Outsell

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

Important Details:  As public and private sparring picks up in pace between daily news producers and Google, we’re learning more about the emerging habits of news readers. In Outsell’s just-published survey of U.S. news readers (News Users, 2009, Dec. 10, 2009), we see a cementing of habits, clearly showing the inroads digital news sources have [...]

Important Details: Traffic. Drivers hate to be stuck in it.  Publishers have long craved it. Online, more has seemed like more. Now, a series of announcements and initiatives tell us that more-is-more philosophy is being seriously revisited. Outsell believes these moves tell us that the fundamentals of measuring, understanding and monetizing web customers is in [...]

Important Details:  Do a local search these days and you may come across an unaccustomed url: Examiner. com. Examiner.com has burst into the top 25 of US online traffic rankings, currently at number 23 with 5.3 milion unique visitors in October, a 195% increase year over year – by far the greatest growth among all [...]

Important Details:  The Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) is an above-average news market. It ranks highly in measures such as regular internet access, college graduates and high-income households. It boasts two metropolitan dailies, a rarity across the country. Now it’s quickly becoming an American testbed for new journalism models, as those dailies, one (the [...]