As Gannett’s brand morphs, print still top of mind
For a handful of years now, several newspaper companies have attempted to re-brand themselves into something — anything! — that doesn’t associate them with newspapers. Gannett is one of the latest examples trying to put some distance between itself and the industry despite the fact that it is still the largest newspaper chain by circulation in the U.S., it still derives the heft of its revenue from ink on paper, and it still is a bellwether for other companies that count big iron as an asset.
The USA Today publisher trips all over itself with its description. Here is part of the boiler plate the publisher and broadcaster uses:
“Gannett Co., Inc. is an international media and marketing solutions company that informs and engages more than 100 million people every month through its powerful network of broadcast, digital, mobile and publishing properties.”
The Street isn’t buying it at least today. Shares of Gannett fell about 9 percent so far after the company announced its Q1 results. It’s EPS beat Wall Street’s view by a long-shot. Its revenue was pretty much in line with expectations. So what gives? It’s the company’s slide in advertising revenue, specifically at its publishing division where it declined a little more than 8 percent, that accounts for the beating.
In fairness, Gannett’s CEO Gracia Martore said it is going to take some time for the company to start reaping results from the plan it rolled out to investors in February that included a pay model at its newspaper properties. On a call with analysts this morning about Gannett’s results, Martore said Gannett is “working to stabilize our Publishing business,” but that the effort is not a ” quick fix.”
“This isn’t a one- or two-quarter solution. Rather, it is a continuous effort which is going to begin to show results later this year,” she said.
Discovery Channel upstaged by murderers, stalkers
If the low ratings at Oprah Winfrey’s OWN weren’t evidence enough of viewer disinterest in programming that inspires, then perhaps the massive ratings growth at Investigation Discovery, a network whose shows are almost exclusively populated by murderers and stalkers, can provide convincing.
Investigation Discovery, the crime-themed cable channel that launched in January 2008, is not just getting better ratings than OWN, it is also doing better than the Discovery Channel itself. Over the last two weeks, ID averaged 275,000 total viewers, or 8,000 more than the 267,000 viewers that Discovery averaged, according to Nielsen. OWN, which launched in January 2011, only averaged 180,000 total daily viewers during the fourth quarter.
Given those ratings, who needs to spend millions on shows like “Planet Earth” when you can just air cheesy non-fiction crime programming like “I (Almost) Got Away With It” and “Who The (Bleep) Did I Marry. Those kind of shows have the fingerprints of ID president Henry Schleiff all over them. After all, Schleiff built Court TV into a cable network powerhouse on the back of similar programming.
According to a report from investment bank Barclays, the momentum behind ID could give parent company Discovery Communications “substantial leverage” when it negotiates new distribution agreements with cable and satellite operators next year. Currently, analysts estimate that ID only earns 8 cent per subscriber in carriage fees while Discovery commands 36 cents per subscriber.
As the flagship network, however, the fact that Discovery Channel is losing steam could spell trouble for its parent company, which is not only seeing poor results from OWN, but also was forced to recently rebrand the struggling environmental focused network “Planet Green” as “Destination America.”
Race On: Will the media outpace U.S. GDP growth as Veronis forecast?
The world is a wonderful place if you’re in the U.S. media business, according to the mid-term update from Veronis Suhler Stevenson.
The private equity firm forecasts the U.S communications industry–which includes everything from Hollywood and cable to education publishing and Yellow Pages–will grow faster than the U.S. economy in 2012. The total communications industry is project to grow by 5.6 percent compared with 4.4 percent GDP growth for the United States.
In particular the top performing segments will include what VSS calls Pure-Play Consumer Internet & Mobile Services, up 18.1 percent, Public Relations & Word-0f-Mouth Marketing, up 14.6 percent and Broadcast TV, up 9.3 percent. Subscription TV is expected to grow by 7.7 percent while branded entertainment is forecast to grow 7.5 percent.
Unsurprisingly, those that will underperform the economy and be down frm last year include consumer magazine publishing, down 2.2 percent; newspapers, down 3.8 percent; and local consumer directories, down 5.6 percent.
But the U.S. economy is far from easy street with uncertainty around the November elections and unemployment still stubbornly high as the improvements are slow and unsteady. This could prove VSS right in one way: the media business, which books a lot of its revenue up to two quarters upfront, will likely outpace the U.S. economy even if there’s a sudden downturn (most of the media business sector companies have betas averaging between 1.3 to 2.0 according to this NYU data sheet). On the other hand some analysts are concerned 2012′s growth outlook is unlikely to match 2011′s and then some stalwart engines of cash growth like cable TV might not do as well as usual.
Top Patch editor’s “bittersweet” exit
In case you haven’t had your fill of AOL news this week: Patch editor-in-chief Brian Farnham surprised employees today by declaring he will be out the door May 4.
The once-mighty Internet corporation stunned Silicon Valley just days ago by announcing it was unloading the majority of its patents to Microsoft for more than $1 billion. Now, Farnham’s imminent departure raised questions about the future of a once highly touted hyper-local news and community site that reportedly lost $160 million in 2011 alone.
AOL’s media business now also spans TechCrunch, Engadget, and the Huffington Post — all under the auspices of Arianna Huffington.
“Taking leave of Patch ain’t easy, but let me try to boil down why I’m doing so: it turns out I really love creating things from scratch, and while Patch is in a continual process of truly fascinating evolution and only a toddler of a company, it has definitely left “scratch” in the dust,” Farnham wrote in a Wednesday blogpost. “So I’m heading off to explore some other startup opportunities. But not before I take a good, long nap.”
Industry insiders had speculated that Patch — or any of a number of AOL properties — was on the auction block, even before the patent sale. Some trade publications in particular had wondered whether Huffington — who crossed to Tim Armstrong’s empire with the acquisition of her namesake content website amid much fanfare — might not see her influence diminish.
What’s next for the ever-more uncertain AOL sprawl? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
“Brian is part of Patch’s DNA, which makes his decision to leave bittersweet for all of us. We’re going to miss him, but it goes without saying that we wish him well and that we’re excited to see what new opportunities await him post-Patch,” AOL’s Jon Brod said in a prepared statement.
Content everywhere? More like content nowhere
Will Big Media and Big Tech companies ever stop punishing their biggest fans?
Like many people, I woke up yesterday and reached for my iPad for my morning hit of news, entertainment and information, so I could start my day. (And like many, I’m embarrassed to admit it.) Padding to the front door to get a newspaper still sounds more respectable, but my iPad gives me a far more current, rich and satisfying media experience than a still-warm printed Times could ever produce.
Except, lately, it doesn’t. Yesterday morning, I saw the exciting news that Bill Simmons, ESPN’s most popular, profane and controversial writer, had secured an interview with President Obama. Simmons published his interview in podcast, text and video form on Grantland, a longform sports journalism website he founded last year under the ESPN umbrella. I clicked over to the story from my Twitter feed and saw three YouTube excerpts of Simmons with Obama. And that’s all I saw. When I hit play on the videos, I discovered ESPN had set them to be “unavailable” on mobile devices.
Moving on, I tried to read a New York Post headline that also found its way into my Twitter feed. But when I tapped in, the Post webpage that loaded was not the story I wanted to read. Instead it was a notice, which I took as an admonition, that to read New York Post content on an iPad, I would have to download the app, which retails for $1.99.
I want to make it clear that I’m not against paying for content. But what I’ve just described aren’t paywalls, where publications warn users that they won’t be able to consume content for free.
The situations I’m describing are blanket denials of content because of a choice I made about which device to use. With these tactics, media companies aren’t creating content paywalls, they’re creating content ghettos. Big Media, set my content free! Stop messing with the user experience to deny readers their content simply because you can detect what platform they’re on. And stop punishing users who are investing in the latest devices to consume your output. In other words, grant my hyper-advanced iOS device or my friend’s fancy new Android phone just as much access to the Web as my mother’s four-year-old Windows XP PC. Which one of us do you think wants to watch Simmons talk crossover dribbles with the Commander-in-Chief?
There’s one big issue with your article, and that is it doesnt’ touch on the advertising model of an iPad version vs a web version. Though it’s changing fast, advertisers were slower to adopt iPad platforms, and therefore, to the media company were perhaps less profitable. You can’t have an ad-supported or near-free model if there aren’t advertisers willing to buy on that platform.
So far, most of these digital platforms have not monetized as well as the traditional players, and that has everything to do with the decision making process.
Boycott an iPad advertiser? That’s silly. They’re the ones that are helping you out. You should be boycotting the advertiser that ONLY wants tos how up on their web site. There is also generally less real estate on the screen of an iPad app to unobtrusively show you ads as compared to your mother’s 4 year old XP system.
And $1.99 for a permanent application is hardly “through the nose” … How much does a single print edition to the NY Post cost? I can’t imagine that the app couldn’t pay for itself in a few days.
Maybe the real problem is the group of whiney consumers (and blog writers) not willing to spend $1.99 on an app that gives them full access, when in the old days it would’ve been 50cents/day?
from Paul Smalera:
What real Internet censorship looks like
Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage -- practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.
Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.
Consider the freedoms -- or lack thereof -- Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” -- the basic way we access the Web -- into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point -- your browser and the Web server you’re logging into -- can decrypt and access the data contained therein.
By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage -- it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.
The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?
Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet -- the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool -- the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.
I’m not arguing semantics here -- if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement -- so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?
The example of Iran is well taken in this article, but I would like to add one: I lived and taught in Zhuhai, China, from August 2007 to July 2009. As an expatriate, I didn’t seem to have my computer monitored and censored very much, but my students at United International College surely did.
We take our freedoms for granted. I don’t any more. I know what it is like to live in a country where “freedom of expression” is a sham. We shouldn’t let that happen here, which doesn’t mean condoning criminal activities on the net, but it does mean a conscious guarding of freedom of speech.
from Paul Smalera:
Twitter’s censorship is a gray box of shame, but not for Twitter
Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be... well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.
Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.
To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.
To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with -- take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality -- it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.
Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:
disagree with your reasoning if the end result of a successful censorship request is (quote) “that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored…. it’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech.”
condoms for tweets and safe social intercourse
timid walter mitty comes to mind … ‘bright signals’ and all
@ iq160 – finding alternatives to restrictive laws are the jouissance of internetting
And the Grammy goes to — Steve Jobs!
First it was a bronze statue in Hungary. Now it’s a Grammy.
The accolades for the technology icon who died Oct 5 are still pouring in.
While Jobs is not a musician, his influence on the music industry — good or bad — cannot be denied. And for this, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is giving the co-founder of Apple Inc a Grammy at an invitation-only ceremony on Feb 11.
A formal acknowledgment of his Grammy — part of the 2012 Special Merit Award — will be made during the regular 54th annual Grammy Awards, to be held on Feb 12 at LA’s Staples Center.
“As former CEO and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs helped create products and technology that transformed the way we consume music, TV, movies, and books,” the academy said in a statement. ”A creative visionary, Jobs’ innovations such as the iPod and its counterpart, the online iTunes store, revolutionized the industry and how music was distributed and purchased.”
In 2002, Apple was a recipient of a technical Grammy award for contributions of outstanding technical significance to the recording field.
Honored alongside Jobs were other industry luminaries including musician and composer Dave Bartholomew, and recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder.
I had always suspected that a Grammy was meaningless….this confirms it.
from The Great Debate:
Supporting the past, ignoring the future
By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The opinions expressed are his own.
Western media industries are going through a rapid and often painful transformation today with the rise of the Internet and mobile platforms, the erosion of the largest free-to-air broadcast audiences, and the decline of paid print newspaper circulation.
Despite all these changes, the important and sometimes neglected ways in which governments provide support for the media have remained largely unchanged for decades.
There is a real need to reform our 20th century support arrangements to make sure they effectively serve our needs in the 21st century. Public sector support for the media should not be industrial policy, propping up specific ailing incumbents, but democratic policy, aimed at ensuring that timely, accessible news from a diversity of sources is available to the entire population.
Most media companies prefer not to talk about the support they receive from their government, but all developed democracies intervene in media markets in direct and indirect ways to serve a range of public interest goals.
The most important intervention in much of Western Europe is licence fee funding for public service broadcasting, based on what is basically a ring-fenced tax on households that own television or radio receivers. The United States also provides funding for public broadcasting, but on a much more limited scale and through direct federal and state appropriations.
Conde Nast digital incubator hatches Santa’s Hideout
Conde Nast just launched the latest product from its digital incubator in time for the holidays called “Santa’s Hideout.” The site is a free gift giving service aimed at children that lets parents set up a list for each child to fill while also allowing parents to don their Santa beard. The items on the lists can be divvied up for Santa only as well as for family and friends.
Santa’s Hideout is using Amazon’s public API which is handling the e-commerce duties of shipping items on the list.
The site is the second digital product launched from Conde Nast’s small research and development group which is overseen by Joe Simon, chief technology officer at Conde Nast. The first was something called Idea Flight, an iPad productivity app, that was released in June.
“The group is allowed to run in any direction,” explained Drew Schutte, chief integration officer at Conde Nast. “You never know how one technology will impact the rest of the company.”
Conde Nast is not alone in wading into tech waters. (It also acquired Reddit five years ago before spinning it out as a standalone company.) Hearst, for instance, launched App Lab at its magazine division and is behind the very nifty personal finance site Manilla.
