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 [...]

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 [...]

[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 gaggle of Google news items: Unlike the past several weeks with their paywall and iPad revelations, this week wasn’t dominated by one giant future-of-media story. But there were quite a few [...]

I heard the news about Editor & Publisher closing as I hear many things these days — through Twitter. Patrick Thornton (jiconoclast) tweeted: “Does anything better symbolize the state of print media right now than the closure of E&P? Yes things are very bad.” At first, I hoped his tweet didn’t mean what I knew [...]

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 [...]

Some online-only news organizations were upset when Google News began attaching a “(blog)” label to their content two months ago. Others, like me, complained the label was outdated and inconsistently applied.
Now Google News is asking publishers to label themselves. In an update to its

Every future-of-news conference should invite Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe Project and CircLabs, if only to serve as the scribe. He was, fortunately, in attendance at yesterday’s conference on business models for news, hosted by our friends across Harvard Yard at the Shorenstein Center.
I’m always on the lookout for new data on the [...]

You’d think selling subscriptions within iPhone applications would appeal to media companies: It’s a model that promises recurring revenue streams, and it matches up nicely with the way they’ve always done business in print. But surprisingly few have jumped at the opportunity; most news organizations seem to be sticking with traditional one-off apps — some [...]

If you’ve been following our coverage of Journalism Online, the pay-for-news venture founded by Steve Brill, Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, you know how they plan to generate revenue for news sites. What hasn’t been clear is how the firm itself will make money.
But in a document submitted to the Newspaper Association of America, which [...]

Google is developing a micropayment platform that will be “available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year,” according to a document the company submitted to the Newspaper Association of America. The system, an extension of Google Checkout, would be a new and unexpected option for the news industry as it considers how [...]

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 [...]

Even as he leads newspaper publishers toward charging for their websites, Steve Brill remains skeptical of one oft-mentioned model for making money online: micropayments. In our conversation yesterday, he told me that his startup, Journalism Online, isn’t expecting newspapers to reap much revenue from per-article fees, though readers will have that option.
“I think that people [...]

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 [...]

Alan Murray, executive editor of The Wall Street Journal Online, doesn’t believe the canard that only financial news outlets can charge for content on the Internet. He concedes that the Journal has a built-in advantage — its audience reads the newspaper for business and profit — but in an interview this weekend, Murray told me, [...]