lawshead

The Skinny

The Numbers: 30% and 3%

Pearson, owner of the Financial Times and half-owner of the Economist, offered its full-year report. Lots of interesting numbers from the education/book/news publisher. Two that stand out:

—30% of revenues total now come from digital sources throughout its enterprises, double what it was five years ago.
—3% of company revenues come from advertising. That’s not an issue in education and book publishing, of course, but shows how much Pearson has insulated itself from the carnage we’re seeing in businesses, mainly dependent on advertising for their sustenance.

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The Quote

“This is probably the most significant play that I’ve seen … since the invention of the online job board,” said Joshua Akers, vice president of RecruitingBlogs.com, a social networking site for human resources professionals. Akers is talking about Direct Employers Association’s planned new online job service, a major challenge to CareerBuilder and Monster, even as it absorbs Yahoo HotJobs. Direct Employers Association includes IBM Corp., American Express, AT&T Inc. and Johnson & Johnson, among 500 large companies.

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4 Questions for the Blog Matchmaker

World-class blog expert John Wilpers shares the tips of his trade, including: “I consider myself a blog matchmaker: I match the needs of information companies (newspapers, magazines, online-only news sites) for ever broader, more relevant, and deeper content with the needs of bloggers for exposure, broader platforms, enhanced credibility, and increased revenue opportunities. There are blog wranglers out there cramming websites full of blogs without regard for the benefit of the company or the blogger, creating blogger ghettos distinguished only by the fact that the content is created by non-staffers”.

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13 Tips for Using Twitter in the Enterprise

Barry Graubart is a guru of smart, company use of social tools, in addition to serving as Vice President, Product Strategy & Business Development at Alacra. He recently participated in an SIIA seminar I led around Law #1: “We’re Becoming Our Own and Each Other’s Editors.”

His thinking impressed the breakfast group and he followed up with 13 suggestions, which we’re sharing more broadly.

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Ask the Agency Guy

Q: The Sports Illustrated tablet demo has now been viewed more than a 600,000 times on YouTube alone. What do you think about it?

A: What’s interesting is not about the tablet, per se. It’s about multi-touch interfaces. which are fast becoming standard. The interaction in the demo is nifty, but not necessarily unique to SI (or even particularly futuristic at this point). In a sense, this is really just another web page…just a few months ahead of its time. Maybe even less.

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Content Bridges

Bartz hardly seemed like the proud captain of a news enterprise. You know, the news, it's just so negative, so ungainly, just too darn hard to understand.

Why We Have a Hard Time Thinking of Yahoo as a News Company

Bartz hardly seemed like the proud captain of a news enterprise. You know, the news, it’s just so negative, so ungainly, just too darn hard to understand…The CEO of this $6.5 billion company, who is “on Yahoo all day”, is just another one of those Americans who just can’t through the Tea Party haze, and read all the intelligent prose written out there that tells us all very clearly what’s in the health care legislation, whatever we may think about it.

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Attributor’s Anti-Piracy “Guardian” Trial Begins

Here’s the 90-day question to watch: If Attributor’s numbers are close to right, pointing to “112,000 near-exact copies of unlicensed article by more than 75,000 unlicensed sites” in a recent 30-day period, how will Google and Yahoo respond to a flood of thousands of notices?

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Patch, Who You Calling White Space?

Local — not long ago the domain of newspaper, TV and radio behemoths so dominant that barriers to entry made competition seem unthinkable — is now open territory, a vacuum to be filled by a combination of youthful journalistic energy and state-of-the-art technology.

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Nine Questions: New York Times Goes Metered

It's a big bet. The New York Times, which has been thrashing about every possible kind of business model in the last six months, is making the bet on metering, meaning readers will get some number of free articles per month, then be told to pay up to get more. Nine quick questions as we [...]

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Newsonomics of...

The Newsonomics of Profit: Google’s and Newspapers’

Newspaper companies’ place in the business world is greatly reduced. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to acquire businesses that will be the building blocks of tomorrow’s growth. Their low profit numbers are proxies for their reduced horizons, their reduced reporting impact and their reduced institutional and community clout, as well, though those are issues for another day.

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The Newsonomics of Social Media Optimization

Social media optimization will meet propensity modeling — the Financial Times‘ secret sauce, now being tasted gingerly by the New York Times — all in an effort to find out how, where, when and why you can engage sustainable customers.

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The Newsonomics of Digital Marketing

Take two simple words: online advertising and replace them with “digital marketing.” Within that simple word change, we see a world shift, and one of huge, fundamental importance to news publishing.

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Touts

HuffPo’s Outsourcing Just the Tip of Rising Iceberg

Good piece by Laura McGann at Nieman Lab, on HuffPo;s outsourcing of a section to for-profit company Causecast. It raises all kinds of questions of intentions, conflicts, disclosures and more. It's all just the tip of the iceberg. As cost structure cuts dictate partnering of all kinds, it's getting harder and harder to figure out who's presenting and paying for what. I'd love to see a 12-point bold disclosure in the same position on any website claiming itself to offer "news" and explaining to us, the readers, who's paying for what.

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Tablets+ As Game Changers

Great, informative discussion led by ABCNews.com VP Jonathan Dube, with Tapulous CEO Bart Decrem, ESPN Digital Media GM John Kosner and Simon & Schuster Chief Digital Officer Elinor Hirschhorn on how the mobile news web is changing reader expectations, products and business models.

Google European Challenges

An Italian court's sentencing of three Google execs is just the tip of the iceberg of Google's European challenges. Good "On the Media" interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, a University of Virginia Media Studies and Law professor.
Beyond the immediate question of Google's legal responsibility regarding the content it hosts, we hear about the three major issues confronting the company in Europe: 1) book search; 2) Street View; 3) impact on rival search engines.

EU challenges and U.S. challenges, have differed over time. Now, with the Obama Administration one year in, we're still to see how the new DOJ anti-trust division and the FTC (which held hearings on the "how journalism will survive the digital age") will treat the dominance of Google.

One thing due for review: digital ad dominance, given Google's recent acquisition of mobile ad leader Ad Mob. AdWords + DoubleClick + AdMob provides Google unprecedented clout in the fastest growing source of advertising in the country, and Western World.

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Kevin Kelly on Technology

Take a 17-minute TED break. TED Talks are a good break from our Twitterized days. Take Kevin Kelly's history of technology, posted this month from a November talk. I like a couple of the definitions of technology Kelly offers: Alan Kay: "Anything that was invented after you were born." Danny Hills: "Anything that doesn't work yet." My own sense is that technology is now a multiplier in our lives: multiplying work, multiplying pleasure. Kelly takes a longer view, back to our ancestors' first hunter-gatherer tools and poses some good questions where tech is taking us. Good new concept: Exotrophy -- the opposite of entropy. The self-organized ability of the world to build, re-build itself.

Beautiful Data, BBC Budget According to Guardian

It's a world of data blizzard, compounded by rolling Twitter streams and Facebook walls. Once in a while, data can be stopped in its tracks, pictured in a relational way so we can understand it.

Today's case in point: the Guardian's take on the BBC budget, subject to recent cuts. Couldn't we make this a standard of all news company reports?

On those cuts, announced today, we see a re-commitment to funding international news, but a 25% decline in budget for BBC's website operations. Those are two datapoints that seem at loggerheads -- committing to producing the journalism is great; distributing it smarter is also key -- but we'll have to wait to see details.

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WSJ-NYT Local Ad Wars Bloomin”

It's the Murdoch Twofer Strategy. Grab a new, small piece of business and do damage to your greatest competitor at the same time. AdAge's Nat Ives has a rundown on how the Journal is going after local NYC advertisers, including Bloomingdale's, using its expanded local coverage as a lure. Lots of reluctance among advertisers to switch, but every Journal dollar taken -- remember advertisers will switch dollars, not add new ones -- is a double gain.

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