A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing.

I don't know where this is going, but the story and background information are fascinating. The media is changing rapidly, and that is not news, but I like how newer models favor bottom-up versus top-down approaches.  

In six years, Goldberg told me, he hopes that Bustle will attract fifty million visitors each month and earn more than a hundred million dollars a year in advertising revenue, making it the “biggest and the most powerful women’s publication in the world.”

And more

Goldberg, who is thirty, is not a traditional publisher: he speaks more admiringly of Elon Musk than of any Pulitzer Prize-winner. But he is not all bluff. Six years ago, at the age of twenty-four, he and a few friends started Bleacher Report, a sports Web site that, in 2012, they sold to Turner Broadcasting for more than two hundred million dollars. Bleacher Report’s success was a striking example of the new economics of media: when it began, its articles were written by a network of two thousand unpaid sports fans (critics have described the site as an example of “loser-generated content”), yet today it attracts twenty-two million unique visitors each month, putting it behind only Yahoo U.S. Sports and ESPN.com among non-league sports Web sites. . . 

Soon after acquiring Bleacher Report, Turner made it the source of sports news at CNN.com, where it replaced Sports Illustrated. This changing of the guard was a reminder of how quickly, in the Internet age, a cost-effective business plan can overtake one built on a reputation for quality. Goldberg points out that Bleacher Report is now likely worth more than the two hundred and fifty million dollars that Jeff Bezos recently paid for the Washington Post.

And

Right now, Bustle’s staff cranks out sixty articles a day. Eventually, Goldberg hopes, they will produce “a thousand articles a day—a thousand relevant articles a day,” covering “every topic that young women care about—all their favorite shows, all their favorite celebrities, all their favorite fashion brands, every news story that’s relevant to them.”

Have you seen the class Economics of the Media?  

Media Economics: Do newspapers matter?

That is the title of a paper by Schulhofer-Wohl & Garrido (September 2012). The subtitle is "Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post."
The abstract:

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year’s Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post’s former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished with time. We exploit a difference-in-differences strategy and the fact that the Post’s closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some noncausal explanations for our results. Although our findings are statistically imprecise, they suggest that newspapers — even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed — can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.

If that happens with newspapers, imagine what would happen with blogs.  
I did not know about this journal, which looks really interesting.  

HT: Roberto Zanola. 

An interesting bias

Most rigorous studies conclude that there is no consistent partisan or ideological bias in the mainstream American news media. This suggests a natural but little-asked question: Why isn't there more bias in the media? A year spent working as a journalist suggests a possible answer: Advancing a political perspective does not help secure a place on the front page. Instead, the core incentive for a journalist is to be interesting. Interesting work that reveals the essence of a situation garners a more prominent spot in the newspaper and all its associated benefits. Because “interesting” sources are found on both the left and the right, among Republicans and Democrats, balance does not require a Solomonic commitment to fairness. Rather, balance can be achieved merely as a by-product of the effort to be interesting.

That is the abstract of the paper "An Interesting Bias: Lessons from an Academic's Year as a Reporter" by David Nivena (Political Science & Politics April, 2012). Alas, I did not find the paper online.

Is the author referring to some kind of median-audience theorem? A lot might depend on the audience. May be some audiences don't like to listen to "interesting" arguments, but arguments that confirm prior believes. In other words, what is interesting might be very subjective and depends on the world view of the audience. 

Interesting bias in blogs?