Archive for the ‘Local News Organizations’ Category

For quite a while, newspaper publishers have complained that Google News is stealing their readers by summarizing their news stories as a news aggregator. Now, Google is rolling out Fast Flip, a new service that will place the stories in a format more clearly branded with the original publisher.

Google uses the tiled format that shows thumbnail pictures of the featured stories, much like the screen its Chrome browser opens when you open a new tab. When you click a story, you’re still on the Google site, and it has ads in the sidebars. Google says it will share the ad revenue with the originating media. If you click on the story a second time, it sends you to the originating newspaper’s web site. The publications whose stories are featured have reached agreements with Google to participate in the service.

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.

Editor & Publisher reports that the amount of time people spend on newspaper web sites is “stuck in neutral if not reverse.” Of the 30 top newspaper sites, the average time spent at 17 of them declined in May 2009 vs. May 2008. Most of the declines were modest — some just a few seconds. For example, the New York Times time online went from 28:52 to 27.34, and USA Today went from 13 minutes to 12 minutes and 11 seconds. Time spent at the Washington Post dropped more significantly, from 16:04 to 10:58. But let’s remember that last May, we were in the middle of a heated presidential election, and The Washington Post is a top destination for political news. And some were up considerably, including the San Francisco Chronicle.

The most interesting result to me was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which saw user time drop by about half even though the print version was no longer available in May 2009. Is that a signal that the print product supports the online version?

Publicly traded companies tend to dump their bad news toward the end of the quarter, which I believe accounted for the spike in media bankruptcies in April. It wouldn’t surprise me to see the same in June.

Editor & Publisher has a good story about just what bankruptcy means in terms of a company’s ability to survive. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

This looked like a total waste of time. Propping up an outdated business model and giving it an unfair advantage over more nimble competitors is unnecessary and simply prolongs the pain. Let’s let the market work.

I’m creating a new category for Local News Organizations (LNOs) that will include any local news gathering operations.