Pressroom Buzz’s regular roundup of recent news-business news and commentary from all over.
Who will pay for the news now? That’s the perpetual, gazillion-dollar question as cheap or free Internet classifieds and other forms of advertising ransack the revenues of traditional news media.
At Salon.com, Andrew Leonard examines Rupert Murdoch‘s continued embrace of pay walls.
AdAge has the latest background on Murdoch’s move.
What about a donor-supported press? Gannett Blog proprietor Jim Hopkins, who himself is seeking reader donations, reports on a study about reader donation as a money-making strategy for blogging journalists.
From making money to saving money: Hopkins also notes that Gannett local papers are dropping in national and world news from USA Today, and cites Wausau’s Daily Herald as an example. A side note: Your friendly Pressroom Buzz proprietor worked at two Gannett papers early in his career; this possible trend was something many predicted from the beginning.
The chattering class: It’s a bit old now, but worth reading: A DailyKos contributor documents that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is incompetent as a journalist.
And True/Slant blogger Conor Friedersdorf analyzes how the same tired horse-race mentality that makes so much political coverage so awful also infects the coverage of policy, like the health reform bill. He aims his critique at bloggers, but traditional daily journalism is just as guilty.
And just for fun: Google changes its name — for today only.
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