Big Data zeros in on ad inefficiency

John Wanamaker, the innovative Philadelphia merchant who pioneered the modern department store in the Gilded Age, was such a fan of newspapers that he is credited with buying the first full-page ad.  

But even Wanamaker knew that the most efficient form of advertising available in the 1890s wasn’t terribly efficient at all. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he is famously

Mobile offers local media a digital do-over

The good news is that you only have to worry about one tech trend in 2014.  But it’s a doozy. 

The trend is the dramatic shift to mobile computing, a communications revolution rivaling the arrival of the Internet itself. The fast-moving swing to mobile from desktop computing is changing everything from interpersonal communications to news consumption to commerce.  


For newspapers and local

UC-Berkeley invites international journalists

Applications are being accepted through Jan. 4 for a unique program providing mid-career journalists from outside the U.S. with an opportunity to pursue advanced professional training and academic study at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.In the non-degree Visiting Scholar program, participants can audit courses offered at the journalism school and in

How NPR lures younger digital audiences

The people who listen to NPR are a lot like those who read newspapers. They tend to be wealthier, better educated and more thoughtful than the population as whole. And, like newspaper readers, they are older than the broader population, too. 

But there’s one major difference between NPR and most newspapers: The managers at NPR have moved aggressively to create differentiated digital products to

Job 1 for newspapers: Audience development

While strategic audience development ought to be the top priority at every newspaper, efforts toward fulfilling this vital mission are fitful and far between at many publications. This has got to change, if the industry intends to sustain its strength. 

The bad news for newspapers, as discussed here, is that a significant majority of the adults in the typical community don’t subscribe to the

Are newspapers losing ‘mass media’ mojo?

Print newspaper circulation has fallen to the lowest level since the 1940s and the lowest household penetration rate in modern history, raising the question of when a mass medium is no longer a mass medium. 

Because a growing amount of news consumption is moving to digital platforms, the answer, as you will see by reading on, is complicated. Here is what we know:

As discussed here last week, 

Struggling industry throttles newspaper metrics

Unable to arrest years of declining ad sales and sliding print circulation, two key trade groups representing the newspaper industry have done the next best thing: 

They effectively have stopped reporting on the metrics that make it possible to measure – and, therefore, understand and manage – the industry’s ongoing challenges. 

Earlier this year, the Newspaper Association of America, an