Fast-Growing Gatehouse Moves to Unify Its Web Properties
Important Details: Gatehouse Media has been a contrarian surprise in a newspaper market in which there are more would-be sellers than buyers. The company’s been on a buying binge for a couple of years, recently announcing the purchase of four smaller dailies from Gannett. When that sale closes, Gatehouse will have a stable of more than 450 publications, including 88 dailies, about 250 weeklies and more than 100 shoppers. Those, in addition to its February acquisition of SureWest Directories, make it a strong local player.
Now Gatehouse, a company of 4000 employees, is moving to bring all its diverse properties together on a single online platform. This week it announced an agreement with Zope Corporation. Zope will, over time, provide the publishing platform for the Gatehouse properties.
The first goal of the conversion is “to share content, a lot of locally produced content that can be used elsewhere,” Howard Owens, director of digital publishing for Gatehouse told Outsell. Down the road, the platform will be used for video serving and user-generated content, or what Owens calls, “the journalism of conversation.” Owens has been one of the early pioneers in the “community participation” push with his work at Bakersfield.com, before joining Gatehouse last year.
“Scripps, Gannett, Tribune, Morris and Lee all have their own platforms,” says Owens, indicating that Gatehouse wants to have that kind of foundation as it pushes forward.
Zope is now launching Zope5, and that’s the version to which Gatehouse will be moving. Given the diversity of Gatehouse’s properties, Owens estimates it will take 12 months or more to fully move all properties to the common platform.
Implications: Gatehouse has been a darling of newspaper stocks since its October 2006 IPO, winning rare “buys” from a few financial analysts as it reported a doubling of Q4 profit, year over year. The company is bullish on what had been an often-forgotten part of the market – smaller communities. As Outsell has noted over the last year, it is smaller dailies and weeklies that are holding their own against internet competition. Small-community dailies haven’t done spectacularly, but they’ve managed to keep their heads above water, growing revenue and circulation. The biggest problem area in the industry is big-city metros, and that’s where we’re seeing significant advertising and circulation declines. So when Gatehouse talks about local, it isn’t the “how do we get more local” talk we hear from dailies; it’s nitty-gritty community news.
This platform announcement, combined with its directory purchase, says that the company believes that local online commerce will be substantial and will be best handled on a single platform. Significantly, the announcement comes in the same week that 12 major U.S. daily chains are moving to adopt at least parts of the Yahoo! platform – their own move to unify and get more efficient.
Outsell believes there’s a certain relationship between the announcements as well. As much as newspaper companies move to bolster the functionality of their own platforms, they’ve simultaneously got to to make sure their technology plays well with others, like Yahoo! and the other audience channels of the day. No platform is an island.