The New York Times Sunday magazine had a fascinating piece over the weekend by Andrew Rice about the new realities of publishing on the internet. It’s a long read, but worthwhile as a snapshot in time: the old media is dying and the new media is still struggling to be born:

For many years, newspapers and magazines operated in fairly uniform fashion, supported by two streams of revenue. The consumers purchased the product, and businesses paid to reach them with advertisements. Recessions came and went, ad pages expanded and contracted, publications started and went under — but nothing disturbed the basic model. Online economics have changed both sides of the profit equation. “It’s dawning on people that the marketplace will no longer pay the freight,” says Ken Doctor, a former newspaper executive and the author of “Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.”

Early on, almost all print publications decided to offer free access to their online content, which over time cut into their print circulation. In theory, the industry should have been able to absorb the gradual loss of paying readers. Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb — and because publications could reach vastly larger audiences online, it seemed reasonable to expect that they’d be able to make more money from ads. But instead, online ads sell at rates that are a fraction of those for print, for simple reasons of competition. “In a print world you had pretty much a limited amount of inventory — pages in a magazine,” says Domenic Venuto, managing director of the online marketing firm Razorfish. “In the online world, inventory has become infinite.”

(more…)

I welcomed the Daily Caller to the community today with this article:

The launch of the Daily Caller is a necessary step toward creating ideological parity in the all-too-clearly biased mainstream media. It is a good thing that you, Tucker, are admitting that you come to the table with certain ideological baggage, and my new site Big Journalism will be there to watch your back when the well-funded, organized left’s knives come out to try to discredit and attempt to destroy you. Believe me, they will.

In my mind, you are coming to the table as an honest broker, like me and Arianna Huffington. As partisans and ideologues, to one extent or another, we don’t have carte blanche to propagate lies. In fact, our survival and success depend on creating trust with our readership, and ensuring that the mainstream media can’t ignore the stories we break.  By being upfront about our political ideals, readers can process the facts through their own ideological prisms and then make up their own minds. This process is how it’s been done for fifteen years online, and it has worked incredibly well.  The mainstream media is dying as we are rising, and yet their only explanation for their fate is that Craigslist has stolen their classified advertising.

Over the last fifteen years, the Internet has become the battlefield, where the mostly false notion of “objective” and “bias-neutral” journalism clashes with those of us on the right who believe that media bias is the central issue facing our nation, and even the world. (more…)