All entries tagged: business model
Lessons learned in Year 1 of a magazine correspondent’s (would-be) online news startup
Jeff Israely, a Time magazine foreign correspondent in Europe, is in the planning stages of a news startup — a "new global news website." He details his experience as a new news entrepreneur at his site, but he'll occasionally be describing the startup process here at the Lab. —Josh
I realized not long ago that it’s been one full year since that night I drifted off to sleep, (suddenly) secure in the knowledge that this was going to be the new passion and focus of my professional life. With the future looking grim for any single foreign correspondent, it was time to commit to the one good idea I’d been mulling for awhile: a unique, cost-efficient way to produce high-profile world news content online. It would be a few more months before I would actually be operative, but I dozed off that night knowing that with a lot of hard work, a few good friends, and a couple of million pesos of funding, all would fall into place.
How I got to that late-night clarity is a long, not very fascinating story. But what has happened since — both much more and much less than I could have envisioned that night — may be of some interest for those tracking or taking part in the figuring out of where the news business is heading. Banging it out here will certainly be of use to me, to give a quick hard once-over at my past mistakes, and return to the counsel of Lesson No. 11 below.
So here’s the run down of the would-be lessons that I’ve learned — and keep on trying to learn. Keep reading »
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: How paidContent found its niche
[Here's another excerpt from Ken Doctor's new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, Ken's Q&A with Rafat Ali, who runs media-world must-read paidContent. —Josh]
Rafat Ali is founder, publisher and editor of ContentNext Media. Reuters described its success well: “ContentNext’s flagship paidContent, founded in 2002, has quickly established itself as a must-read among executives in the media and digital media sector.” PaidContent has indeed a daily stop for those involved in the business of news, media, and entertainment industries. In addition, the company runs parallel sites for the United Kingdom and India and around mobile content.
Q: PaidContent filled a niche no one had previously seen as clearly as you did. How did you see the niche, define it, and make sure you got it as focused as you could?
A: This was the depths of Internet recession in 2002 in New York City, and I was looking for a way to raise my profile, and this seemed like a good way to showcase my skills as an online journalist covering online media and the Internet. I was aiming for a new job with the likes of WSJ and CNET then. Of course, no one was hiring in those days, much less hiring an online journalist covering online media. Keep reading »
From Ken Doctor’s “Newsonomics”: What Phil Balboni learned about online journalism from cable news
[I'm very pleased to say that Ken Doctor, one of the smartest minds out there on the business side of journalism's digital future, is going to be joining us here at the Nieman Journalism Lab. You'll see his pieces on the economics of news here weekly. But at the moment, Ken is focused on the release of his new book, Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get. Today, tomorrow, and Wednesday, we'll be running three brief excerpts from the book, each a Q&A with a leading journalist whose career has been shifted by the Internet. First up is GlobalPost CEO Phil Balboni. —Josh]
Phil Balboni launched GlobalPost in January 2009, just as many news companies were further reducing international reporting. He acted on a forty-year-old idea he’d had about bringing back global news to American audiences — and had seen that the ability of Internet efficiencies now made it possible. GlobalPost is his second career; he founded and ran the award-winning New England Cable News (NECN) business for many years. Now he can look out on the harbor, where clipper ships came in, and beyond, to his growing network of more than seventy correspondents working around the world.
Q: How did your cable news experience inform your GlobalPost plan?
A: There are quite a few, seminal lessons learned from NECN. First, the enormous value of more than one revenue stream and not being solely dependent on advertising. Keep reading »
