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, [...]

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 [...]

Gawker Media’s web measurement of choice is shifting from pageviews to unique users. That’s a pretty big deal for an organization that led the charge in pageview obsession. Gawker founder Nick Denton explained the refocusing in a staff memo:
The target is called “US monthly uniques.” It represents a measure of each site’s domestic audience. This [...]

An invite-only conference began today at the American Press Institute with a singular directive: “generating revenue from online content.” At the morning session, which just wrapped up, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishing presented their survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. The cardinal finding, first reported this morning by Alan [...]

It wasn’t quite the Red Sox winning the World Series, but The Boston Globe saw huge traffic yesterday as it covered the death of Ted Kennedy — a sign that local news sites can still dominate national stories on their turf.
The Globe, which had spent years preparing for Kennedy’s death, had more than 8 million [...]

Kevin Kelly pointed a few days ago to this essay by Dan Cook, a designer of online Flash games, on how game designers can make money. As Kevin points out, there’s an awful lot of stuff in Dan’s essay that could be applied to other creative fields where a limited professional class is facing enormous [...]

Eight months ago, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton was predicting a 40-percent drop in U.S. advertising and paring back accordingly: He laid off 19 writers and, by selling some blogs and consolidating others, shrank his blogging empire from 13 titles to 9. Well, that dire forecast hasn’t quite come to pass — least of all [...]

I’m reliably informed that the current issue of Vanity Fair contains a lengthy, engaging, and revealing profile of Sarah Palin, full of unflattering details like an email she wrote to friends and family in the voice of God, signed, “Your Heavenly Father.” But I must confess: I haven’t read the piece. I’ve read about it.
So [...]

[We're doing another Lab Book Club this week and next, on Bill Wasik's And Then There's This. Today, Ian Crouch summarizes and reviews the book's arguments; we'll have more excerpts from our interview with Wasik in the coming days. —Josh]
Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture deceptively slim [...]

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 [...]

Here comes the summer of paid content: Steve Brill tells me that his pay-for-news startup, Journalism Online, will soon announce deals with several newspapers to — in many cases, for the first time — charge readers for some of their digital content.
“We’ve signed a couple, we’re going to sign some more, but we’re sort [...]

The Wichita Eagle’s Kansas.com was the 15th-most-visited American newspaper site in February, according to Nielsen Online. That’s remarkable, considering that the Eagle has never previously cracked the top 30.
What happened? A prominent link on Yahoo’s front page February 13 caused an astounding wave of traffic to the Eagle’s 389-word story about a student who caught [...]

Tuesday was a big day for pageviews on The New York Times website, of course. But get this: Wednesday was even bigger.
Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at the Times, offered that intriguing tidbit in a memo to staff this morning. He wrote:
Based on past experience, we expected less traffic the day after [...]

The Gawker Media blogs redesigned yesterday, prompting explanatory posts all around the family of sites. From a cynical point of view, the redesign of each site’s front page to include shorter excerpts of each post seems clearly aimed at generating more pageviews (and thus, more ad impressions). In most cases, the key link the post [...]