Business models for news
The Digital News Test Kitchen is here to help devise, refine, test, and conduct research on news business models for today and the future.
image: Fotolia.com
Old media like newspapers, magazines, and TV and radio networks and stations have seen their businesses rocked as both advertisers and audiences shift to new digital media. The old models relied on scarcity to keep profit margins high. But in an age of information abundance, when most digital content is free for the taking, there’s no longer enough revenue to support everyone.
The results:
- An alarming number of layoffs of professional journalists.
- Reductions in the quality of the news product by traditional news providers.
- Media company bankruptcies, and a growing number of old-media news properties dying.
- A new wave of non-profit news enterprises, from the local level to national and internatioinal, emerging to try to fill the gaps left by old media’s decline.
- For-profit news start-ups that aim to produce quality journalism and profit by way of modest payment for journalists, and utilization of such methods as crowd-sourcing, user-generated content, news curation and aggregation.
- Individuals leveraging inexpensive and free technologies to start one-person news entities and online communities, covering cities and towns or narrow niche topics.
Old media must reinvent themselves and their business models. For- and non-profit news start-ups must find new business models that work in the new digital-dominated, information-overloaded media landscape.
We are looking to partner with media business-model innovators to discover new ways to make news media sustainable.
Print 
PDF
- Comment help
- Get Livefyre
