Tribune

Once you’ve clustered — centralized to the max the administration, circulation, advertising, production, finance and newsroom tasks of all of your own owned properties, you look next door to other companies, for fresh cluster bait. (Wait a minute, wasn’t that the plot line in Aliens or The Blob?)

In addition to this super-clustering, there’s one other big benefit of merger: getting rid of one company’s corporate overhead. Savings here could amount to $25 million or more – annually — for the mid-sized companies in possible play.

Still, it will be an intriguing test. Beyond the immediate test, we’re seeing how flexible news content delivery is getting to be. Demand Media is selling content to USA Today and Hearst papers, while Reuters and Tribune buddy up to Examiner. Mix and match is the order of the day and un-bundling, just like what cable consumers are asking for, is happening. News companies, seemingly on the fly, are more and more becoming more discerning buyers, and sellers, witness Tribune’s new sales of its MODs products.

It’s content chaos, and it’s the new, heightened chaos that AP must regroup even quicker, as it plots its own way in the contemporary news wilderness.

That 92-percent “open” market — maybe 23 million businesses — tells us how early we are in this digital marketing movement. Commerce change is one thing. For those who care about the news, the big thing to watch is whether those dollars, as they move digitally, move to companies that produce news, distribute news — or have nothing to do with news.

Will the cats of newspaper industry be successfully herded? After pouring millions into his Alesia project, Rupert Murdoch gave the retreat order to his would-be Roman warriors, killing the tablet-oriented paid news portal initiative. Though his News Corp is the biggest news company in the world, it still a little less than six percent of the business, by revenue. News is among the most splintered of industries, and that makes getting a critical mass of news suppliers agreed on anything quite difficult. Next up in the effort is the AP-led “rights consortium.” As much as it is an assertion of rights, it is as much about a new drive to capture significant sums of new revenue through smarter application of content-tracking technology. Expect the consortium or new company to go forward by December with double-digit funding in the millions. Of course, News Corp is unlikely to play, while the New York Times and Gannett may chart their own separate paths. Finally, NAA (Newspaper Association of America) task forces have been meeting to try to get industry consensus in two areas: 1) mobile formatting and ad standards; and 2) e-preprints, trying to transition that Sunday circular revenue online.

In the coming digital decade, news brand management will become more important than ever. Since the internet age dawned, news publishers have thought of the print product and the dot.com. Now in the age of the smartphone, iPad and TVs becoming monitors, those news brands that endure and prosper will be ones that master ubiquity. That means that those brands, merrily crossing and re-crossing platforms, become even more important identifiers, stamps of recognition — and one would hope, trust — as digital ubiquity both complicates and simplifies our information worlds.

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.

Those synergies in this order:
1. Joint ad sales.
2. Synergistic news-gathering and production.
3. Monetizing cable-produced news video through Newsday’s site.

Are we beginning to see the Last Man Standing strategy play out in the U.S.’s biggest cities? The New York Times is planning on building out 10-15 regional editions, on the model of its Chicago (partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative) and Bay Area (partnered with Bay Area Citizen) models. Now the Wall Street Journal is renewing its previously announced regional forays, into Chicago, L.A. and perhaps other places. WSJ CEO Les Hinton noted this week that “we’ve done focus groups and see a growing antipathy among high-end readers, towards what’s happened to their local newspapers.” One publisher’s nightmare is another’s opportunity.

In context, that’s a forced march from one era to another, jettisoning debt built in by acquisitions and/or investments that just won’t pay off in revenue. In short, the 14 represent the corporate do-over plan: What we were doing didn’t work; maybe our next evolving business model will.

Who will be next? And is the mating of banko companies the look of the next year? Dean Singleton bit the bitter bullet last week. After staving off bankruptcy for all of 2009, telling MediaNews execs that the company would not need to take that route, the company succumbed. MediaNews is following Morris into bankruptcy, [...]