The Number

Today’s news that the Times Company is finally selling its New York Times Regional Newspaper Group holdings of 14 newspapers absolutely fits with the last week’s news of CEO Janet Robinson’s abrupt departure. Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world. The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company,

500. As in the S&P 500. Out: The New York Times Company and Kodak. In Netflix and Cablevision. Lots of telling meaning in those moves. One on the face of it: Video is ascendant as a business model, in multiple ways. A second, Kodak’s not a particularly good bedfellow to have for the news industry.

9%

That’s Chrome’s share of the browser market, two years into its life. So Google’s browser is twice as popular as Apple’s Safari, though still lagging Firefox with 23% of the market and Microsoft’s IE with 59%.
Coming in early 2011: the Chrome OS, and it’s into the clouds we’ll go.

3.6% That’s the growth in magazine ad pages in 3Q, 2010 in the U.S. The number is up from .8% in 2Q, which was the first period showing an increase since late 2007. Now, will newspaper ad growth finally turn positive?

So, if it is newspapers’ strategy to transition paying readers to digital devices, charging them along the way, some part of that $34 billion will move to tablets, e-readers, iPads, Streaks and whatever the next generation of devices are called. If Apple snapped its fingers, and transformed the print industry tomorrow, its 30% take would be $10.2 billion.

It’s astounding how fast the overall population is going digital, an acceleration even from several years ago when we clearly saw “power digital users”, whose habits were significantly ahead of the overall population. If anything, the print-to-digital revolution is only moving faster.

As the much-ballyhooed “fight for livingroom” plays out, can national news companies like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and NPR, or local news companies, get a piece of the pie, whoever (Apple, Google, Comcast, Time Warner, Dish) slices it up?

That’s the percentage WashingtonPost.com — no shrinking violet in the new battle of D.C. — is up in unique visitors, June, 2010 over June, 2009, according to Nielsen. That positive number is a small feat. Nielsen’s Current News category was down 2.74% overall for the same period.

Marketplace reporter Eve Troeh and Poynter’s Kelly McBride do a good job of connecting the dots: the power of scarcity as a few big old media brands connect with new media leaked files to create huge impact.

While investors have reacted negatively to drain on profits, Google’s aggressive hiring is an audacious move for market share — what smart companies, with the means, do in a recession.