Tag Archives: internet publishing

By Christopher B. Daly 

And the future for journalism is . . .

  DIGITAL. . .

                                           PROFITABLE . . .

                                                                 AND HERE NOW!

Focusing on the recent decision by Ezra Klein to decamp from the old-school Washington Post

Ezra Klein, pointing to his major asset.
AP photo

when the legacy medium could not accommodate his demands, Carr sees an array of “digital natives” who are managing to do good (or at least decent) journalism and make money at the same time.

If true, three cheers for those on-line winners!

Here’s Carr’s take:

In making the switch, Mr. Klein is part of a movement of big-name journalists who are migrating from newspaper companies to digital start-ups. Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher left Dow Jones to form Re/code with NBC. David Pogue left The New York Times for Yahoo and Nate Silver for ESPN. At the same time, independent news sites like Business Insider, BuzzFeed and Vox have all received abundant new funding, while traffic on viral sites like Upworthy and ViralNova has exploded.

All the frothy news has led to speculation that a bubble is forming in the content business, but something more real is underway. I was part of the first bubble as a journalist at Inside.com in 2001 — an idea a decade ahead of its time — and this feels very different.

The web was more like a set of tin cans and a thin wire back then, so news media upstarts had trouble being heard. With high broadband penetration, the web has become a fully realized consumer medium where pages load in a flash and video plays without stuttering. With those pipes now built, we are in a time very similar to the early 1980s, when big cities were finally wired for cable. What followed was an explosion of new channels, many of which have become big businesses today.

Still, some things don’t change all that much. As Carr points out, it still takes some serious money (about $25 million, he says) to launch a big site, and it takes time (5+ years, he estimates) to work out the kinks, find your audience, build a staff, and earn a reputation for being worth a visit.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: David Carr is no longer just the most influential columnist writing about media and the web, but he is also a new colleague of mine on the Journalism faculty at Boston University, where is the new, inaugural Andrew Lack Professor in the economics of journalism.]