Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Don’t write off the newspapers just yet. Moody’s just upgraded its sector outlook for U.S. newspapers from “negative” to “stable.” And Gannett, which owns USA Today as well as dailies throughout the United States, reported that its first-quarter profits were double those from 1Q 2009.

The Dallas Morning News reported a modest $5.6 million profit for the fourth quarter of 2009 even though it lost $107.9 million for the year.

Revenues are going to continue to fall, of course. Thirteen newspaper chains have entered bankruptcy since the start of 2008 (according to Pew), and some are starting to emerge with banks owning a sizable share. Indeed, Pew projects that by the end of this year, up to 25% of the industry may be owned by lenders without media experience.

But the good news in that seemingly dark scenario is that the newspapers are shedding their debt, cutting their expenses and becoming more viable for the long term.

There still are no easy answers. There does seem to be growing evidence that consumers will pay modest amounts for access to news on hand-held devices such as the iPad and Kindle. And with up to 50 tablet PCs projected to hit the market this year, prices of the gadgets will fall probably fall a good bit. That could get interesting.

As various schemes for turning online news coverage into money emerge, we’re finally starting to get a clear picture of the most promising ideas.

• “Pay-as-you-go” micropayment plans. I’m not sensing much interest around this one. The idea is that you give your credit card number to one clearinghouse of sorts and cooperating media charge you a few cents for each article you read.
• Charge for the unique coverage. The New York Times couldn’t make this work a few years ago, when they required a subscription to get columns by their stable of famous op-ed writers. But there does seem to be a renewed sense that readers will pay for content they can’t get anywhere else.
• Give away a little, but charge after that. The Financial Times has been doing this for years. They give you one story per month no matter what. If you register but don’t pay, you get 10 free stories. Beyond that, you have to pay.
• Give away part of the story, but require payment to get the whole thing. The Wall Street Journal has been doing this for quite a while, and while it doubtless reduces the number of eyeballs on a story (thus suppressing add revenues), it seems to be working for Rupert Murdoch.

We’ve finally gotten our first look the long-expected Apple tablet, predictably named the iPad. And since I haven’t had a chance to finger and play with one, I reserve the right to change my opinion later. (Actually, nobody gets to see one until April, and none of the reviewers actually has one.) But at this point, I have to say I feel awfully let down.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really, really cool gadget, and I want one.

But I wanted more than that. I wanted a new pricing and delivery model for books, newspapers and magazines, but we didn’t get much. When we do see those things, I’m sure that visually, they’ll be far more appealing than they are on the stodgy old Kindle and Nook readers. But at what price? I wanted something that would do for news and information what iTunes did for music, but what we got was … iTunes. Huh?

What I saw on the Steve Jobs video was a big iPhone, minus the phone. The price points are still fuzzy, but we know the $500 starting price doesn’t include 3G connectivity. Typically for Apple, you can’t change your own battery (a sore spot with me since my first iPod). It doesn’t have any USB connectivity, a physical keyboard, GPS or a camera. (My Android has all of those. OK, it’s a lot smaller and the keyboard is tiny, but the keys move when I touch them.)

It shows snazzy video — like, uh, all the smart phones already on the market, including the iPhone, Android and Blackberry. And it would be nice if it could output at least 720 HD, but apparently plain old 480 is the best it can do.

And here’s a really neat trick … if you turn it sideways, the screen adapts to a landscape display. Just like the current crop of smart phones. Again, bigger, but nothing new.

Will it kill the current crop of e-readers? I don’t know, but it may not matter. As CNET’s David Carnoy points out, the point of the Kindle, for Amazon, is not to sell hardware but to sell books. And guess what? Amazon already has a Kindle app for the iPhone, and Jobs said all iPhone apps will run on the new iPad. So Amazon’s already there, sharing in whatever spoils exist.

Will iPad succeed? Sure. It’s Apple. They always succeed. It’s cool because it’s Apple and it starts with an “i”. It’s also cool because … well, it’s cool.

But will it really change the media world the way the iPod changed music? I’m not so sure.

Editor & Publisher, the venerable trade magazine for the newspaper industry, has resumed operations with a new owner.

The magazine, recently shuttered by Nielsen, was purchased by Duncan McIntosh, whose publications include Boating World, Sea Magazine, America’s Western Boating Magazine, The Log Newspaper, and RishRap News.

Smartphone or e-reader?

iPhone, Pre, Blackberry or Android?

Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble Nook?

The answers to those questions will tell us a great deal about the future of news media. The first is the most significant: Will consumers start using applications to read books and newspapers more easily on their handsets, or will they drop $250 or more on a digital e-reader like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook? This question is important to newspaper execs, because Amazon has had some success getting consumers to pay a nominal amount (typically $6 or so per month) for the convenience of getting the news on their devices. This, of course, can be a source of badly needed revenue for the newspapers.

After leaving my own Kindle at a hunting lodge last weekend, I decided to experiment with the free Aikido reader, which allows me to read books on my Android. I downloaded a copy of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol in .epub format, and I have to say it’s an entirely satisfactory way to read a book. Similar apps, including an Amazon Kindle reader, are available for the iPhone.

Keep in mind, too, that all of the handsets — including the Blackberry — can easily access virtually any newspaper online. The Android even has a Newspapers app that links the reader to online versions of more than 60 newspapers.

It’s hard to tell much about what consumers are buying for Christmas just yet. Barnes & Noble is already sold out of the Nook and won’t fill any new orders until Jan. 15, but their holiday offering seemed to be a rushed-up, last-minute effort anyway, so they may not have had that many units to sell.

Like a lot of other people, I wondered if Google was getting carried away when it started selling operating systems for wireless telephones, but within an hour of using my new T-Mobile Android Cliq, it was entirely clear. This is one in a series of steps aimed at eating away at Microsoft’s dominance.

So why am I talking about mobile phones in a media blog? Because the Google strategy is central to how we receive our information – news, texts, email and almost everything else that involves pixels. And by integrating the Android operating system so tightly into its online services, they make it almost impossible not to make Google the center of your life. For example:

• Calendar and addresses. As soon as you finish setting up your phone (including the all-critical step of entering your Google account information), your Contacts directory instantly includes every single person in your Google directory. Since I had already exported all of my 3,000 or so Outlook contacts into Google, I never even had to plug the Android into my USB port.
• Exchange server alternative. Microsoft’s Exchange Server does a lot of nifty stuff, like keeping everybody’s email and calendars in sync.  But it costs at least $2,000 to set up even an entry level Exchange server, and you have to spend at least a few hundred every year on software licenses alone. That’s tough for small businesses to swallow. Google offers a free online application that lets you sync your Google and Outlook calendars in one click. (If you want the whole buffet, their sync product will do practically everything the Exchange Server does for $50 per user.)

For those who were around in the mid 1990s, you’ll recognize echoes of Microsoft’s strategy of dominating the search engine market by integrating Internet Explorer into Windows.  They displaced Netscape because they made it too easy to simply use their product. Google is doing the same thing with the Android mobile operating system.

Can there be any doubt that a Google desktop operating system is in the cards?

Rupert Murdoch is rattling his saber again, this time threatening to block Google from indexing and pointing to his newspaper stories. The process is simple enough; all it takes is a line of code.

It won’t happen until his newspapers have their pay walls in effect, presumably sometime next year (though it keeps sliding). It was interesting to see that Murdoch was unaware that stories accessed through Google are normally available in their entirety, whereas readers who access the same stories at www.wsj.com get only a paragraph and a subscription form.

There are two other head scratchers. If the tipping point is the erection of the pay wall, why doesn’t Murdoch go ahead and block Google access to the Wall Street Journal? And exactly what is the role of Dow Jones’ Marketwatch, the free, advertiser-supported web site that carries much of the Wall Street Journal’s breaking news?

For professional communicators these days, few things are more important than search engine optimization (SEO) – writing your web page, release or article so that the search engines will index it and you’ll reach a larger audience.

But lately, I’ve seen a lot of news releases and articles that were so loaded up with search terms that reading them was sheer torture. Here’s one piece of advice on SEO writing:

First, you decide what topic or keyword that you want. For instance, you’re selling decorative lamps, right? in the SEO article writing process, list down ‘decorative’ and ‘lamps’. Then think about other words that relates to ‘decorative’ and ‘lamps’…words that people use all the time to describe them. This is a very important part of SEO article writing because these are common words that your potential site visitors will use to find you.

When you follow such guidelines slavishly, you end up with sentences that are designed for machines, not for people. Sure, you may get more eyeballs, but those eyeballs are attached to people, who’ll find your copy dull and sometimes indecipherable.

There are two basic approaches to SEO-optimized writing. One is to work from a list of words, then smooth it out to make sure it’s readable. The other is to write the copy without worrying about search engines, then look back over it for places where you can bump the SEO without violating the readability (and the reader).

The second is by far the best.

MediaWeek reports that almost 58% of print publishers are already formatting web sites for mobile devices. And they report that mobile devices are increasing traffic on web sites — by up to 10% in many cases.

Thirty-six newspapers have developed pay phone apps, followed by 22 consumer magazines.

It still isn’t clear how the money flows. Charge for apps? Carry ads? Charge for delivery? We’re seeing a little of all the above, but it’s not at all clear which will turn out to be most feasible.

The day I started my internship at The Birmingham News in the summer of 1975, one of the first people I met was a guy they called “Young Victor” — Victor Hanson III, grandson of publisher Clarence and son of general manager Victor. I liked him instantly. He worked hard, was good with people and knew what he was about. I was a little jealous, of course, because we all knew he was the future publisher. But he rarely (I won’t say never) acted like the boss’s privileged kid. He retires as publisher in December at age 53. Of the three generations of Hansons with whom I worked, I think he was probably the best.

Congratulations, Victor!