Tribune

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.

While the San Diego News Network (Chris Jennewein’s new hangout) is hardly a commercial threat yet in San Diego, the cratering of the Union-Tribune — a one-time employer of 1422 people that will soon be paying only 572 — leads to this question, in San Diego and elsewhere: How big a marketplace hole does a disappearing daily leave in its wake?

A lot of ideas come from looking at all the cool new tools that are constantly being developed, and sitting back and thinking, ‘hmm, how can I use that?’ Google Reader inspired me to ask some of our staffers to start creating “what I’m reading” headline lists that we surface on their blogs. Cover it Live gave us a new way to run conversations online. Twitter’s been a great addition to the tool kit—we’re using it to surface a running narrative of what’s happening now across the city by creating a combined Twitter feed from the Tweets of 15 or so local agencies and leaders. I love to run through the winners of the Webby Awards and the SND online awards every year, there are always great inspirations there. The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald have always been two favorite sites to look to for innovations and inspiration. The New York Times is incredible of course, and I love El Pais.

For Sherman, it wasn’t entertainment, it was just the game of business. Win some, lose some, and see-ya-later. Journalism, though, isn’t just a business. Sure, Sherman’s pulling of Knight Ridder’s — and the industry’s — plug didn’t cause the ensuing implosion. There is plenty of blame to be ladled around for that. It was though a pivotal first step, and for that, we’ll always remember him

If you’ve actually looked at your cable bill lately, you know it’s undecipherable. Cablevision — owner of Newsday — could peg any amount it wanted to Newsday value, call it an information access charge or whatever, and attribute the money to ….. Newsday. Sound familiar, maybe a bit like, the early days of classified bundling (the ’90s), in which newspapers attributed whatever they wanted out of a recruitment/auto/real estate print buy to online. Trick here is that Cablevision would have to be able to continue raising rates to make the “bundling operation” really profitable for the whole company, and not just a shell game.

Want to know how likely it is that Cablevision’s new charge-for-Newsday-online will work? A few rational arguments to follow, but consider this number: The average unique visitor on Newsday.com spends four minutes, 25 seconds per month on the site. Ouch. That number can sub for lots of focus groups, price elasticity testing and the like. Newsday’s would-be digital audience has voted with its fingertips. That number is up almost one minute from a year earlier, here courtesy of E and P’s monthly Nielsen rankings, but still ranks Newsday as having the lowest online engagement of the top 30 newspaper sites.

Now they find themselves in a too-familiar fix. Not only have they allowed to Google to index and snippet their stories — “fair use” has never been finally adjudicated in the course — but they’ve grown dependent on Google traffic overall. Google traffic began as a gateway drug and now has become an addiction. If publishers could collectively agree to pull their content off Google, their own traffic would suffer significantly.