Newsonomics: Buying Yelp — and Making It the Next Core of the Local News and Information business

Yelp’s for sale, and the news has generated the usual, now-tiresome lists of potential buyers: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook. It’s like all the money in the business world slid off one end of the table and sluiced down to Silicon Valley. Forget the old spend-a-week-without-the-Internet ...

Read More

MediaNews’ New TapIn Bets on the Tablet

That's the dream that the MediaNews' new made-for-the tablet, TapIn taps into. Potentially -- and I cannot emphasize that word too much -- it may become a prototypical product for the news industry, pointing a new way out of the hollowing-out landscape into which the news industry has ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of the Digital Mercado

McClatchy’s newspapers are the first big clients for Find n Save, a product ofTravidia, a long-time player in the print-to-digital ad conversion business. Find n Save replaces Marketplace 360, the company’s former regional marketplace product. Two big McClatchy papers — its hometown Sacramento ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Eight Per Cent Reach

That 92-percent “open” market — maybe 23 million businesses — tells us how early we are in this digital marketing movement. Commerce change is one thing. For those who care about the news, the big thing to watch is whether those dollars, as they move digitally, move to companies that produce ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Commercial Crowdsourcing

One big lesson here for everyone to get their heads around. This is commercial crowdsourcing. Why outsource the collection, organization and checking of “directory data,” as numerous Yellow Pages companies have done over time, when you can have the crowd do it — for free. It’s using the web, as ...

Read More

Honolulu Civil Beat: Where’s the Marketplace?

In my community, I'd have great local news reporting, great community discussion -- and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie's List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like functionality (aka The New Classifieds!). Maybe, that's a wrinkle up Civic ...

Read More

Google’s Snip Machine Makes Local Sites Snippy

Is the FTC looking at the trinity of Google's ad play: Paid Search (AdWords) + Online Display (DoubleClick, acquired in 2007) + Mobile (Ad Mob, acquired in November)....Digital media aren't bought silo by silo; they are bought to reach a set of would-be customers, across platforms and ad type.

Read More

Three Words to Remember: Social Media Optimization

Editors — gatekeepers — had long picked out stories for their readers. Now we’re picking out stories for each other, flinging them about the digital universe, into our e-mail inboxes, Twitter accounts and Facebook walls. The Google Buzz news just reinforces this wider phenomenon and tries to ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of New News Syndication

Some have said that in the digital world, news companies need to think of themselves both as creators and aggregators, doing what they do best and linking to the rest. Let’s amend that: creators, aggregators, and syndicators, doing what they do best, licensing with zest and linking to the rest.

Read More

Chronicle Crackdown Prompts Question: Where’s the Bay Area Online Super Startup?

Could the Chronicle indeed go away? Well, don't expect anyone to buy it. The newspaper market is, to use the kind word, illiquid. Frozen solid by two minor problems: 1) the credit meltdown, which will someday ease; 2) no one knows how to hell to value a newspaper company because no one has ...

Read More