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March 28, 2024

Maroon Ventures Puts Itself into the Middle of the News Fray

Important Details: When more than a dozen newpaper companies agreed to form a consortium with Yahoo! last year, they found that agreeing to work together was one thing. Managing the logistics among members and with Yahoo! was quite another. So, after much discussion, consortium members turned to an increasingly common commodity: newspaper people who’d left the newspaper trade.

The consortium asked Chris Tippie, formerly vice president of service delivery at MediaNews Group Interactive, to represent its interests and deal with coordination issues. Tippie had formed a wider operation – Maroon Ventures – to formally take on consortium coordination and to seek out other opportunities, connecting local media companies and emerging web potentials. Tippie, who was vp/marketing at SEM firm Web Visible after leaving MNGI, now serves as managing director for Maroon.

Maroon (which now has now up to six partners, all of which have recently exited the industry, from companies including MediaNews to Scripps to Belo) — is gearing up to take on multiple projects. Today, these projects include:

  • Managing the consortium’s work with Yahoo!: The consortium is seeking an executive director to take on this work more permanently, but Tippie is now doing it on Maroon’s behalf.
  • Managing the consortium’s alignment with QuadrantONE: Numerous consortium members joined the Tribune/Gannett-led online ad network (see Insights 25 March 2008, QuadrantONE Expands Network Amid Parent Company Moves) as affiliates.  Details and set-up logistics have been managed by Maroon.
  • Coordinating deployment of the Metrix4Media SEM product, a private company that counts Hearst among its investors. The product, which coordinates search engine marketing (from targeting to purchasing to tracking) for advertisers large and small, is now being sold by newspaper ad staffs at the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
  • Started a new subsidiary, Maroon Gadgeteering, specializing in creating news content distribution widgets for Facebook and other applications. Maroon Gadgeteering develops stand-alone and custom widgets. Open Mic, its first product, was released for Facebook users on April 1.

Tippie explains to Outsell why former industry people are newly valuable to the industry, “Sometimes it’s easier to help industry from the outside….. The newspaper is sitting on a motherlode of value.”

Implications: Outsell has written (see Insights 1 April 2008, News Industry Calls on New Talent to Reverse Downturn) about how the newspaper industry often rejects “outsiders”, seeing them as alien. So it’s unsurprising that working with those one step removed — those speaking the same language — is more comfortable. Beyond comfort, the Maroons of the new world have to prove their lasting value.

While web disintermediation has made short shrift of many middlemen, it has created chances for new middlemen to be useful. Connectors, linking up the old and new, pervade the internet space, from SEO and SEM to online ad networks and web 2.0 content syndicators.

Connecting those connectors (think of it as middlemen squared) to the newspaper companies is Maroon’s niche. It’s a big potential niche. As the Yahoo! consortium went forward, it has been a tacit acknowledgement that newspaper companies’ strategy to win the web war with their destination sites is insufficient. So with Yahoo!, and now tentatively beyond, it’s all about joining in the distributed web, the great networks moving editorial and advertising content at warp speed around the globe.

Maroon is one step in that game-changing process, and we expect to see more.