Publishers
seem to be saying, in not-quite-on-key unison: The next Internet decade is
going to be different than the last one.
They are all living with the consequences of unintended Googling, as their own sites have become secondary players to the search aggregators, Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN.
In a week that saw the [...]
Just a note to Content Bridges readers.
"Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get" is now up on Amazon, ahead of St. Martin's Feb. 2, 2010 pubdate. It's my step-back take on the astounding print-to-digital transformation we've all been' [...]
Saving journalism wonkfestapaloozas are bumping up against each other in our calendars. Can’t attend each and every one?; take in its webcast, live or archived! As Salon CEO Richard Gingras has sagely suggested: "The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news".
Minnesota Public Radio’s version [...]
It's hard to gauge the impact of New York Times and Wall Street Journal moves into metro markets. They could be simple, print retention strategies aimed, at holding on to valuable print readers -- the magnets for still-lucrative print advertising -- for as long as possible.
Longer-term, it could be' [...]
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 [...]Tired of playing defense and readying itself for offense, the New York Times’ formal announcement of its San Francisco “edition” this week shows us how a world is moving and how the Times and Wall Street Journal (which also will offer an SF edition soon) are taking their battle to a [...]
The Bay Area's online news scene is now popping, waking up from a prolonged period of somnolence, and pointing a way toward an online news renaissance across the country.
Friday, we got the official news that financier Warren Hellman's long-planned independent online news operation would get off the ground [...]
The sails are up, and news companies feel a little recovery wind at their backs. With the worst of cost-cutting over, they're looking for growth. Here's nine questions as they chart that new path.
1. Is one foot better than two? Newspaper companies are feeling a new vim and vigor, [...]
Fast Flip, Google's hardly secret visual news search product, just made its debut today. It's a premiere that tells us lots about the swirling winds in which the company now finds itself. It also marks two important milestones, one about the slow replacement of news search 1.0 and [...]
Late midsummer brings hugely cautious optimism, and lots of identity guessing games -- who has Journalism Online signed?; what's Rupert really up to? -- worthy of William Shakespeare. Here's nine questions for the time:
1) Who are the 330 non-dailies in the Journalism Online semi-announcement? That's a big part' [...]
Update: MSNBC.com just paid several million to buy Everyblock, the much-watched Adrian Holovaty start-up, around local city data. Smart local interactive data should be a strong core of every local news(paper) site; it drives traffic and screams utility. The fact that MSNBC.com -- co-owned by Microsoft and NBC -- [...]
Face it. We're in a time that seriously lacks oracles. So, apparently, Rupert Murdoch passes for one, given his well-chiseled mien and occasional wont to make pronouncements.
Now he's making a bit of midsummer news, with still another comment on charging for news:
"Quality journalism is not cheap. The digital revolution has" [...]Midsummer brings us a surprising amount of news and innovation. Isn't anyone on vacation? Here's Nine Questions on what I'm seeing and hearing:
How desperate is a paper in bankruptcy? Longtime Philadelphia Inquirer crime reporter George Anastasia does great short videos on the site, called "Mob Scene". Current advertiser:' [...]The biggest story of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal for newspaper companies: What the deal doesn't include.
In a full-blown merger of the companies or even a broader partnership, the more than 30 U.S. newspaper companies in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium -- more than half of the country's press by Sunday circulation [...]
With financial pundits increasingly calling the recession's end and newspaper companies' having cut their way back to operation profitability, it's time to move forward.
Doing that I suggested in my last post ("Can You Feel the Bottom") includes damage assessment. While some companies have cut more prudently than others, we've seen major damage inflicted [...]
Can you feel it? It might just be a bottom. Wall Street valuations of newspaper companies certainly indicate it might be. Those valuations have mainly been based on the earnings reports of the last week.
What sense do we make of the slew of newspaper earnings reports that "surprised" financial analysts, [...]
It turns out that newspaper sales forces weren't the only child in the Yahoo APT family. Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members now have a brother, and he's fairly full grown.
Today, Yahoo and ATT announced a deal to enable ATT's 5000 local salespeople to sell display advertising, based on Yahoo's [...]
It turns out that newspaper sales forces weren't the only child in the Yahoo APT family. Yahoo Newspaper Consortium members now have a brother, and he's fairly full grown.
Today, Yahoo and ATT announced a deal to enable ATT's 5000 local salespeople to sell display advertising, based on Yahoo's [...]
Think of it as updated Geritol, a tonic for an industry with tired blood.
Its founders call it Circulate, and it's the latest "solution" to address the woes of newspapers. It aims to get the blood flowing -- online -- by re-directing readers to more like content, newspaper content, by' [...]
“Mobile.”
“Video.”
Usually, these are the rather dry one-world descriptions of What’s Next, items on to-do lists for anyone serious about building new digital businesses. Add “Social,” and you’ve got a trifecta.
Getting the words transformed from whiteboard to lively product is another undertaking entirely.
1Cast, a still-beta mobile video product, manages to do that.
I found 1Cast [...]
Pocantico once served as one of the Rockefellers’ family estates. Stately, 45 minutes north of Manhattan, it speaks to the wealth of an earlier industrial era. The Rockefellers, of course, built their fortunes on oil, but their brethren, like the Hearsts and the Pulitzers built them on paper and ink. The kinship is palpable as [...]
Sometimes, for brief moments we hope, satire is all we have left.
Mad Avenue Blues is a satire for our times, this discontented summer, this seeming nadir of media fortunes. Set to Don McLean's "American Pie," it's brilliant, wholly watchable for its full 9:21 run. It's done by' [...]
Things are turning ugly. Globe staffers up the ante in Boston. John Carroll calls Sam Zell an idiot. Online ads on newspaper sites drop to double-digit negatives. Which leaves me, as we approach this summer of our discontent, with more questions than answers. Here's Nine:
1. Down the road, will the Globe Guild members' [...]Oops. As Amazon makes its move from retailer to publisher, it has stumbled clumsily, but not surprisingly. Amazon is fundamentally a bookseller, a bookseller that knocked out the walls in the adjoining online mall to sell everything from KLH sound equipment to Kingston digital gadgets K'NEX toys to now its' [...]
New week, new storyline.
This one appears to be: The Shrinking Daily vs. The Daily Eric.Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, it did. Today's FAS-FAX report tells us that print is dying off more quickly. The basics:
7% down daily and 5.3% Sunday; Double-digit carnage at major metros: The New [...]With today's announcement of Attributor's "Fair Syndication Consortium," we see the third piece in what's emerging as a new news industry reckoning with the Web as a major distribution point.
Attributor's new service basically says, "Let the web be the web" --- let news and information flow freely without walls [...]
The news industry's Oscars are in. Though there are many other awards that recognize good, great and distinguished work, it is the Pulitzer name and brand that still connotes the highest accolades of the year.
We spend most of our time these days, understandably, writing about daily journalism's busted [...]
Maybe we've found an answer: get Dean Singleton, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Jarvis, Nick Carr, Mathew Ingram and Danny Sullivan in one room, charge admission and use the proceeds to pay for American journalism.
Last week may have shed as much heat as light on the trials and tribulations' [...]
Good Monday Morning Math over at Nieman Lab.
Writes Martin Langeveld:
"Surprise.
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got" [...]
What's the problem? And what do we do about it?
Presstime, the magazine of the Newspaper Association of America asked 10 of us our thoughts on core mission, newspapers' wholesale scrapping of publication certain days of the week, audiences and the like. (For multi-taskers, podcast available on the same page.)
One [...]
It almost seems like a vestige of a vestige now, but there is news of the Knight Ridder signs.
Somehow the two 57,000-pound signs are for sale -- YOUR NAME HERE.
As KCBS reports:
"As far as building signs go, they don’t get much bigger. The largest sign in" [...]
The launch of the Times' new Global Edition opens a window on the emerging global news competition to come. Even in deep recession, we see the battle lines being drawn.
Global Edition is a simple concept. You know NYTimes.com. And you know the Times has lots of world-oriented news, the staple' [...]
The news about the news has been truly horrific this week. Massive bloodletting from coast to shaking coast. Staff cuts, furloughs everywhere.
Amid the doom, gloom and cutting, let's keep our eye on what is turning into ground zero for what's next. Michigan.
Michigan of course is synonymous with cars and old [...]
Two newspapers on the block, about as far away from each as they can be.
One in San Diego, the Union-Tribune, finally sold after nine months on the market. The other, or really others, Blethen Maine Newspapers, still sits on the market after a year, but is being pitched to all [...]
PI print readers woke up Wednesday morning to find their daily paper replaced by mere pixels....and Tweets. The online-only PI, seeking to define Second Life anew, added a Twitter feed to its home page. "Seattle Tweets" captures a few Twitter microposts, this afternoon heavy on TV station tips to whale [...]
So Bruce Sherman's out of the game. Failure apparently has its price, eventually.
You remember Bruce, the anonymous-to-newspaper-people fund manager. He's the guy who pulled the plug on the newspaper industry's sense of normalcy, setting off a chain reaction of events that remain with us to this day.
As [...]
You gotta love the description of the San Diego Union-Tribune buyer, private equity company Platinum Equity: a firm that acquires businesses facing complex operational challenges in declining or transitioning markets.
Now, that's a delicate way of describing the mess newspaper companies have gotten themselves into. It's an apt description of [...]
We've all got a front-row seats now. The PI flipped the switch, wholly and irreversibly. Tuesday: Mainly print (in revenue), with some online. Wednesday: a web creature, wholly digital. Or should we say Holy Digital!
Since it's the first metro daily to do it, there's a fair amount of confusion about' [...]
In Seattle, the Globe creaks noisily on its axis.
In the PI newsroom, remaining staffers are awaiting a clemency call
they know will never come, or as one told me today, "I'm one of those
semi-miserable souls who is waiting for the word from Hearst on when the
print product dies."
We've found the problem, and it is apparently the Internet.
Why else are publishers touting every conceivable non-desktop, non-laptop, non-smartphone gizmo as a way to save the industry.
We've got the Kindle hailed as a potential savior, with even the estimable Steve Rubel joining in.
We've got Hearst moving' [...]
As the economic vise tightens around all of us, but around newspapers more tightly than most, readers may become more suspicious about the influences bearing down on what was once a free and vibrant press. Suspicions like being unduly influenced by commercial pressures. Anyone who has ever worked in a [...]
And the envelope, please: How many people does it take to run an online-only metro news site?
The answer appears to be 22, a number some occultists are said to believe holds psychic powers. Hearst, psychic, who'd a thunk it? That's the number I've heard from outsiders and that's the approximation [...]
Make 'Em Pay! Sounds like a old Clint Eastwood movie. Now, though, it's the theme of the newspaper industry month. We can't blame the industry for trying new tacks; that's only to be encouraged in the time of ransacked newsrooms.
Furtive cable bundling. Special e-newspaper readers. Hints of content pony [...]
Okay, at this late evening time, there's growing questions about what Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge meant when he apparently said:
“We plan to end the distribution of free Web content. Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed.”
Maybe a Cablevision' [...]
So the Rocky's final daily circ will come in at 210,000, more or less.
That would make it the biggest paper shutdown since the columnist-rich Chicago Daily News, which folded in 1978 with a circulation of about 327,000. The last big shutdown metro that came to my mind was the' [...]
(Brief update on parsing what Cablevision meant, here)
Numbers can be terrible reality checks.
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' [...]
You remember. The exquisite journalistic/commercial mix that sustained newspapers for many a year. News and Ads. Ads and News. Both, together, side by side. Reaching mass markets that wanted to know things and buy stuff.
We're seeing daily the damage done to that newspaper model, as newspapers themselves become higher-priced,' [...]
We knew that Hearst's moves in Seattle -- saying in early January that it would sell or close down the Post-Intelligencer -- was just a dry run for San Francisco. After all, the Hearst-owned Chronicle has bled more than a quarter of a billion dollars by most estimates since' [...]
1. Will the Post-Intelligencer Flip the Switch in Seattle? You know, go online-only. (Is online the onliest medium?) With Hearst's Ken Riddick and the PI's Michelle Nicolosi working through the what-ifs, we may have a new, great test to watch. We’d be able to compare the online PI to the Seattle [...]
Look no farther than the week’s transport news to get an idea of what kind of muddle we’re in.
My Forever stamp is getting to look more and more like the best thing in my portfolio as the Post Office moves toward 44-cent stamps, and oh, incidentally, says that it thinks [...]
Imagine you'd left the planet some time just before the election and just returned. You'd find that suddenly someone's sounded a Press Emergency! First, it was Sarkozy calling his people to rally 'round the failing press -- aux barricades, mes freres. Now, though, it's serious.
Time Magazine certified the emergency with' [...]
Goodwill. It's a notion that newspaper publishers and those of us who watch them have learned a bit more about over the past year.
Consider the goodwill write-offs:
Gannett, with the granddaddy of newspaper goodwill write-downs at $5.2 billion last week. Media General, late last month, removed $130 million from' [...]I love the moxie and the passion. As Editor and Publisher headlined it this morning: "Newspaper Execs Launch Group to 'Fight Back'. The fight is good, the punches though a bit awry.
We're just at the beginning of schemes (in the British sense) being offered to save American journalism. Today alone,'" [...]
You remember the fight for the home page in the '90s? The home page was all -- "owning" the reader was news and media companies' intent. In addition, to various presentation strategies intended to increase "stickiness" (is there an online museum of over-used web buzzwords that have had short half-lives?), [...]
Just when bought-out and laid-off American journalists are prepping their fast-food pitch, “Would you like Freedom Fries with that Recession-Priced Burger?” French President Nicholas Sarkozy is throwing journalists a lifeline. Surely, Sarkozy’s power starts and stops within his country’s borders, but his stunning action may stir fresh thinking here in [...]
As long anticipated, the Star Tribune filed for bankruptcy today, now the second company (after Tribune's big splash) to do that. Expect more.
All the parties are now in a mad scramble to protect their interests. The labor unions have been ready, their knowledge of bankruptcy greatly increased. They know' [...]
And now, putting shivers into executives and managers everywhere, the words, "let's do a reassessment."
It's as predictable as Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca. Instead of rounding up the usual suspects, thought, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will be rounding up the usual assessments. You know, what do we have?/what should we keep?/what should' [...]
GlobalPost will get a lot of digital ink Monday, and deservedly so. It takes moxie to launch a news enterprise into the deep, winter gloom of The Worst Economic Downturn Since the Great Depression. It's like Henry Luce founding Fortune in 1930.
GlobalPost founders Phil Balboni and Charlie Sennott (
Quiz question. What's Fox? A news network? A regional sports broadcaster? An entertainment network? A reality show company?
Of course, it's all of the above, and therein lies the rub.
David Carr's Monday The Media Equation column, in the New York Times, told the story of Fox's hook-up with Phoenix'' [...]
What a difference a few years can make.
Imagine if the New York Times had been one of the first papers to sell front-page space to advertisers in 2005? It was one thing for USA Today, a paper so totally comfortable with commerce, to put ads on Page One, which [...]
As the Great Detroit Experiment begins, the industry owes them for acknowledging the obvious. As Lou Mleczko, president of the Detroit Newspaper Guild Local 22, reported:
"And [Detroit Media Partnership CEO David] Hunke said, if we don't do this, the
current model is unsustainable. So he'd rather take the calculated risk
of" [...]
Sam Zell's House of Cards has fallen flat. Today's bankruptcy filing changes everything and nothing.
If we still have the capacity for amazement, after a year of subprime meltdown, worldwide recession and the election of Barack Obama, Tribune going banko would be stunning. Its filing reminds us that no news [...]
Post-Bankruptcy Filing Content Bridges post
Has it been less than a single year? One year since Sam Zell took over the Tribune Company as its management, like Knight Ridder's two years earlier, simply ran out of juice and said, "hey you try it, we've run out of ideas and energy?"
In one quick year [...]
As daily newspapers become less than daily -- witness the East Valley Tribune's move into the world of four-day-a-week dailiness in January -- why would we expect a metro area to support two daily newspapers? Against that backdrop, Scripps' announcement that it is "selling" the venerable Rocky Mountain News [...]
We've seen lots of wry, earnest and soul-searching comments about whether newspapers should get in line for federal bailouts, since all other pillars of society seem to be stretching their hands out.
Most, I think, are missing the point. The bailout is on the way. Thankfully, it's not coming in [...]
When's the last time you checked out Real Clear Politics? Been, say, a little less than a month?
Huff Post's announcement of new $25 million funding brings RCP to mind. Yes, RCP seems like more of a single-purpose poll aggregation site, though it stepped out from that in becoming [...]
The gallows humor of MediaNews' Bay Area operation took a cartographic turn recently. Remember MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton talking about how outsourcing would become essential in the newspaper industry, when he said, "In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, [...]
The punditocracy is unanimous on one point: Barack Obama's campaign set a new standard, both in strategy and execution. While he goes off to the even-tougher business of governing, let's look at what the press, journalism as we know it, can learn from the Obama's barrier-busting two-year journey:
1. Civic [...]
Newspaper people like to think of themselves as good storytellers. But, lately, newspaper execs find themselves with fewer good storylines to share. In fact, Gannett -- the world's largest newspaper company -- is going to tell its official stories less often. Of course, we'll see interim announcements, like yesterday's stunning one that another 10% of [...]
(Related post: Slaughtering the Cows a Bit Too Early)
A moment of silence, please. Many publishers and editors might like to take the meditative approach of the Christian Science Monitor leadership in moving from mainly print/a little digital to mainly digital/a little print today. Said Managing Publisher Jonathan Wells in [...]
If the newspaper industry was on thin ice a month ago, the financial meltdown has meant that the creaking and cracking is getting more audible. Think of it as a triple whammy for an industry used to declaring itself the victim of a perfect storm:
After the pieces fall apart, put then back together. Or in the jargon of our trade, after seeing disaggregation, re-aggregate.
News that Newsweek is leveraging the experimental Kindle to put together a package of its best election coverage over time, and making it available as a Kindle "book," selling it [...]
Who'd a thunk it? Alaska is an epicenter of the final stretches of this Presidential campaign. Luckily, the McClatchy-owned Anchorage Daily News is on the beat and offering deep and wide coverage, complete with timely video and great organization of the story's twists and turns.
On Friday, the Alaska Legislature's [...]
To yesterday's post on US journalists anemically shying away from "follow-up" questions (Tom Brokaw gets a B- for that, graded on a curve, for last night's debate), I got several good e-mail comments.
My favorite, from a colleague in the UK, reminded me of the famous Jeremy Paxman interview [...]
Okay, you've lived in this fair country of ours for the last couple of years. You're sufficiently interested in the affairs of the country that you are willing to venture into the halls of Nashville's Belmont University to participate. You've then probably heard something about the candidates, who have [...]
Thumbing through the dead-tree edition of the Mercury News – quick exercise these days -- looking for weekend movies, I was struck with this thought. Forget commoditization; we’re now into the age of self-commoditization.
My movie tout sources used to be five. Joe Morgenstern is my first Friday read in [...]
Good Morning Silicon Valley's John Murrell makes a simple, but vital, point in connecting the dots in the latest Steve Jobs health scare speculation. He describes how a CNN iReport got it wrong, and how the report sent the stock diving, before spawning another ill-informed web debate about "citizen [...]
So how do we judge the impact of Katie Couric’s string of interviews with Sarah Palin? Certainly, we can see the value of journalistic questioning – “hey, I don’t think you answered my question, sweetheart” – especially as compared to the often-anemic performance of journalists throughout the campaign.
The [...]
Open your windows, and you can almost hear a muted "Yahoo!," wafting out of the windows of many newspaper buildings across the land this week. "Yahoo!," as in the long-awaited launch of the ready-for-newspaper-integration ad platform has begun. Though I have doubts that this is the cavalry coming finally to [...]
You got your East Coast news. You got your West Coast news.
Something about the cratering US financial system going on out there on the isle of Manhattan, sources tell me. Meanwhile, here on the Left Coast, it's round 74 of Google and Yahoo. GooglyHoo is giving lots of people [...]
You gotta like media analysis that starts with The Simpsons.
This week, Matthew Schwartz, senior editor of ScribeMedia interviewed me, on the trials and tribulations of the news industry. His intro:
"In an episode of The Simpsons (that takes place in the not-too-distant future) local- news anchor Kent Brockman is delivering [...]
As I train down to D.C. for the Online News Association conference (moderating a panel hopefully titled, Optimize and Monetize, tomorrow; if you're there, say hello), the dizzying news industry news of the last week raises more questions than answers. Here's my top nine of the moment. Feel free [...]
Yes, the rich are different. They may disproportionately affect which national newspaper "wins," as the Wall Street Journal increasingly targets the New York Times' readership and advertising dollars.
The latest shot in the war will be launched Saturday, as the Journal debuts its new luxe, glossy magazine WSJ. It seems [...]
Well now, all-platform reporters are all the rage. CNN's among the most prominent of news companies claiming the turf. Its recent announcement that it was starting -- yes, starting in the summer of 2008! -- 10 new US bureaus (Columbus, Ohio; Denver; Houston; Las Vegas; Minneapolis, Minn.; Orlando, Fla.; Philadelphia; [...]
Today's announcement that Centro is taking over the Real Cities Network isn't really an exclamation point. It's more like a period, marking movement between eras. Centro has brought local news websites significantly more revenue over the past several years. Real Cities, on the other hand, was a vestige of Knight Ridder (KR Digital, specifically, [...]
There's little intrigue in Tribune's second quarter earnings announcement. As the company says, "Our publishing results are, for the most part, in line with industry trends, which remain consistent with what we reported in the first quarter." Such consistency, unfortunately, is not something you want to be a part of.
All [...]
Out of many memorable quotes from my Knight Ridder days, one keeps bouncing back to me. It came of the company's mess in Detroit. Knight Ridder had long run the Detroit Free Press, one of the country's liveliest, most readable papers. But it fell afoul of Detroit's tough economy, and [...]
