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.

[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 [...]

In my last post, I spent a lot of time laying out a fairly abstract framework for how we can think intelligently about future kinds of news organizations. I argued they could be usefully evaluated and charted on four factors: the type of work they do, how institutionalized they are, how many resources they have, [...]

Recent posts by Patricia Handschiegel, Amy Gahran, Dana Chinn, and Bill Grueskin have driven home a crucial point about online journalism: Traffic and page views are nice, but engaged readers and loyal audiences are more important. Here, I’d like to point out a new tool that builds on that notion.
Even on the infinitely measurable web, [...]

The next time someone tells you that the news industry’s financial crisis is hurting coverage of the federal government, point them to this chart. The Project for Excellence in Journalism has released new figures on the Capitol Hill press corps, and they show that Washington is still teeming with hacks. They’re just working for new [...]

Bill Wasik begins his book, And Then There’s This, with a “plea to future historians.” Well, when the early history of online news is written, a crucial document will be the memo distributed at a Politico staff meeting on July 21, 2008. Written by the news site’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, a veteran [...]

The fascinating, if flawed, meme-tracking study that I wrote about yesterday is full of rich data on the mechanics of American political journalism. To review: The paper analyzes commonly repeated phrases from a broad swath of media coverage in the last three months of the 2008 presidential election. Phrases like “lipstick on a pig,” “No [...]

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 [...]

“TPM started literally out of nothing,” Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, was telling me by phone this week from the site’s new loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “There was no money behind it. There wasn’t anything like that. And for a long time, the operation was kind of [...]

Three pages into his new book, Bill Wasik presents the first of several charts illustrating the “telltale spike” of viral culture on the Internet — that is, a dramatic burst of attention around one piece of content followed by interest that doesn’t so much taper as tumble. You know this spike well, even if you’ve [...]

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 [...]

What would Jeff Jarvis do? On Monday night, I asked the CUNY journalism professor and new-media evangelist how he would advise various news organizations that are struggling with old business models or experimenting with new ones. It was a rapid-fire exercise, and Jarvis, sporting a What Would Google Do? pin on his lapel, gamely offered [...]

The data is in, and we’re ready to declare the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008! It was a hard-fought battle in a year that saw visitors to all newspaper sites rise by 12.1 percent from the year prior. We’ve ranked the top 15 by average monthly unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, which is [...]

Fishbowl DC has obtained an in-house Politico memo about the web site’s post-election future. Lots of interesting stuff, but I want to highlight a few points and what they tell us about their business model. (Politico is privately held, so hard numbers are hard to come by.)
In our first 21 months, Politico has frequently achieved [...]

Two top sites for political junkies, FiveThirtyEight and Talking Points Memo, have announced their October stats, and they’re astounding. To put them in context, I’m inserting them into E&P’s list of top newspaper sites’ unique-visitor totals for September. (October numbers for the newspapers won’t be out for a couple weeks.)
New York Times: 20.07 million unique [...]