Outsell

The FT made a significant break from traditional practice by reclaiming control of its licensing activities. At that point, it said that building and growing direct customer relationships, rather than indirectly licensing via aggregators, was a top goal.

For the Times, Thought Equity Motion will take about two years of news video, from the time when the company started to produce video in earnest, and enable their greater re-use. The Times hopes that digitization will open the door to wider web usage and greater monetization.

The push in business news shows several key trends in the marketplace:

* Niching. Beefing up “news” in general is out; targeting select readers is where investment is going.
* The action is greatest among the Digital Dozen, the term I’ve originated to describe top globally-oriented news concerns, those that seek to profit from almost-free internet distribution, leveraging costs across a variety of products, platforms and brands.
* Business models are, reliably, two-fold, focusing both on reader (or company) payment for content and advertising.

The tablet shouldn’t be mistaken for a newspaper made of pixels. Sure, it can receive repurposed newspaper (or online) content. However, with its next-generation, multi-touch interactivity, ability to combine text, photo, video and social elements, it offers news publishers the possibility of creating whole new categories of news- and features-based products.

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 harness it.

And time is running through the hourglass too quickly. Both Carolyn McCall and Sly Bailey are trying to transition their companies, on the fly, into more digitally oriented enterprises, and both are trying to use the stress of time to their advantage. For McCall, that means focusing news resources on the grand prize: the preservation of the self-described world’s leading liberal voice, the now-global Guardian, with only a third of its online readership in the UK, one-third in the US and one-third elsewhere.

Important Details: This weekend, Avatar bust well through the $2 billion mark at the box office. With that unprecedented Hollywood success, great publishing fortunes may flow. What’s the connection?
Avatar was produced and directed by 20th Century Fox, owned by News Corp, which is also now the number one news company by revenue worldwide. News Corp [...]

Important Details: Paid content has finally found a face, after a year of US dailies considering how to wring reader payment out of their emerging digital audiences. That face is metering.

Most publicly, the New York Times announced that it has opted for a metering system, with plans to launch it a year from now. [...]

Important Details: On the first business day of the new year, Dow Jones announced it was combining the operations of its two largest divisions — the Consumer Media Group and the Enterprise Media Group – under the leadership of Todd Larsen, who was also named president of Dow Jones.
Larsen is an 11-year-veteran of Dow Jones, [...]

This is how things go in the digital world. Politico started as an idea in January, 2007 — a high-quality news site, led by veterans from Time Magazine and the Washington Post. It made its bones in the run-up to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, and hasn’t looked back, now placing in the top 15 of the U.S. news sites, pulling a third or more of the Washington Post’s, for example, unique visitors per month. That model — web-first and web-quick, promotion-savvy and using print as a helpful ad niche — is one that now can be applied to other ideas. So the DC site will be a new test of it within a metro context, and it will be an experiment to which that all daily papers must pay attention.