Archive for the ‘Local news blogs’ Category

Without the Post-Intelligencer to compete with, the Seattle Times is operating in the black, according to a New York Times article. That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s always easier to make money without pesky competition.

But here’s surprise #2: There is competition after all — from the Post-Intelligencer, or at least its ghost. Continuing as a web-only news source, seattlePI.com, it seems to be doing pretty well — holding onto its web audience and perhaps expanding it a bit. Hearst wouldn’t say whether it’s making money (which I take to mean it isn’t) — only that revenue and audience are ahead of projections, whatever that means. Not knowing the projections, it’s impossible to make sense of such statements.

Finally, here’s yet a third surprise. E.W. Scripps became the latest in a long lineup of media chains to announce they’re making money again. Like McClatchy, Tribune and other chains, Scripps said revenues were down, but cost cuts have put the company in the black. Scripps shuttered the Rocky Mountain News earlier this year.

After analyzing 90 million articles and blog posts, researchers have found that blogs typically lag traditional news outlets by about two and a half hours.

The study by researchers at Cornell is one of several recent attempts to quantify the news cycle. In this case, the researchers looked for repeated phrases (e.g., “lipstick on a pig”) and tracked their appearance on 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs.

The study found that about 3.5% of the phrases tracked began with the blogs and percolated to mainstream media. Read the study.

When the Rocky Mountain News in Denver folded, we immediately got word of a new startup, INDenver Times. But when they signed up only 3,000 subscribers rather than the expected 50,000, former RMN Business Editor David Milstead and several others bolted and now are starting their own “daily news site.”  Story.

The New York Times tends to be slow about picking up local trends that aren’t based in NYC, so the paper just now figured out that fired journalists in places like Denver are starting local news sites and blogs to fill the gap (and hopefully make a living.) This has actually been going on for a couple of years. Birmingham has two pretty serious ones – Birmingham Terminal and Wade on Birmingham.

Of course, the hyperlocal bloggers still have to figure a way to make a living at it, but that’s a lot easier with low overhead and no costs for printing, paper and trucks.