Audrea Huff

For traditional media companies fighting to stay on top in the internet age it may no longer be a case of forgoing analog dollars in favor of digital pennies just to stay ahead of the pack.

Media and entertainment companies say that 47 percent of their overall revenues currently come from digital products, according to a new report by professional services firm Ernst & Young. Further, they project that by 2015 a majority of their income, or 57 percent, will be generated from digital sales.

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To arrive at those numbers, Ernst & Young surveyed more than 550 senior executives at technology, gaming, publishing, film, broadcast and cable and social networking companies.

Read full story: Majority of Media and Entertainment Revenue Will Come From Digital by 2015, Study Finds

In every way, metros under-perform smaller, community-sized papers — as many community publishers point out to me when they complain (justifiably) about media coverage that uses metro papers’ woes as a proxy for the entire daily industry.

Why do metros underperform? They are caught between the national/global players and community dailies. Community dailies — think those with 75,000 or less circulation — cover smaller geographic areas. More of their coverage is expressly local, meaning the stories may touch neighborhoods and issues known to readers. They also typically face less competition for readers and for advertising.

Read the entire report at NiemanLab.org.

Over the years, it grew to have an office of its own, where students would come to produce a newspaper that was distributed to the classrooms of more than 1,200 teachers across Los Angeles County. It had a circulation of 70,000 and an estimated readership of 400,000, Myrow said.

But L.A. Youth struggled financially in recent years, reeling from the loss of foundation grants and corporate donations that were a primary source of funding. After the paper almost ran out of money last year, narrowly surviving through last-minute gifts, its board of directors decided it had run out of options and voted earlier this month to cease publishing.

Read the full story at LATimes.com.

In the U.K., we found a few journalistic startups who’ve experiment with business models and have found somewhat unexpected revenue streams — including money made selling something other than their journalism, most often technology. One British example is Tweetminster, which gets its name from a mashup of Twitter and London’s Westminster. Tweetminster automatically curates what experts in U.K. politics and current affairs think is important, based on data and without human intervention. For its clients and partners, however, the company produces analysis of particular industries, topics, or markets — all based on what experts of those fields are paying attention to online. “Everything we do outside of politics we charge for. We sell a license to use our software. It’s an API, so as the clients make more calls, the price goes up,” CEO Alberto Nardelli said.

Blottr is a U.K.-based citizen journalism news service, but its income also comes mainly from its technology.

Read the full report here.

In a note to staff and in a story published on the paper’s website, the Chicago Tribune announced it is resuming work with Journatic after suspending relations following a range of ethical breaches at the Tribune and other publications.

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The Tribune, an investor in Journatic, suspended work with them in July after discovering plagiarism and fabrication in a story published for TribLocal, a hyperlocal news network serving Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs. Prior to that discovery, “This American Life” revealed that Journatic used fake bylines and took other ethical shortcuts.

Read more at Poynter.org.

“From January to June, Google received nearly 8,000 requests for user data from the U.S. government. The search company said it “fully or partially” compiled with roughly 90 percent of them. That’s up from the 5,950 requests for user data that Google received from the U.S. government during the same period a year ago.”

Read the entire report here.

breakingnews:

BBC News: Taiwan-based Foxconn Technology, a major supplier for Apple, halts production at a plant in northern China after a fight broke out among workers.

Foxconn confirmed that a ‘personal dispute’ escalated into an incident involving about 2,000 workers, injuring 40 of them.

Foxconn has previously been accused of having poor conditions for its workers.

All this hysteria over the new iPhone reminds me of one of my favorite SNL skits. 

onaunconference:

Once upon a time, the jobs in journalism were all at what we would consider traditional outlets — Time, Newsweek, ABC News, the Washington Post, etc. But these days, journalists who’ve had their pick of those publications are flocking to tech companies like Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter to create stories — content that competes, in breadth and scope, with the highest-caliber traditional publications. As print suffers a slow and painful decline, it’s not just the web that’s changing journalism as we know it — it’s tech companies like Tumblr and Facebook who are launching what could be the new new media movement. But what does this mean for the future of traditional journalistic outlets? Can a journalist remain objective when she’s employed by a company? Are journalists’ future homes in places that aren’t primarily about journalism, and should it be?

Read More

A growing number of new businesses are following in the footsteps of successful companies such as Dropbox Inc., LinkedIn Corp., and Skype Inc., by giving away their products and services free to build a customer base.

Yet for some, the “freemium” strategy is turning out to be a costly trap, leaving them with higher operating costs and thousands of freeloaders.

That’s what happened to Chargify LLC, a provider of billing-management software to small businesses, which used the freemium business model when it started out in 2009.

The Needham, Mass., company gave away its software to merchants that billed fewer than 50 customers a month. If a merchant wanted to bill more than 50 customers monthly, then the business owner would have to start paying $49 a month.

Most Chargify users never became paying customers. Within a year, the company was on the path to bankruptcy.

Chargify eventually put up a paywall for all users. Last month the 12-employee company became profitable, with more than 900 paying customers. The starter plan is $65 a month.

“The decision to move away from freemium was the best business decision we ever made,” said Lance Walley, co-founder and chief executive officer.

via online.wsj.com

A growing number of new businesses are following in the footsteps of successful companies such as Dropbox Inc., LinkedIn Corp., and Skype Inc., by giving away their products and services free to build a customer base.

Yet for some, the “freemium” strategy is turning out to be a costly trap, leaving them with higher operating costs and thousands of freeloaders.

That’s what happened to Chargify LLC, a provider of billing-management software to small businesses, which used the freemium business model when it started out in 2009.

The Needham, Mass., company gave away its software to merchants that billed fewer than 50 customers a month. If a merchant wanted to bill more than 50 customers monthly, then the business owner would have to start paying $49 a month.

Most Chargify users never became paying customers. Within a year, the company was on the path to bankruptcy.

Chargify eventually put up a paywall for all users. Last month the 12-employee company became profitable, with more than 900 paying customers. The starter plan is $65 a month.

“The decision to move away from freemium was the best business decision we ever made,” said Lance Walley, co-founder and chief executive officer.

via online.wsj.com via @pattonroberta