Chrystia Freeland discusses niche news models and the costs associated with private news at CJR:
[...] Some of the companies faring best in the news business today have built an entirely different model, what we might call private news, and are working on an entirely different balancing act. Their challenge is to determine the right mix of focused, professional content—sold to a relatively small client base, usually bundled with data, for extremely high rates—with consumer content, which brings in less money but reaches a bigger audience.
The big question for these organizations is the inverse of the one troubling the mass news outlets in a digital world: their concern isn’t to find a model that allows their influential newsrooms to keep humming along; it is to achieve public influence commensurate with the size and ambition of the newsrooms their already-profitable business model has built. This is a balancing act I have come to know from the inside, and it comes with both promise and peril… READ IT