Steve Brill

News Byte

Brill, Crovitz, Sell Newspaper Paywall Operator Journalism Online to RR Donnelley

Peter Kafka in Media on March 24, 2011 at 5:11 am PT

Steve Brill and Gordon Crovitz have sold Journalism Online, the newspaper paywall company they founded in 2009, to Chicago-based printing company RR Donnelley. Terms haven’t been disclosed. Journalism Online is supposed to help print publishers operate online subscription services, and to date it has publicly launched with a handful of smaller publishers. News Corp., which also publishes this site, bought a stake in the company last year and is selling it to RR Donnelley as part of the deal; News Corp. says its investment has appreciated “considerably”.

Time Magazine Walls Off Its Web Site: Will You Pay Up?

Peter Kafka in Media on July 7, 2010 at 3:30 am PT

Want to read the cover story, or anything else, in this week’s Time magazine? Get out your wallet.

News Corp. Buys Hearst’s Skiff Platform, Leaves the Reader

Peter Kafka in Media on June 14, 2010 at 12:31 pm PT

In January, Hearst and Sprint showed off something called a Skiff e-reader, which was designed with newspapers and magazines in mind and was supposed to go on sale this year. Hope you weren’t planning on buying one.

Does It Really Take a Year to Build a Pay Wall?

Peter Kafka in Media on January 20, 2010 at 2:32 pm PT

The paper of record has problems, but it still has plenty of resources. Does the New York Times really need 12 months to figure out an online billing system?

Steve Brill’s Clear Card Gets Grounded

Peter Kafka in Media on June 22, 2009 at 8:38 pm PT

A system to speed elite travelers through airports shuts down after four years and $116 million. Its failure will rub some shine off a couple of well-known media types: The entrepreneur behind Court TV and some of the primary investors behind Twitter.

How Much Will You Pay To Read Your News Online?

Peter Kafka in Media on June 3, 2009 at 10:53 am PT

After years of training people to expect that whatever you can find on the Web will be free, media companies are trying — desperately — to reverse the trend, and figure out how to get people to pay up. Or at least some of the people, some of the time, for some stuff. This assumes that there’s unique stuff that people are willing to pay for, and I don’t know about that thesis. But if it does pan out, the guys behind Journalism Online want to handle the backend.