What Are They Thinking? Eight Principles for Mathias Dopfner's Transformation of Axel Springer

Newsonomics reporting:
...3. Greatly reduce dependency on print as a source of earnings.

Today, Springer can claim that 72 percent of its earnings now comes from digital businesses. In jettisoning newspaper businesses and investing in digital, the earnings sources have seen quick reversal. Just six years ago, only 13 percent of earnings came from digital businesses. Earnings are still a struggle, though, up only 8 million euro 2014 over 2012.

3. Greatly reduce dependency on print as a source of earnings. Today, Springer can claim that 72 percent of its earnings now comes from digital businesses. In jettisoning newspaper businesses and investing in digital, the earnings sources have seen quick reversal. Just six years ago, only 13 percent of earnings came from digital businesses. Earnings are still a struggle, though, up only 8 million euro 2014 over 2012.

How can legacy publishers supplement falling print revenues?

themediabriefing reporting:

"Most publishers are getting into native advertising because brands believe well written content that carries their message will cut through the cacophony of digital advertising, and publishers can charge a premium prices, as opposed to traditional display advertising, where excess inventory continues to put downward pressure on CPMs and returns. To compete in this hot space, major publishers are creating content studios staffed with crack design and editorial staff to create truly premium native advertising content. The New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journaland broadcaster CNN have all launched content studios."http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/how-can-legacy-publishers-supplement-falling-print-revenues

What the next recession could do to the media business

Politico / Ken Doctor reporting: While newspapers’ financial woes now receive decreasing media attention, 2015 has been worse than 2014 – and no year has shown revenue growth since 2007. These are fragile enterprises, unquestionably in downward spiral, by any metric. Newsroom employment is down to 32,900, and will soon be half what it was 25 years ago. They are profitable, but for most, only on the basis of continual cost-cutting.

In truth, newspaper companies lost a huge amount of revenue – one-fifth of their pre-recession totals – in one year and then continued to lose. If recession accelerated newspaper ad revenue loss, so did economic recovery, as advertisers switch to digital further picked up steam. One publisher notes that throughout all the change we’ve seen, newspapers have taken a “disproportionate hit.” Unfortunately, that history would probably repeat.

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/08/8575230/what-next-recession-could-do-media-business

Why some UK publishers are investing in events spaces

digiday reporting: The digital era was supposed to mean publishers could shed expensive, pricey physical assets. Yet some publishers are putting big money into brick-and-mortar outposts, whether educational facilities or events spaces, in the hopes of wringing more value from their brands.

...The Condé Nast College of Fashion & Design

Condé Nast College was set up in 2013 to educate those looking to get into the fashion industry. Courses include the Vogue Fashion Certificate cost £8,100 ($12,500) plus tax for 10 weeks’ tuition. The College is situated in a 12,000-square-foot space in the middle of SoHo, London, which comes with a mix of flexible rooms, studios and a roof terrace. The College also doubles as a space for events for Condé Nast U.K.’s magazine brands and is available for private events.

...Guardian Space by Guardian News & Media

Guardian News and Media is renovating the Midlands Good Shed in King’s Cross, London, to launch Guardian Space in 2016. The 30,000-square-foot space will enable the company to run “a huge number” of Guardian Live events and act as a hub for its membership program. But such a large space would be hard for the Guardian to justify for its events alone. With that in mind, the space will also act as a hub for events offered by other cultural and educational organizations including Birkbeck, Central St Martins, Indytute and 5×15.

Its membership, which acts something like a patron plan, offers three tiers of status and access to events at a price range of £15 to £60 ($23 to $92) a month....

http://digiday.com/publishers/uk-publishers-investing-events-spaces/

The NYTimes could be worth $19bn instead of $2bn

Monday Note reporting:

Recent annual reports and estimates for the calendar year 2014 suggest interesting comparisons between the financial performance of media (either legacy or digital) and Internet giants.

In the charts below, I look at seven companies, each in a class by itself:

Coming back to our analysis, Google unsurprisingly crushes all competitors when it comes its financial performance against its audience (counted in monthly unique visitors):

http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/02/15/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-instead-of-2bn/

The World's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 In Media

Fast Comapnyr reporting:

1. THE WASHINGTON POST

For regaining its strength (with a little help from Jeff Bezos). When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for just $250 million, it wasn’t clear whether the tech maven could breathe new life into a 140-year-old print newspaper. But nearly two years later, The Post is thriving. The change has been largely driven by both an infusion of new talent (more than 100 new employees have been hired) and greater focus on the publication’s digital presence, including the announcement last fall that the Post’s app will come preloaded on Amazon products, and the hiring of 25 engineers to create eye-catching interactive web stories. Already the newspaper is seeing the positive effects: Just one year after Bezos’s purchase, unique monthly visitors to the Post’s website increased by 61%, setting an all-time traffic record for the paper.

2. BUZZFEED VIDEO

For making viral video seem easy...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3041669/most-innovative-companies-2015/the-worlds-top-10-most-innovative-companies-of-2015-in-media

Newsonomics: How deep is the newspaper industry’s money hole?

Ken Doctor reporting:

How big a hole is the U.S. daily newspaper industry in?

We know the toll in newsroom jobs — about 20,000 lost in a little under a decade — and the fact that the industry as a whole took in about $26 billion less in 2014 than it did a decade earlier. We’re used to, and fairly inured to, those numbers. So let’s ask a new question: How close is the industry as a whole to reversing its long slump? That’s an answer we can quantify.

In 2013, total revenue in the U.S. industry totaled $37.5 billion, accordingto NAA. That number was down an even one billion dollars, or 2.5 percent, from the year before. The difference between its actual performance and what it would have needed to get to the new normal: $1.4 billion. With a revenue of $38.9 billion, the industry would have grown one percent and stayed even with inflation. The industry missed a new normal by about 4 percent.

It may seem like a small number, but it’s been a mountainous goal. The industry hasn’t overall seen revenue growth at all (much less with inflation taken into account) since 2007. The continued declines in print advertising — down in the high single digits, percentage-wise, year after year — have been too big for other revenue sources to make up the difference.

...Think of industry’s potential revenue growth buckets as three-fold: reader revenue, digital advertising, and what we’ll call the Third Stream.....

..The Third Stream The situation: In 2013, what NAA considers “newly developing” revenue came in at $3.15 billion. Notably, this is the fastest growing play publishers have, growing a little faster than circ revenue.What’s in this bucket? It’s things like commercial printing, distribution of other products (e.g., other newspapers), event marketing, e-commerce and marketing services...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/01/newsonomics-how-deep-is-the-newspaper-industrys-money-hole/

Inside the NY Times’ audience development strategy

digiday reporting:
...
“It isn’t chasing clicks”
As a founding editor of The Huffington Post, MacCallum understands well the need to have social analytics at a news product’s core. Having been on the business side — she joined the Times (after getting her law degree at UC Berkeley) in a strategy and development role for video and then the paper’s new Cooking product — she had worked closely with tech and design teams, which gave her an understanding of how those parts of the Times ecosystem work together. But MacCallum said while the Times could learn from viral news outlets like the HuffPost and BuzzFeed, her goal for the paper, as a news brand with a strong subscription business, is different.
“It isn’t chasing clicks; it’s making people loyal to the Times specifically,” she said. “The Times has had the luxury of readers coming direct for many many years. As readers move from search to social, we haven’t been as in front of them.”
Things are off to a hopeful start. In a memo to staff in January, executive editor Dean Baquet said that in the first two months since the paper increased its audience focus, the Times’ online readership has increased 20 percent. (ComScore multiplatform figures back up that claim, showing the Times’ U.S. monthly uniques rose 22 percent from August to November, when they stood at 56.4 million.) Some of that was due to a strong news month in October, but MacCallum has also been busy, building her team and introducing new practices at the paper....

http://digiday.com/publishers/inside-ny-times-audience-development-strategy/

Magazines boomed during 2014

New York Post reporting:
It was a banner year for magazines — at least in terms of new titles jumping into the market.
Professor Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi, counted 234 magazine launches in 2014 — up 21 percent from the 185 launched a year earlier.
The one-time book-a-zines and annuals added 621 titles, although the book-a-zine craze seems to have slowed down somewhat. It was down by 32 titles from 2013.
...
Husni tagged Dr. Oz The Good Life, which debuted in February, as his Magazine of the Year.
“It was the first magazine since O, the Oprah Magazine, in 2000 that had to go back on press for a second printing of its debut issue,” he said.
The joint venture between Hearst and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the heart surgeon/talk show host, plans to up the rate base to 800,000 next year from its launch rate base of 450,000.
One noticeable trend, Husni said, was the move by pure digital companies to roll out traditional print magazines.
The trend follows companies like Politico, DuJour and All Recipes, digital products all, that launched print titles in 2013.
Net-a-Porter launched Porter magazine with a February/March issue, while the booming apartment rental site, Airbnb, launched its own magazine, called Pineapple, this month.
“I know we live in a digital age, but print is still a powerful medium,” he said. “I think any digital company that is worth anything will be doing print magazines in the next two to three years,” said Husni.
One other reason for print’s staying power, according to publishers, is that there has been relentless downward pressure on the standard banner ads on the digital side, making the relatively stable print ad page prices more attractive. Big publishers are nevertheless doing far fewer big launches...
http://nypost.com/2014/12/31/magazines-boomed-during-2014/ 

Ken Doctor: “Rosewater,” cascading censorship, and press freedom

Ken Doctor reporting:
As the year ends, take a moment to look past business models and apps and think about how you can help the challenged cause of press freedom worldwide....
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/ken-doctor-rosewater-cascading-censorship-and-press-freedom/

How newspapers lost the Millennials

Newsosaur reporting:
The inability of newspapers to resonate with digital natives has left them with a daunting demographic challenge. Two-thirds of the audience at the typical newspaper is composed of people over the age of 55, according to Greg Harmon of Borrell Associates. “The newspaper audience ages another year every year,” he adds. “Everyone’s hair ought to be on fire.” 

As the newspaper audience grays, the readers that newspapers – and most of their advertisers – would like to have are, instead, busily racking up page views at places like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox. 

To delve into the demographic disparity, I pulled the audience data on Mic.Com, which comScore calls the favorite news destination for individuals from the ages of 18 to 34. Although many publishers and editors never may have heard of Mic, comScore says it is visited by a thumping 60% of Millenials. 
,,,In a recent study, researchers at the University of Missouri reported that only 29% of newspaper publishers conducted focus groups prior to putting paywalls around the digital products that most profess to be the future of their franchises.  

Instead of talking with their intended consumers, fully 85% of respondents to the survey said they asked other publishers what they thought about erecting barriers around the content that they had been freely providing for the better part of two decades.  

While paywalls boosted revenues at most newspapers because they were accompanied by stiff increases in print subscription rates, the tactic gave the growing population of digital natives – and non-readers of every other age – the best reason yet for not engaging with newspapers. 

Of course, newspapers were losing Millenials well before they started feverishly erecting paywalls in the last few years. But what if publishers and editors had begun studying the needs and attitudes of the emerging generation from the early days of the Millenium? Could the outcomes have been more positive?  

http://newsosaur.blogspot.fi/2014/12/how-newspapers-lost-millenials.html?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=aadbc83941-Need_to_Know_December_12_201412_12_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-aadbc83941-31701933

The fight to get Google to pay for news continues in Europe

NiemanLab reporting:
BERLIN — The European Union’s new commissioner for digital affairs didn’t waste any time. Days before starting the job at the end of October, Günther Oettinger (his official title is commissioner for digital economy and society) announced plans to reform European copyright law in 2015. That could mean introducing a levy on search engines when they show results for European companies, he said — a contested issue that’s been pushed by large news media companies from across Europe in recent months.
Oettinger has announced few details of his plans for copyright reform. But in an interview with the German daily newspaper Handelsblatt, he made it clear that he wants to tackle Google’s profits from listing European companies in search results. “If Google takes intellectual property from the EU and works with that, then the EU can protect that property and demand Google pay for that,” he said.
Copyright laws nicknamed “Google taxes” have been passed in a few European countries over the past few years. That name is deceptive — the laws don’t call for an actual tax since any fee Google is made to pay will go to publishers, not governments — but they have left Google at the center of legal battles driven by major publishers. Spain passed a law at the end of October that charges search engines to pay a copyright collection agency for including snippets from and links to news websites. In 2013, France’s government settled news publishers’ demands for copyright reform by striking a deal with Google: For a flat rate of €60 million (invested into a fund for digital publishing), the company was allowed to continue listing news articles in search results.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-fight-to-get-google-to-pay-for-news-continues-in-europe/

Membership focus helps Times Newspapers make first operating profit since 2001

The MediaBriefing reporting:
News UK subsidiary Times Newspapers, which runs the Times and Sunday Times newspapers, recorded an operating profit of £1.7 million for the financial year ending June 30 2014, as the newspapers steadily grew their digital subscriber bases and shifted more of their readers into long-term membership relationships.
The operating profit is the first for the two newspapers since 2001, and follows losses of £6 million in 2013 and £70 million in 2009, before the newspapers began charging for all online content.
News UK refused to reveal pre-tax profit for the newspapers and that operating figure doesn't mean the newspapers are yet sustainable on their own. At a press event in London, News UK chief marketing officer Chris Duncan said the swing from loss to profit reflected the impact of significant investment in areas such as unified subscription handling and publishing, as well as journalism.

http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/membership-focus-helps-times-newspapers-make-first-profit-since-2001

Let’s get over the whole 'newspapers are dying' thing

the guardian reporting:
...Fourthly, they are tilting their revenue balance away from advertising and towards content. The FT actually makes most of its money from content, essentially flipping the modern newspaper business model on its head. But this has benefits on the advertising side as well. The greater behavioural and demographic insight that comes with membership plans and paywalls helps newspapers move away from empty calories like slideshow page views towards more valuable engagement metrics like time spent.

Advertisement

Finally, along with dozens of other industries, they recognise the increasing importance of live events. The Guardian is a pioneer in this category – or at least it will be when its event space opens in 2016. Membership access to TED-style forums, celebrity speakers, music concerts and Mediterranean cruises is one way to broaden the subscription experience and connect like-minded readers.
So let’s get over the whole “newspapers are dying” thing. They’re certainly moving in lots of creative new directions (and eventually they may ascend out of physical world altogether - holograms, maybe?), but they’re definitely not going gently into that good night...http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/2014/nov/07/newspapers-not-dying-buzzfeed-new-york-times?CMP=new_1194

Spain passes ‘Google tax’ allowing publishers to charge aggregators fee for displaying their content in search results

Talking NewMedia reporting:
The Spanish parliament is the latest to empower publishers to charge search engines a fee whenever they aggregate their online news content in search results. The law goes into effect on January 1.
The new law, Canon AEDE, is similar to efforts in other countries, namely Germany, where news organizations have lobbied to have laws passed that would require Google to pay publishers for displaying content. The problem, of course, is that Google simply says it will not pay, and will, if forced, eliminate the news content of publishers from their search result. The effect is the decrease the web traffic going to publishers, and therefore decreasing the money publishers make online.
http://www.talkingnewmedia.com/2014/10/30/spain-passes-google-tax-allowing-publishers-to-charge-aggregators-fee-for-displaying-their-content-in-search-results/?utm_source=API%27s+Need+to+Know+newsletter&utm_campaign=4c1de47613-Need_to_Know_October_31_201410_31_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3bf78af04-4c1de47613-31701933

The New York Times’ financials show the transition to digital accelerating

Ken Doctor reporting:
Call it an acceleration of the digital transition. Those are the words that best describe this morning’s New York Times Co. Q3 financial report and conference call.
Take the month of October — the biggest ad revenue month of the year for the Times.
Digital advertising will be up about 15 percent this month, says Times Co. chief financial officer Jim Follo, but print advertising will be down about 10 percent, with total ad revenue down 5 percent. The delta is widening, though these are not placid waters. Choppy or “volatile,” as CEO Mark Thompson said, repeating that word many times to describe the ups and downs of print ad revenue. “Inexplicable” is another word Thompson used, trying to explain the vagaries of managing a declining, if still valuable, print ad business.
...Overall, the Times reported adjusted operating profit at $40 million, down $5 million a year ago.
Much more important to understand than these bottom line numbers are the ones that illustrate the quickening acceleration to digital.
Look only at the income results of the quarter — an overall 0.8 percent increase in revenues — and you’d miss the drama of that volatility. What seems like a smooth drive is actually quite a bumpy journey. Advertising is moving profoundly (but haphazardly) from print to digital, as are readers. While the Times could count 44,000 new digital subscribers in the quarter, a 20 percent year-over-year increase, it lost 5.2 percent of its daily print readers — and, more worryingly, 3.5 percent of its Sunday print subscribers. The Times already counts more digital subs than print ones, and the divide is widening...
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/ken-doctor-the-new-york-times-financials-show-a-digital-transition-speeding-up/

The New York Times Co. and Axel Springer are investing €3 million in Dutch startup Blendle

NiemanLab reporting:
The New York Times Company and German publisher Axel Springer are collectively investing €3 million ($3.7 million) in Blendle, a Dutch news startup where readers pay by the article, Blendle announced Sunday.
Blendle said it will use the Series A funding to expand to additional European countries beyond the Netherlands over the next two years. In an email, Blendle cofounder Alexander Klöpping wouldn’t elaborate on the company’s expansion plans, saying it “all depends on in which countries publishers are most excited.” Klöpping declined to say how much each company was investing, only that the total was €3 million. Axel Springer, which is making the investment through its venture arm Axel Springer Digital Ventures, also wouldn’t say how much it’s investing. The Times didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Blendle launched publicly in May, and the site has more than 130,000 registered users. Publishers set the prices for how much each of their articles cost, and keep 70 percent of the revenue generated from those stories. Blendle takes the other 30 percent.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/10/the-new-york-times-co-and-axel-springer-are-investing-e3-million-in-dutch-startup-blendle/

News and Innovation. But what is the Question?

baekdal reporting:

Q: What are the top 3 areas in which newspaper publishers should innovate in the digital space?

...
Well, I feel the word innovation is misleading in this context. It implies that newspapers can just focus on a specific thing (like mobile), and then everything will be fine. We all know it won't.
Real innovation doesn't work that way. Real innovation is about solving a problem for a specific group of people in a specific situation.
Nike, for instance, innovates by inventing shoes, clothes and apps that allow athletes to run faster, with less injuries, in greater comfort, all of which can be measured and analyzed to further improve and tweak their performance.
This is where the challenge is for most newspapers. The traditional model of a random package of daily news didn't have a target audience. It was just targeted anyone, in any situation.
So, step one is to identify your target for innovation. And once you know that, what to innovate suddenly becomes clear as day because you will know what the problem is....
This is the challenged that newspapers face. To innovate you first need to know what the question is.
Innovation is not about mobile, tablets, apps, aggregation, responsive designs, listicles and many other things. It's about understanding what the question is, and then innovate to find an answer to that problem.
The newspaper industry will find that there are a thousand different questions with an equal amount of answers. It all depends on what you decide to focus on.
https://www.baekdal.com/opinion/news-and-innovation-but-what-is-the-question/?utm_source=Baekdal+List&utm_campaign=b0369ce678-EMAIL-UPDATE&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a820ca719e-b0369ce678-358411673

How Gigaom Built a Media Business Around Free Content

Mediashift reporting:
Last month, Paul Walborsky stepped down after seven years as chief executive of Gigaom. During that time, the tech site grew enormously in traffic and revenue as it expanded its business beyond just advertising. Currently, about 60 percent of Gigaom’s revenues (estimated to be around $15 million annually) come from research and 25 percent from events. Advertising accounts for only about 15 percent of total revenues. Walborsky, who is 48, spoke with PBS MediaShift about the struggles of running an editorial-based business when competition is fierce and ad rates continue to slump.

Gabriel Kahn: In media, size matters. How does an operation like Gigaom, which averages about 6.5 million unique visitors a month, make a go of it?

Paul Walborsky: Media either has to be huge, at the BuzzFeed level, or small and intimate.
When we started, we looked at each other and said, “We’re never going to get to a 100 million uniques.” The type of content we write is more analytical. We can squeeze about 20 million page views a month out of our audience. If we tried to build an editorial business just based on advertising we’d never be able to pay our staff.
So chasing page views is a dead end?
Paul Walborsky: Our whole concept was not to serve you another page and make you click once more; it was to give you a good user experience. So by definition we had to have a different business model. I don’t think about creating page views. I think about creating long-term relationships with readers. If you have a long-term relationship, you do different things. You get them to come back. You serve them well. And you then try to upsell them more products and services...
...Paul Walborsky: Editorial is the focal point of our business model. This is where we create credibility. That is what keeps people coming back. Without our editorial content, without people writing things everyday that make readers feel smarter, we would not have a brand. We just choose not to monetize that content directly. We monetize it in different ways...
By this logic, when Gigaom uses space on a page to sell an ad, it almost represents a failure because the company itself should be able to find a better use for that same space.

Paul Walborsky: The situation in media is laughable. When we sell ad units, we are basically selling our reader relationship to someone who doesn’t care about it. The advertisers are selling a car or a trip to Vegas. If we could create enough products, we could use that space ourselves to sell that audience something that is actually meaningful to them.
That’s what we did with our research. Then other companies began doing the same.
We saw Politico Pro come out, then Business Insider came out with research....
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/10/how-gigaom-built-a-media-business-around-free-content/

Aftonbladet gör direktsänd morgon-tv

Dagens Media reporting:

Aftonbladet gör direktsänd morgon-tv

Publicerad 7 oktober 2014 15:42 15 kommentarer

Aftonbladet ska göra ett morgonsänt nyhetsprogram online varje vardag mellan 06 och 09.

Aftonbladet ska göra ett morgonsänt nyhetsprogram online varje vardag mellan 06 och 09.

Dagens Media har tidigare skrivit om Aftonbladets tv-satsning. Under ledning av Karin Magnusson, Maria Bjaring och Claes Åkesson, ska Aftonbladet nu direktsända morgon-tv.
Programmet kommer att vara en mix av de senaste nyheterna, sport, nöje och feature. Delar av materialet kommer också att finnas tillgängligt på Aftonbladet TV hela dagen.
Producent för det nya morgonprogrammet är Lotta Folcker, programchef för Aftonbladet TV, som tidigare varit chef för Nyhetsmorgon på TV4.
http://www.dagensmedia.se/nyheter/dig/article3853982.ece