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 [...]

Yesterday’s meeting of top newspaper executives in Chicago, where they considered ways to charge for content online, has reignited the often-passionate discussion of whether news sites could generate subscription revenue from readers. Plenty has been written about the futility of erecting pay walls — much of which I agree with — but a few points [...]

This is an update to a recent post about the Wall Street Journal and its policies on Twitter use by its staff. In that post, I essentially agreed with a post by Jeff Jarvis in which he argued that the WSJ policy “missed the point” of social media in general by trying to lock down [...]

Shortly before 10 this morning, Amy Trachtman heard what seemed like a military jet zoom past her apartment building in Jersey City, N.J. Her first instinct? Tweet about it.
“just had a mild heart attack from a jet plane grazing the apartment…” Trachtman wrote at 9:59 a.m., becoming — as far as I can tell — [...]

Last week we published two videos from my interview with Alan Murray, deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, covering his wisdom on charging for content and his thoughts on changes at the Journal under Rupert Murdoch.
In this third installment, Murray, who oversees the Journal’s website, talks about what qualities he looks for in [...]

The clearest indication of Rupert Murdoch’s influence over The Wall Street Journal might be pirates on the front page. Yesterday’s lead story reported the dramatic tale of hijacking and hostages on the high seas of East Africa. “U.S. Cargo Ship Repels Pirates” was the headline. (The cover of Murdoch’s New York Post was less restrained: [...]

At more than 24,000 words, Steve Fainaru’s Pulitzer-winning reports on American mercenaries in Iraq were nearly as long as Heart of Darkness and just as eerie. But spread over nine installments in nine months, the Washington Post series could hardly be read as literature.
Later this month, a coalition of news organizations — including the Post, [...]

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, [...]

Over the past several weeks, we’ve been ramping up our use of Twitter to share interesting links, promote our work, interact with readers, and collaborate on reporting. Consider following us over there or checking out our five most-recent tweets in the sidebar at right. Here are some of the more popular and interesting links we’ve [...]

This morning we revealed the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008 as ranked by average monthly unique visitors. Now let’s take a closer look first at the top five national newspapers. (Note that the y-axis in the chart above starts at 3,000,000 uniques to get a sense of the finer fluctuations among these sites; think [...]

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 [...]

— The Wall Street Journal is talking out loud about poaching the markets of the major metros, Gawker says. Would that mean regional variations of the WSJ that are have just enough local content to turn two-paper subscribers into one-paper subscribers? I have a hard time seeing average newspaper readers converting in large numbers to [...]

— Blog company offers a temporary “bailout” for journalists — free blogging software. Plus membership in an ad network that promises to pay more than AdSense. Worth grabbing, not for money-making reasons (the coin will be small), but for this reason: “[T]he first result for a Google search on your name will be an active, [...]