Medium

49. How should access to news be bundled? Pay Spotify $10 per month and you’ll get access to tens of millions of songs bundled together. Purchase a cable TV package and you’ll get hundreds of channels, most of which you’ll never use. But fly with some airlines and you get nickel-and-dimed for everything you need.

41. What should determine whether or not a media company goes global? What is it about a media company’s audience, advertisers, product, content, technology or something else that weighs into the calculus of whether expansion is worthwhile or not? It makes a lot of sense for CNN to have global offerings, less so for The Northwest Arkansas Times. How…

47. Which is healthier for a media company, subscription or advertising revenue? All else equal (forget everything about print/digital), if you were to buy a media company, would you rather the majority of its revenue come from subscribers or advertisers?

26. Do advertisers need publishers? If so, is that dependency disappearing? Is “content marketing” the new Craigslist, ridding advertisers of their need for publishers? And is native advertising just an evolutionary step toward another plummet in revenue for the journalism industry? What implications does this have for the influence of money on…

24. Does Google help publishers more than it hurts them? Google News automatically crawls the Internet, scrapes articles, organizes them and presents snippets on news.google.com (and as part of some search results). For some users, their need for news is satiated there, and they don’t visit the publishers’ websites themselves (and thus aren’t exposed…

21. Is media coverage too negative? This is more of a timeless journalism question, but does it have renewed importance in the modern media age? Has media coverage become more negative in recent eras? Why? How has technology affected this? What’s the right mix of positive/negative coverage? Can positive coverage have as much of an impact as negative…

18. Can you save journalism if you have a paywall? Is journalism saved if only those with the ability to pay and who care enough to do so can access it? If general interest media companies are going to die because their business model no longer works, who is going to cover general interest news? If those who can’t pay can’t access good journalism…

7. What makes a magazine successful? How can some magazines thrive and new ones be created despite the rapid decline in print advertising revenue? What differentiates those that are thriving and those that are struggling? What exactly is a magazine, and what makes the value of a magazine unique, for readers and for advertisers? Will magazines exist…

5. Is it possible to go digital too quickly? If a majority of your readers prefer print to digital even after you make your digital offering great and advertisers learn the value of digital advertising, should you ease the brakes on print? The constraints have generally been technological/design advancement and advertisers understanding the value of…

3. Are we using the right metrics? Do pageviews get more attention than they deserve? What metric most accurately captures the added value of a media outlet? Must this metric differ when measuring journalistic added value (good done in the world, corruption exposed, etc) as opposed to business added value (revenue potential, engagement, etc)? If…