Cory Doctorow’s great experiment

We already know that giving stuff away can be an important part of building an effective revenue generation mechanism – and it seems to work quite well in publishing in particular (even academic publishing!). Two of the strongest proponents for giving away some version of work for free are Seth Godin and Cory Doctorow, and […]

news business model summary

I just made a new page with links to some of the posts we’ve had here that people have seemed to like. It’s there for people that are new to the blog to get a feel for some of the topics that we cover here, but also as a pointer to some of the more […]

the news value proposition

Once I start thinking about something, it often takes some time for me to move on to other topics. I have a tendency to dive relatively deeply into things that grab my attention. Which means that you get to read more about new business models for journalism. There’s a decent summary in this post, where […]

business models & the three horizons

Here’s a very good talk from John Temple – the former editor of the Rocky Mountain News, discussing how the paper went out of business: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News – Presentation at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex in Silicon Valley from John Temple on Vimeo. (there’s a transcript of the […]

leaning into change

I’ve been teaching the MBAs today so I’m pretty wiped out at this point – so I’ll let Seth Godin do the work for me tonight. I’ve watched this twice in two days now – and Seth is, as usual, right on target. His stated objective is to show people how to lean into change, […]

business models summary

With all this recent talk of business models, it is probably useful to clarify what I mean by it – business model is yet another phrase that ends up meaning different things to everyone. I use the Henry Chesbrough definition, which splits the business model into six key issues (the summary is from quickmba.com): Value […]

aggregate, filter and connect

In response to my last post, my friend Ken Katkin said “Reading your essay make me glad that: (1) I traded in the music biz for academia when I did; and (2) I have tenure!” The only problem is that the more I’ve thought about it, the more uneasy I’ve become. I keep saying that […]

higher education business models

After all this discussion of journalism, it’s only fair to turn the focus on to my current industry – higher education. Despite the fact that most academics spend a fair bit of their time trying to come up with new ideas, it is not often regarded as an overly innovative field. This is probably due […]

more news business models

Just gathering together a few loose ends concerning news business models… First off, I think that Steven Johnson’s ‘news ecosystem’ idea from his SXSW speech is a pretty useful way to think about things. Here’s one of the key quotes: But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up […]

free news?

I keep coming back to the idea of business models in news for a couple reasons. The main one is that we are seeing a major industry being transformed right in front of us, in real time. And a critical industry at that. We’re seeing all of the issues that surround the idea of free […]

the price of free leads to innovation

I just finished reading Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson. As usual, Anderson takes ideas that have been out there a while and packages them in an insightful and valuable way. I’m a bit late to the party, so there has already been plenty of reaction to the book. Much of […]

business ecosystems

One topic that is guaranteed to get my classes fired up is Apple. They’re great to use as an example because they elicit a strong reaction. Consequently, I’ve been giving some thought to some of the issues surrounding iPhones, particularly as they relate to other 3g phones, like Google’s Android-based phones. Whatever you might think […]