Every syndication dollar earned is another dollar that doesn’t have to be wrung out of highly competitive advertising markets. Importantly, the syndication dollars derive from what journalism organizations do best: create high-quality content. The big notion: create better-than-good-enough content, the kind of stuff that is beginning to flood the web. It’s another way to affirm worth: the more companies that want to use your content, the clearer the value proposition in the digital world….Some have said that in the digital world, news companies need to think of themselves both as creators and aggregators, doing what they do best and linking to the rest. Let’s amend that: creators, aggregators and syndicators, doing what they do best, licensing with zest and linking to the rest.

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 [...]

The Washington Post caused a bit of a stir yesterday when it announced a $1.99-a-year iPhone app. The choice was interesting both because it offered time-limited access to content and because of the low price point — at a time when other newspaper execs are apparently debating prices more than 100 times greater. As our friend [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
A meter for the Times’ blogs: Plenty of stuff happened at the intersection of journalism and new media this week, and for whatever reason, a lot of it had something to do [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
Google Buzzes social media: For the second week in a row, the biggest story at the intersection of journalism and new media is an innovation by Google: This week, the talk was [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s news about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]
The Times’ paywall proposal: No question about media and journalism’s biggest story this week: The New York Times announced it plans to begin charging readers for access to its website in 2011. Here’s [...]

[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 [...]

Because it’s my job, I’ve followed pretty much everything Steve Brill has said in public about Journalism Online, the pay-for-news firm he launched in April with Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindrey. From the start, they’ve been offering infrastructure and consulting for news organizations that want to charge for access to their websites. But as you’d [...]

Seth Lipsky is ever-so-slowly resurrecting The New York Sun as a stripped-down, online-only version of the newspaper he ran between 2002 and 2008. “We plan to build it up,” he told me yesterday, referring to nysun.com.
His most-recent addition to the site is a 20-week run of crosswords by the Sun’s highly acclaimed, former puzzle editor, [...]

When I was in San Francisco for ONA, a kind reader offered a blunt critique of my reporting: “You know, every time The New York Times sneezes, it isn’t news.” He’s right, and yet, here’s another post in which the Gray Lady clears her nose: Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor who’s becoming a regular [...]