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What if the AP had cut off Google News at the pass?

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006

My extensive notes from the epiphanic third day of the Poynter seminar are on the way, honest. (I spent the weekend joyously buried in Django, if you must know.) Meanwhile, here’s a neat think piece from Forbes’s Paul Maidment, who’s out for some counterfactual fun:

There were attempts by newspapers as long ago as the early 1990s to pool news services and classifieds online in the face of a common enemy. But they were felled for the most part by old rivalries and narrow minds. CareerBuilder.com … being a notable exception.

What was missing then was audacious imagination. The U.S. industry already had a national news co-op, the Associated Press. Could it have held the space now occupied by Google News and Yahoo! News and done the job better as it both creates and aggregates news? As well as the stories written by its staff, one-fifth to one-quarter of the stores carried on the AP wire come from its owner newspapers but remains within the gated community of its members.

There was no call to throw open the gates.

(Tx Jon Dube.)

I assume we can all balk a bit at the idea of letting the nation’s nonprofit news collective mutate into an online megaportal. (Though something similar isn’t such a far-off dream, I’d add.)

Posted in collusion, portal | 2 Responses »

Poynter, day one: Bundling and portals

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

The biggest question I have about the local news business is the extent to which we can preserve the bundles that have worked so well with our print product. For example: Jane buys the Longview newspaper for its real estate ads. Jim for its movie times. Julia for its op-ed page.

Between them, Jane and Jim subsidize Julia’s op-ed page, and vice versa, keeping the quality on all three high even when one goes through a slack period. This has always been the case. See what I mean?

Offering and promoting RSS will surely accelerate the destruction of our portal. But can unbundling be slowed? Stopped? Nope, says Jay Small, one of Poynter’s teachers this week:

“The new newspaper.com should therefore be maybe 50 different products, instead of one bundle. And even if you lump all 50 together, they shouldn’t combine and bake up into what we know as a newspaper.

“Which 50 products make sense? Ah, if I knew that, I’d have them out there already. The one thing I know is the same 50 won’t work in every newspaper market. And we better get started figuring out which 50 we need, one or two at a time.”

I’m sure we’ll return to this issue soon.

~~~

In related news, Jupiter Research found that most young folks start looking for news from portals like Yahoo. (Tx Will Sullivan.)

Posted in bundling, conference, portal | No Responses »

It's not too late to prevent Wal-Martization of the Web

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

Local newspapers shouldn’t yet be running up white flags in the battle for local mindshare.

Responding thoughfully to my recent argument that local newspaper sites must do more than merely gather news, Chris Tolles of Topix.net comments:

One word –WAL*MART. The idea that a set of local monopolies are going to be maintained in the long run, with the audience increasing its rate of online adoption (where there is little or no brand for a loot of local papers) is a bit of a stretch. … How often does the average 25 year old start looking for a restaurant review on the home page of the local paper, vs. Google?

Chris makes a great point about long-run consolidation. (Hence, by the way, the modest title of this blog.) But I think he overestimates the adoption rate — and the Google loyalty — of “the average 25 year old.” If a newspaper can provide a better restaurant directory than Google, it’s certainly not too late to notify the neighborhood. This goes double in small markets, which are less mobile — and therefore potentially more loyal — than the big one that I assume Chris lives in.

Most local papers have cash flowing out their armpits. Rapid reinvention as local information sites could head off the encroaching Wal-Martization of local content. (This might be engineered at the corporate level.) And that would go a long way toward keeping newspaper brands alive — and their news operations viable — for many years to come.

Chris’s original post closed with the following vision for newspapers (my emphasis):

[N]ewspapers need to build the products their audiences and advertisers want, rather than basing their strategy on a capacity for great journalism and printing pages of classifieds. … The successful newspaper business of 2010 might look a lot like the successful newspaper business of 1910 – and the connection to Pultizer won’t be his prize, but rather his business methods.

I’ve got no problem with changing the business methods. But maybe the difference between Chris and I is that I’m not ready to give up those prizes. And I’m not convinced we have to.

Not yet.

Posted in competitors, marketing, portal | 2 Responses »

Yahoo says "no thanks" to local news

Sunday, February 19th, 2006

Newspapers shouldn’t celebrate the news that Yahoo doesn’t want to compete with their newsgathering service. They should treat it as a warning.

As the Local Onliner reported the other day, Yahoo News boss Neil Budde told the Software Information Industry Association that he’s happy to rely on local providers for local news:

“We’re not getting into the local news business,” said Budde. … “[O]riginal content will be a small part of what we do.” Mostly, Yahoo just wants to be a “remixer,” like a dance club DJ, he said.

Unfortunately, the local newspaper business is not the dance music business. As I’ve argued, merely reporting the news doesn’t make money. Financially speaking, the crucial service newspapers provide today is connecting advertisers with the proper audiences. Yahoo would love to take that job itself by becoming the portal through which everyone encounters news.

Big profits for Yahoo. Long, slow decline for newspapers.

The better solution is for local papers to devote themselves to remaining the premier portals for information on their local area. They’ve done this in print for years. Now they just need to do it online. And, as Yahoo knows, news content alone won’t be enough.

(By the way: I know blaming a missed update on a PC malfunction is so 1.0, but that is indeed the reason I was absent last weekend. As a result, I’ll be playing catch-up with extra posts over the next few days.)

Posted in competitors, portal | No Responses »