Content economics, part 5: news | Felix Salmon

Content economics, part 5: news | Felix Salmon: Now is a particularly exciting time in the news business. One journalist recently told me that it has changed more in the past eight months than it changed in the previous five years, and I think he’s right about that. One big reason is that the technologists are getting involved: people like Vox Media and Medium and BuzzFeed and First Look Media are making multi-million-dollar bets that they can build the CMS of the future, and that they can use their software advantage to win the battle for consumer attention. David Carr says that it costs about $25 million these days to compete in the digital media space — that’s a lot lower than the $50 million cost of launching a magazine, or the $200 million cost of launching a cable network. And it’s lower still than the billions of dollars that newspaper companies — including the New York Times Company — spent on color printing presses. In other words, the barriers to entry have never been lower, while the potential rewards have never been higher.