The Washington Post didn’t respond to my print circulation marketing challenge, but I just subscribed to The Washington Post Sunday print edition anyway. Why?

I don’t think print newspapers are dead — they just need to radically evolve.

But evolution is a process that has to start somewhere, and I want to understand better where print newspapers […]

I received the following “offer” from The Washington Post in the mail today — I’m going to pick on the Post just because I happen to live in the DC metro area, but I’m sure almost every newspaper is sending out circulation marketing pieces like this:

Print is dead and all content wants to be free — two bogeymen of the digital age, with some edge of truth, but based on current visibility, still unlikely at those extremes. But it’s undeniable that the economics of print publishing are very different today than what they were before the web, and more content […]

How do print publishers know when they have successfully “made the transition to digital”? Here’s Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons:

Blogs and other new media upstarts have taken a big bite out of the media attention pie, particularly in categories like tech, politics, and celebrity gossip. But People Magazine is a venerable media brand that appears not to be taking the threat lying down, according to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore:

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller made a series of announcements at a staff meeting that make it clear the Times is aggressively accelerating its transition from print to digital publishing with some dramatic changes (via Gawker):

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore spoke yesterday at a Magazine Publishers of America event and gave evidence that Time Inc. is having some success in digital media — but she gave no evidence (at least none cited in the Ad Age coverage) that this success is compensating for challenges faced by the legacy print business:

Yesterday, there was the the news about a current and a former New York Times Digital executive joining DailyCandy, the successful email newsletter company targeting young women with the “ultimate insider’s guide to what’s hot, new, and undiscovered.” Today, there is the news about print ad revenue at the New York Times continuing to fall, […]

When I read about the private equity buyout of the ailing Chrysler group from DaimlerChrysler, it immediately reminded me of another buyout of an ailing legacy player in a fast changing industry being driven by successful upstarts — Sam Zell’s buyout of Tribune.

Thinking about it, I realized there are many analogues between what upstarts […]

How foolish would someone sound in 2007 making a sweeping generalization about what people do with websites? Probably about as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with printing on paper — and as foolish as making sweeping generalizations about what people do with blogs.

A blog, after all, is just a content management […]

I’ve spent a lot of time on Publishing 2.0 talking about the impact of digital media on periodical publishing, i.e. newspapers and magazines, and about online publishing broadly defined, e.g. search results as a form of publishing, that I’ve only rarely looked at the publishing form that gave birth to modern publishing — the book. […]

Here are some watershed moments that mark the radical transformation of the publishing industry to a non-print-centric business:

1. New York Times becomes an aggregator

The New York Times, paper of record and one of the last great bastions of the belief that one entity can create all the content that anyone needs, has finally capitulated to […]

Since the merger with AOL, Time Warner has been emblematic of the media industry’s struggle to evolve, and it’s now become emblamatic of the tail-chasing confusion over the future of media. I read the following stories about Time Warner back to back (via Forbes and MediaPost):
Time Warner shares jumped Monday on hopes that the media […]

There seem to be two principal reactions to the collapse of the print classified business that is destroying the print newspaper business. The first reaction is to insist, as San Francisco columnist David Lazarus does, that people should pay for the news. The second reaction is evident in the report from Tim O’Reilly about trouble […]

It has been confirmed (by Rafat) that InfoWorld will cease to publish in print. Colin Crawford at IDG foreshadowed this rapid transformation. The news about InfoWorld is extremely significant for two reasons.

First, if InfoWorld can make the transition from print publishing to online publishing without going out of business, without diminishing its value to readers, […]

The death of print publishing is coming, it’s just a matter of whether it happens in 5 years, 10 years, or 15 years. I’m betting it happens sooner than anyone expects. Colin Crawford, the SVP of online for IDG, posted some stunning figures:
Today the absolute dollar growth of our online revenues now exceeds the decline […]

I just got my hands on the new version of the Wall Street Journal, which is one column inch smaller — seeing the physically shrunk paper is jarring — it’s tangible evidence that newspapers are slowly fading into history. Much as I wanted to assess the new design — and I’m sure there is real […]

Business 2.0 editor Josh Quittner pushes back on Chris Anderson’s treatise on “radical transparency” in magazine publishing:

I don’t mean to be too much of an old-media-reactionary running dog. And some of the things he says make immediate sense. In fact, I asked all my writers and editors to start blogging a few months ago. (See […]

What content category benefits greatly from digital, web-based organization and distribution, but is best appreciated offline? If you said art photography, then you understand intuitively why JPG Magazine is such an interesting Publishing 2.0 play.

The idea is elegantly 2.0: give the new breed of digital-technology-enabled pro-am photographers a place to showcase their work and […]

I thought it was some kind of late summer April Fool’s joke — MySpace is looking into starting a print magazine. That’s right, a PRINT magazine. Other commentators have already made the obligatory comparisons to bubble era magazines from Yahoo, Ebay, and infamously from Pets.com, and they’ve observed how increasingly Old Media MySpace’s strategy seems […]

A eulogy is a speech of praise, typically — although not necessarily — for the dead, which seems fitting for a post about the lingering charms and strengths of Old Media.

According to a recent survey, New Media still has a long way to go to earn the public’s trust, at least in the UK:

Respondents were […]

Scott Donaton has a column in Ad Age imagining the inevitable day when the Wall Street Journal will fold its print publication:

I don’t have enough insight into The Journal’s economics to say when (or, with confidence, whether) the day will come when a print-to-digital conversion is economically feasible. Could be two years, could be 10. […]

There are only two plausible reasons to publish a “digital edition” of a print publication, as the New York Times is now doing in partnership with Microsoft:

1. To prop up print advertising revenue by artificially increasing the “print” circulation through “digital distribution”

2. To make a bucket of content, i.e. the print edition, available for “browsing” […]

Web 1.0 gave us “internet,” “HTML,” “email,” “hyperlink”, “online,” and, of course, “web.” Web 2.0 has given us “social media,” “citizen journalism,” “tagging,” “blog,” “podcast,” “Web 2.0″ (of course) — and the list goes on.

Web 2.0 is still in the wrangling over terminology phase — especially over Web 2.0 itself. Recently, there’s been some […]

Here’s a quote from an Economist article — guess what year it was published:

Jessica Reif Cohen, a media analyst at Merrill Lynch, reckons that profits from online advertising and paid content could represent up to 8-9% of total earnings for Disney, Viacom and News Corporation in 3-5 years and considerably more for Time Warner, courtesy […]

The Wall Street Journal will be combining it’s print and online news operations:

IN YET ANOTHER CLEAR EXAMPLE of the inroads online publishing is making against its traditional print counterpart, Dow Jones announced a reorganization that includes a combined print and online Wall Street Journal news operation.

Dow Jones also signaled its belief in the power of […]

Michael Arrington declares that BlogBurst Can Save Big (print) Media. To suggest that the lack of blog content is all that ails Old Media is deeply naive. Old Media needs to follow bloggers into the new content creation frontier, but that in itself will NOT solve the problem of business models.

I will give BlogBurst […]

It’s entertaining to watch tech commentators, who know next to nothing about the dynamics of print advertising (with all due respect), assess Google’s new print advertising program. Does anyone writing about Google Print Ads today know who the Nielsen of print ad buying is? (hint: it’s MRI — Mediamark Research).

It makes perfect sense that Google […]

It’s now conventional wisdom that the future of media is digital and on-demand — content creators no longer own the distribution channels. But the economic center of gravity in media has not shifted to reflect this change. The laws of media dynamics will force the center to shift — advertising dollars always follow the audience, […]

There have always been generation gaps, especially when it comes to politics, but if you believe the latest hype about the Digital Generation (such as this Times article), the new generation gap is more like a gapping chasm. The argument goes that the Digital Generation doesn’t just consume media differently, they also think different:

“What’s hard […]

The Wall Street Journal is shifting it’s center of gravity away from print in the wake of Peter Kann’s ouster. Kann’s replacement, Richard Zannino, has big plans:

One of the things he stresses is the importance of making the Journal’s content available via every imaginable outlet, whether it is the Internet or handheld devices like […]

I just picked up a pile of magazines and newspapers from my mail folder and dumped them into the ever-growing pile in my office — I’ve had it. I’m canceling all of my print subscriptions.

Thanks to the RSS feeds from a select group of blogs on media (see the list at the bottom […]