[A little over one year ago, our friend Martin Langeveld made a series of predictions about what 2009 would bring for the news business — in particular the newspaper business. I even wrote about them at the time and offered up a few counter-predictions. Here's Martin's rundown of how he fared. Up next, we'll post [...]

MinnPost, the non-profit news startup in Minneapolis, has rolled out a new form of advertising that looks a little bit like print classifieds, a lot like Twitter, and nothing like traditional marketing on the Internet. They’re calling the service Real-Time Ads, and it’s live in the left column of the front page right now.
The service [...]

Remember? Two months ago, Associated Press chairman Dean Singleton said his organization would take a firm stand against unlicensed use of its content and that of its members. “We are mad as hell,” he declared at the AP’s annual meeting in San Diego, “and we’re not going to take it any more.”
Singleton is a newspaper [...]

It’s happening. Yesterday we revealed Steve Brill’s latest moves toward charging readers of newspaper websites, and separately, Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Brian Tierney said he would erect an online pay wall by the end of the year. Those developments followed similar statements by executives of Hearst Corp. and MediaNews Group, among other newspaper companies.
As these paid-content [...]

Last time we checked in with Talking Points Memo, which was December, the political news site planned to get serious about in-house advertising sales as it added reporters in Washington. Since then, TPM hired its first vice president of sales, Diane Rinaldo, and vastly accelerated the site’s advertising revenue. (Expanding in D.C. has not been [...]

So, what to do about this over-abundance of advertising inventory in our local markets?
Unlike some in this industry who are looking, again, at some form of paid content as the solution to the revenue crisis, I still believe that there’s a lot of life left in the ad-supported model. We haven’t been particularly creative in [...]

It’s shorthand for the chief problem of transitioning a local news operation’s business model from print to online: Newspaper revenue dollars become online pennies. Despite increasing readership online, advertisers continue to pay a much higher price when they place their ads in print.
A lot of that has been laid to inertia on the part of [...]

If the numbers presented here and here are true — and the rates web sites get for online advertising have really dropped 46 percent since the final quarter of 2007 — my optimism for future business models of journalism just took a dive.
The fundamental monkey wrench the Internet threw at newspapers was the loss of [...]