Google’s economist-in-chief, Hal Varian, was the keynote speaker this morning at the Federal Trade Commission’s second round of hearings on the future of journalism. (The study is entitled “How will journalism survive the internet age?” Round 1 was held in December; transcripts and other material are linked here — scroll down. Not to be outdone, [...]

Even on the web, sometimes actions really do speak louder than words.
The technology site Ars Technica has a tech-savvy group of readers, of which about 40 percent have installed ad-blocking software in their web browsers. That’s a plugin that allows you to avoid seeing most ads on a site. The financial consequence for Ars is [...]

[Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]
Parse out the numbers, and they’re quite puzzling.
The average news reader spends little time on newspaper-owned sites, from a 20 minutes a month [...]

Remember when journalists were merely overworked and underpaid? In today’s hypercompetitive market, it’s not enough to be a tenacious reporter or an elegant writer; you also need to be a tech-savvy coder, a capable videographer, a constant conversation-engager, a shameless self-promoter, and, in general, a worthy bottom-line-improver. Call it the soft bigotry of high expectations: [...]

Ever wonder how a site like Talking Points Memo can run AP content without an official relationship with the wire service?
The answer is a site called Mochila, a syndication platform launched back in 2006. About 1,200 websites use the platform, creating a combined audience of 200 million monthly page views for the syndicated content, [...]

You hear a lot said about how news organizations need to help people “make sense of the world.” I’ve used the idea myself to show how news organizations need to realize they sell convenience, not news. We all kind of know what we mean by the concept, but it doesn’t have a clear definition.
On Thursday, [...]

Michelle Leder likes to joke that she is the first journalist to have been fired by email. In 1998, her editor at the Poughkeepsie Journal shot her a note to say that her job on the business desk would not be waiting for her when she returned from abroad.
Since then, she’s been a pioneer in [...]

Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.”

Within that simple word change,we see a world shifting, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that [...]

[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 [...]

So, it’s official: There is an Apple tablet, and it’s called the iPad. And, at least to these Apple-friendly eyes, it looks really, really nice. I can feel my credit card getting warm already.
But for future-of-journalism junkies, the question was never whether or not Apple could come up with a sexy new device. The question [...]

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 [...]

[Yesterday, we showed how our Martin Langeveld's predictions for 2009 turned out. A few hits, a few misses, but lots of thoughts provoked. Here's his list of what we can expect in 2010. —Josh]
Newspaper ad revenue: At least technically, the recession is over, with GDP growth measured at 2.2 percent in Q3 of 2009 and [...]

[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 [...]

As the web has sliced the general audience into niches, publishers have responded with narrower, deeper content: neighborhoods instead of cities, products instead of industries, subcultures instead of monocultures.
But when audiences get narrower, advertisers get smaller — and sadly, when your advertisers are putting up less than $5,000 or so per ad buy, a professional [...]