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Archives: March 2020

O’Reilly Media, long known for its successful conferences, has decided that it’s getting out of the business — no matter how quickly civilization gets past COVID-19. Will events revenue bounce back quickly in a few months or be lost under a mountain of Zoom calls?
For publishers seeing their ad revenue crater amid coronavirus, Scroll’s pitch of a paid ad-free experience sounds awfully appealing.
News products that the Journal built to highlight its election coverage to occasional readers are being repurposed for coronavirus coverage.
Plus a deep dive into how coronavirus is affecting the podcast industry. “Some podcasts can survive cuts in direct support. Some can survive losses in advertising revenue. A great many can’t.”
“The economic problem for journalism was not competition, in other words, but surveillance and monopoly.”
“We are accustomed to seeing images of crisis represented by fires, floods, bombs, warfare. The photographs we see as a result of COVID-19 are an emptying out and a slowing down.”
COVID-19 is “a nearly perfect weapon against alternative weeklies.” In dozens of cities, papers are asking for donations, laying off staff, or abandoning print as social distancing dries up their revenue streams.