- Business News Arms War Heating Up * It's war for the business reader, the global business reader, the investor, the savvy consumer. It's no accident that it's been the FT and the Journal that have led paid content models. Expect to see lots more products, steals and innovations, as a half-dozen top business news brands fight for may be the most lucrative slice of web pie.
- Tasini? Tasini! A Blast from Another CenturyNow, digital content aggregators are starting to call the freelance tune, with their low double-digit payments, gauged to web analytics, based on marketplace value and built-in profit margins. It's a new world, day by day, and "Tasini" reminds us of that anew.
- AP Gateway: Learning from AP MobileAggregation, as nurtured through the News Registry ingestion-and-tagging process, is the key, and that's been largely proven out. Among the big challenges is creating a compelling user experience that transcends old news conventions. Give AP Mobile a B here; what's needed is an A product;AP Mobile a B here; what's needed is an A product.
- Honolulu Merger Offers Peer News OpeningIf Peer News (the name seems problematic from here on the Mainland), can execute at a high level, it can move into a vacuum -- and make the case for a homegrown news product.
- NYT-WSJ Local Ad War Bloomin’Every Journal dollar taken -- remember advertisers will switch dollars, not add new ones -- is a double gain.
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.
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.
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”.
Read more »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.
Read more »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.
Read more »Content Bridges
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.
Read more »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?
Read more »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.
Read more »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 [...]
Read more »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.
Read more »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.
Read more »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.
Read more »