friends Joel Kramer at MinnPost and John Thornton at Texas Tribune each put out their year-in-review posts this afternoon. (Thornton, who launched in November, called it his 12-week report, but whatever.) There’s a lot to consider beyond just numbers.
While each has had to focus on his own shop’s finances [...]

The legacy press — or the traditional media, or whatever we’re calling newspapers these days — has one main challenge for 2010, and it’s not finding a new business model. It has to do with vision. It has to do with being able to imagine a world that does not yet exist.
While the news media’s [...]

I’ve been studying journalism nonprofits one way or another for about five years now, and I confess that in all that time, I’ve looked at their business models really as being slightly different iterations of the same species. But now, I’m not so sure.
As part of my graduate studies in nonprofit management at George Washington [...]

The element of the Downie/Schudson report that’s triggered the most fuss is its call for a larger role for the government in funding journalism — the creation of a “Fund for Local News,” supported by taxes or fees, that would support news organizations. And it’s true that the United States is a global anomaly in [...]

When Barnes & Noble announced the Nook — its attempt at a Kindle killer — on Tuesday, the reviews focused on its interface, its native PDF support, its ability to lend books to friends, and the potential of its Android operating system. But I was more interested in how it’ll work as an outlet for [...]

Having spent more than three years doing dissertation research on the changing journalistic ecosystem in Philadelphia, I was excited to see Technically Philly get a great write up last week. And having spent the past six months as a research assistant with the Downie-Schudson report on reconstructing American journalism, I see a connection between Technically [...]

You’d think selling subscriptions within iPhone applications would appeal to media companies: It’s a model that promises recurring revenue streams, and it matches up nicely with the way they’ve always done business in print. But surprisingly few have jumped at the opportunity; most news organizations seem to be sticking with traditional one-off apps — some [...]