LINKS | Newspapers Don’t Need Micropayments

Newspaper Business Models

• How to Save Your Newspaper | TIME: Didn’t we already have this debate? Paying for essential information doesn’t work. You can charge a niche audience, (a’la Wall Street Journal) but charging the masses just won’t work. This is the story that initiated the latest debate across the web.
• Death Of Print: How Not to Save Newspapers: A really good argument against the micropayment plan for journalism.
• Lab Book Club: Jay Hamilton, Chapter 2 on Vimeo: As newsorgs rely on less and less sustainable business models, they become more and more biased. Ends with a call for the non-profit business model.
• Please pay us for our news – please? Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: Sums up the argument for and against the paid content model and concludes that users never really paid for content anyway, and that newspapers must add some value to the news to be … valued.
• Journalism 2.0 There really are new business models for journalism: A list of some new media orgs that are surviving in today’s economy with off-beat business models.
• Nonprofit Newspapers: Worth a Try – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com: A good argument for the non-profit business model through examining an argument against.

Advertising

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  • Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper-site traffic: Weaker than it looks: Engagement at newspaper websites is very, very low, averaging 27 seconds/user. That’s extremely low, and does not help sell advertising.
  • “As of 2007, half of newspaper site visitors were 45 or older. By comparison only 34.4% of the U.S. population is 45 or older, according to the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau.”
  • How to grow local revenue, despite the ad inventory glut Nieman Journalism Lab Pushing to the Future of Journalism: A really good look at how to leverage new media tech to increase ad sales. More importantly, it calls for a re-examining of how ads are treated online — sell them with the same value as you sell print ads.

Tech

• “The Daily Kos now boasts six quad core Xeons with 8GB of RAM that network boot from a central NFS root, with local scratch disks for logs and other machine specific files, and each running 1GB of memcache shared with a total memcache pool of 6GBs. “With the network file system root and network booting for our Web servers, it’s easy to add new servers to the Web server pool on a moment’s notice,” Bingham said. The database now runs on two eight core Xeons with 16GB of RAM each, and dedicated drives for the operating system and locally mounting /tmp. MySQL runs on six 73GB disks in a RAID-10 configuration, with the two servers are in a master/slave setup, while an additional quad Xeon works with the dual Pentium 4s for outgoing mail and search and acts as the origin point for the content delivery network. A Xen virtual machine runs MySQL enslaved to the master and stores back-up snapshots of the database.”Techworld – How the Kossacks conquered AmericaThat’s is how the big boys play.  
• NYTimes Exposes 2.8 Million Articles in New API – ReadWriteWeb: The New York Timesseems to be moving towards establishing itself as a platform of news. Sharing all of it’s content in this matter is a good indicator that they ‘get it’

Photography & Design

• On Portfolio Reviews (part 2) (Conscientious): Good advice for getting a photography portfolio reviewed from a variety of people who do it.

• Clear And Effective Communication In Web Design | How-To | Smashing Magazine: States a lot of basics of web design, but it’s a good textbook like approach.