Advertising

Seriously, I wonder how much the Gumbo-like turns of circulation accounting will matter to ad buyers. Increasingly, across all media buying, they are focused on audience. They want to know who (gender, age, household status, region, clickstream behavior, recent buying behavior and more) and they want to target these on the fly, as the world turns, spinning ever more quickly. So audience targeting is getting to be instantaneous; a 20th of a second is what we hear it takes.

So Gannett’s decided that it’s go-it-alone, devise-its own-local-marketing strategies approach didn’t work.

We could say that news companies — from Slate to the Journal and Times — have figured out that playing the ad game by someone else’s rules didn’t make a lot of sense. In the game of gross numbers, they couldn’t win.

Are there any positive growth numbers to report? Which categories may be turning positive — maybe national or retail display ads — as the sagging economy continues to plague the traditional classified strengths of auto, recruitment, and real estate?

Thinking about the recent terminations at the Washington Post and CNN, though, I wonder if the press priesthood is still another cultural institution in the process of being swept away, encumbered as much as it has by habit as by principle.

“I think the notion of the “Chinese Wall” between advertising and content is really antiquated,” marketer Alexis Maybank, a fashion “flash sale” site entrpreneur, told the Wall Street Journal, which headlined its story, “Media and Retail Firms Meld Business Models Online.”

Can CNN find a digital upgrade to the analog King?

Type “San Ramon shooting” into Google, and on both web and news search, Patch comes up first. In addition, Patch’s story elicited nine comments by late Thursday evening; Contra Costa’s none.

A small sample, but therein may lay this emerging tale of newspaper vs. Patch competition. The story quality is one thing; the ability to SEO and draw community comment may be another. That’s an emerging gulf worth paying attention to.

We can look at each of the major revolutions in digital news and commerce, and see how news companies responded.

Search. Late.

Paid search. Way too late.

Video. Late.

Social. Too late.

Mobile. Largely too late.

News companies have used old yardsticks to measure new technologies, and the results have been, predictably and disastrously, too little, too late.

That’s left me wondering exactly what value is in good editing. Are there any Newsonomics of editing, value to be gained and harvested?