Gannett

Today’s announcement that the USA Today is falling on its own grenade, blowing itself up, taking casualties (130 layoffs) and taking an increasingly familiar digital-first, print-last path makes historic sense.

News Corp.’s Avatar has taken in $2.75 billion. Compare that financial flexibility with the Times, and it’s night and day. The Times Co.’s total 2009 revenues: $2.4 billion, less than Avatar itself has produced.

Why it’s a big story: 1) The size of the gift. $1 million.
2) The size of Rupert Murdoch’s presence in the news world.
3) The size of Fox News in the political news landscape.
4) The size of Murdoch’s influence at the Wall Street Journal.

So who’s the ad competition? Maybe we should ask, who isn’t? …The question, here, is one of sustainability. Certainly, there’s the question whether Patch can sustain itself, as its parent AOL struggles to find a new identity and growing business model. Then, there’s the question of the sustainability of hyperlocal journalism already being done from coast to coast. These are true start-ups, often one-man (or -woman) bands, invented by journalists truly passionate about community coverage. Pre-Patch, it’s been the fledgling blog ad-and-distribution network experiments that gave hope that more money could be found to support these ventures. Now, we have to wonder whether Patch — which will link to other sites it finds useful, but won’t network them — will make the sustainability of these more organic, non-templated local blogs more questionable.

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

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?

$1.96 billion: Google’s 1Q, 2010 profits, with $6.8 billion in revenue. Gannett — largest news company in the US and second worldwide – reported total revenue of $1.32 billion, and profits of only $119 million in 1Q.

Those are measures of how the world values these companies, what they do, and of their clout in the culture.

“Each Starbucks location buys 10+ iPads. Then they rent them out to us – their consumers – by the hour…. by allowing us to access an iPad, we can then look through any and all newspaper(s) we’d like”.

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.

If 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.