Tribune

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, [...]

So the newspaper industry is taking a page from indie film ("A Day Without a Mexican"), dailies are hiring execs from the alternative press, and we're seeing new, almost-daily, mating rituals between older and newer news media. What's going on? Nine questions to start: How about a week without the Chicago Tribune? Yes, I know [...]

If it fact, the ability to charge — and get paid — is based on having a good degree of proprietary content, then maybe it is the weeklies who have a better chance of bundling print and online than city dailies. Those that have websites or e-editions have seen them mainly as print retention tools, or bonuses for snowbird customers, Brian Steffens, exec director of the National Newspaper Association (2300 largely weekly members), tells me. He says that the about 42% of his members’ papers are paid, 6% free and and the rest some combo of the two. I wonder if these papers — that take in $20-50 in annual subs — could tack on an online fee of 20% or so, and have it stick far better than their daily counterparts.

The main difference: Advance Internet is maintaining its own ad platform, currently powered by 24/7 RealMedia, and integrating with Microsoft. Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members have fully adopted the Yahoo APT platform for their ad serving businesses, creating a closer, more exclusive relationship. “We wanted flexibility,” says Weinberger, who won’t comment on what parts of the deal involve exclusivity or on the duration of the contract.

Search advertising does have an impact on newspaper companies. Most consortium members take Yahoo search and paid search, both services that would be replaced by Microsoft’s new Bing and related products. The newspapers’ paid search deal with Yahoo has provided a steady, if small, revenue stream — guaranteed — over the first couple of years of their agreement. Last I have heard, not too many had exceeded that guarantee. So when Microsoft replaces Yahoo search, which will give it a roughly 30% share of search combined, perhaps it can drive higher search pricing. Google, though, is clearly still the big dog here, so don’t expect a lot of new revenue in this developing paid search duopoly world.
What the deal doesn’t include is Microsoft’s usage of Yahoo APT; the companies have said they’ll go their own way in selling display advertising. That’s a missed opportunity, potentially, for newspapers. As they perfect the art of selling Other People’s Local, it would have been good to be able to sell Microsoft local as well.
What the deal doesn’t include is HotJobs, still being shopped by Yahoo, and still a major revenue driver for many newspaper companies. Lucrative recruitment packages, though clearly hurt by the recession, have contributed as much as half or more of Yahoo-related revenue for some of the companies.
What the deal doesn’t include is more traffic generation, a good Yahoo benefit, as it gives preference to newspaper content. No Microsoft preference in this deal.
Of course, all of this could have been worked out quite differently if newspapers had ever really been a search player. They missed that boat, though, several times.
They mistook the web for a browse medium early on. Then, the old troika of TKG (Tribune/Knight-Ridder/Gannett) almost got into the search business, coming close to closing a deal for Kanoodle a search player that wanted to make their own and industry-wide solution. They walked away from the deal, though, fearful they were overpaying for a slice of what has turned out to be a $10 billion plus ad segment (paid search alone). So instead, today, they find themselves bystanders, watching from the sidelines as two of behemoths mate.