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.
Exclusive: NYT expands tech blog
The New York Times is expanding its technology blog Bits to include more reporting and analysis about the enterprise portion of the tech sector. The expanded coverage will encompass a broader range of subjects like “big data,” “cloud computing” and security issues.
“It’s an area the Times has never had a lot of reporting,” said Damon Darlin, technology editor who oversees the site.
The Times recently hired three new reporters to its tech desk–Quentin Hardy, Nicole Perlroth and Brian X. Chen–to help beef up its coverage and contribute to the blog along with other Times tech reporters. The expansion also includes a new section called “Scuttlebot” that will aggregate tech stories of interest from across the Web.
Traditionally the Times’ tech coverage has had a more consumer-centric bent. But with hacking in the headlines and the term cloud computing popping up in TV commercials, for example, these issues are becoming more mainstream. “Whether they know it or not, it effects (consumers),” Darlin said.
Washington Post: the latest example of print ad plunge
Just when you think things can’t possibly get any worse for newspapers, it somehow manages to get even bleaker. Today’s example is provided by the Washington Post Co and its flagship paper (and the online site Slate). The company reported third quarter earnings including results from its newspaper division today.
Print advertising revenue fell 20 percent to $57.6 million — quite a stunning plunge even as newspapers across the U.S. manage to post quarter after quarter of print ad revenue declines. Even more disturbing is that online revenue, which includes washingtonpost.com and Slate, plunged 14 percent to $23.3 million. Display online ad revenue dropped 17 percent.
The Washington Post is one of those curious oddities in the industry that manages to be extremely local — it’s market penetration of the D.C. area has always been one of the highest in the U.S. — and also draws the interest of a large national audience. So while it may compete with the “nationals” i.e. New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, on the news front, it is very dependent on local advertising. The NYT, USAT and WSJ get a hefty portion of their advertising revenue through national advertisers.
The local advertising category hasn’t been holding up as well as national advertising. It’s taking it on the chin as the housing market struggles, unemployment remains high and retail outlets are going out of business or simply taking their advertising elsewhere.
That’s not to say that national advertising revenue isn’t hurting as well. It’s more of a mixed bag. At the New York Times, for example, the division that mainly includes its flagship paper reported advertising revenue fell 6 percent to $156.1 million in Q3.
Gannett, which publishes USAT, used to give some information on how that paper was doing by reporting paid ad pages, but the company ceased — to use the parlance of research analysts — to provide more color on the USAT front. Instead, Gannett reports that national advertising, including USAT, fell 17 percent. USAT represents a big chunk of Gannett’s national advertising.
The Wall Street Journal manages somehow to defy these trends. Ad revenue rose 13 percent in the third quarter– that includes print and online – according to a memo from Dow Jones’ top executive Todd Larsen to employees.
Hmmmm. Guess WaPo/Slate subscribers and readers are getting tired of paying for and reading biased reporting and outright lies, and the advertisers don’t want to waste their money in venues where readers and subscribers are fleeing in droves.
Boston Globe sets pricing for new website
Another one of the New York Times Co’s newspaper properties is preparing to officially roll out a pay model for its website. The Boston Globe launched bostonglobe.com and starting Oct. 1 it will charge $3.99 per week for a digital-only subscription (print subscribers can read the site for free). Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage New England is sponsoring a free trial subscription through Sept. 30. Unlike its sister site NYTimes.com, a subscription for bostonglobe.com is required to access all content.
The flagship New York Times rolled out in March a pay model for its digital products allowing readers to access up to 20 articles per month for free. After hitting that limit, a reader must shell out for a digital subscription to read more, anywhere from about $15 to $35 a month depending on the package. Print subscribers get free access to the site, mobile and smartphone apps.
The experiment is a being closely watched in the U.S. newspaper industry as a guidepost to see if general interest newspapers can successfully charge for digital content. The early data seems encouraging: As of the New York Times’ last earnings report in July, the company said that the NYTimes.com had 224,000 digital subscribers.
The Boston Globe is taking a slightly different path, though, with the launch of bostonglobe.com, which complements boston.com — one of the earliest and one of the most successful newspaper sites in this country. Boston.com will continue to be completely free, featuring breaking news, local deals, and listings for area restaurants, music venues, clubs, etc. Meanwhile, bostonglobe.com highlights content from the print edition and will include videos, photo galleries, breaking news and other features like online chats and access to the archives.
“We recognize that readers of boston.com are going there for different reasons: to find out what’s happening in the news and to find out what’s going on around town,” said Christopher M. Mayer, the publisher of the Boston Globe in an interview. “The Boston Globe never had its own digital front door.”
Tech wrap: Apple hits new app download milestone
Apple customers sure like their apps. More than 15 billion applications have been downloaded from the App Store by iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users since its launch in July 2008, according to new figures from the company.
To put that number in context, remember it was just this past January when Apple announced its 10 billionth app download. That means customers have downloaded around 5 billion apps this year alone, compared to the 2-1/2 years it took to reach the 10 billion mark. Apple can thank its wildly popular iPad for the surge in demand. Of the more than 425,000 apps now available from the App Store, 100, 000 are designed specifically for the tablet computer.
Meanwhile, Apple’s attempt to stop online retailer Amazon.com from using the “App Store” name has failed. Apple filed a trademark lawsuit saying Amazon improperly used the name to solicit developers in the U.S. Amazon responded by saying the term is generic. The U.S. judge who denied Apple’s request argued that while the term wasn’t purely generic, the company failed to prove “a likelihood of confusion” with Amazon’s service.
Amazon finally lived up to its promise that New York Times Kindle subscribers would have free access to NYTimes.com, nearly three months after originally announcing the promotion. Subscribers using the Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader aren’t so lucky yet, though. As mocoNews.net notes, the company’s website still tells readers it can expect access “soon” and “in the coming weeks”.
YouTube gave users a peep at a new design for its website on Thursday. TechCrunch praised the video portal’s revamp, codenamed “Cosmic Panda”, calling it slick and dramatic. Test it out for yourself.
Bill Keller’s war on the Internet keeps the Times down
By Alex Leo
It seems every time Bill Keller takes pen to paper (or hand to keyboard) these days it’s to express displeasure with some aspect of the Internet. Last week he tweeted “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. discuss.” Without delving into the irony of using the trappings of the Web to attack it, you can see this man is spoiling for a fight. Ever since Keller started his column in the Hugo-Lindgren-revamped Sunday Times magazine, it’s been clear he’s swinging at Arianna Huffington. (Full disclosure: Before coming to Reuters I was a senior editor at the Huffington Post.)
In his first such column, he called The Huffington Post, and aggregators in general, “pirates” and “counterfeiters.” This level of vitriol is something Keller normally reserves for despots and the Bush White House, so why the exception here? Yes, HuffPo is nipping at the NYT’s toes to become the most widely-read news site on the Web, and yes, Huffington has poached some of Keller’s top talent in recent months, but the truth is that part of Keller’s animus must come from the knowledge that he helped create this monster of a site by refusing to engage with the Internet on the Internet’s terms. It’s not just Keller who ceded ground to The Huffington Post—it’s the news publishing world as a whole which, like the music industry, didn’t revolutionize fast enough and saw a new entity arise to classify their content.
To be fair to Keller, he’s right about a few things. Many of the editors Huffington claimed to employ pre-AOL were really content producers more than journalists—they made slideshows, polls, quizzes, they wrote headlines for AP stories, added images to blogs, embedded videos and aggregated outside news. With the influx of AOL money, Arianna has started to do what she always wanted: Hire prestigious journalists and bloggers and build an empire that earns as much respect as it does page views. This in no way means the page views will come from the respectable journalism—my guess is that Peter Goodman brings in 1/10th the traffic of a kitten-posting associate editor who earns 1/10th his salary does, but they serve different purposes and both are important for the brand.
But this begs the question: If what Arianna did was so easy why didn’t Keller do it too? Even if the NYT doesn’t want to aggregate—which is going to be an increasingly hard decision to defend—there are many things that Huffington Post did under the technological leadership of Paul Berry and the editorial chutzpah of the young content creators that made it a popular destination.
First, there’s SEO. HuffPost sometimes goes over-the-top with its content farm-y headlines, but that’s not what SEO has to be. Search Engine Optimization, used correctly, can make someone a better headline writer and is important from a reader standpoint. If you don’t have the story’s key terms in the headline or in the first sentence, a user won’t be able to find it internally or externally. NYT headlines are problematic for social as well: Having a vague, boring header may work in print, but it simply doesn’t fly on Twitter or Facebook.
Secondly, while some of the NYT blogs are great, they have not invested in or cultivated blog stars. They have no Yglesias, Klein, Linkins, etc, and their columnists aren’t really good stand-ins as they don’t interact with the Web the way bloggers do. (The notable exception to this is Paul Krugman whose blog is frequently updated and often cited.) This may stem from Keller’s distaste for aggregation and blogging by extension. As Felix Salmon wrote on this site:
#TwitterMakesYouStupid Discuss. My comment didn’t show up @nytimes, or my “User Account Banned” – ? @BostonPhoenix
Thanks to @whet @ The 312 – Chicago and “The New York Times’s Bill Keller comes to bury Twitter…” http://bit.ly/iA8xeY
Best of all, @psychcentral – “Psychology and mental health information and support…” and “8 Reasons Why Twitter Can Make You Happy” http://bit.ly/jDLTHY
Perhaps, Mr. Keller is just using one of the world’s first social networks – gossip!?
Bill Keller @nytkeller view full profile → 21 Tweets 130 Following 19,413 Followers 872 Listed Executive (((#Twitter #disabilities))) Editor – The New York Times.
Tech wrap: Apple beats Google to the music cloud
Apple has completed work on an online music storage service and is set to launch it ahead of Google, whose own music efforts have stalled, according to several people familiar with both companies’ plans. The sources revealed that Apple’s plans will allow iTunes customers to store their songs on a remote server, and then access them from wherever they have an Internet connection and that Apple has yet to sign any new licenses for the service and major music labels are hoping to secure deals before the service is launched. Amazon.com launched a music locker service earlier in April without new licensing agreements leading to threats of legal action from some music companies.
Verizon gained wireless subscribers with Apple’s iPhone, but the device’s affect on its financials failed to impress investors. Verizon Wireless posted 906,000 net new subscribers, roughly in line with expectations. That was much better than AT&T, which added only 62,000 net subscribers in the quarter as it lost iPhone exclusivity. However, a key sticking point for investors when comparing the two operators was the fact that AT&T won more new iPhone customers in the quarter than Verizon. Verizon announced that it would sell a new version of the iPhone later this year that, unlike its current iPhone, would work globally.
The risky attempt by The New York Times to charge fees to website readers looks to be paying off, although it still faces stiff challenges in turning around a fall-off in print advertising revenue at its core business. The company gained more than 100,000 new subscribers since it introduced its digital subscription service on March 28, representing at least an estimated $26 million in annual revenue and trouncing early expectations for the service.
Disruption to Amazon servers that host Internet services took down a raft of social networking websites including social network foursquare and Q+A aggregator Quora. Amazon’s “Elastic Compute Cloud,” part of the online retail company’s cloud-computing service that hosts websites for startups, experienced latency problems and other errors, according to Amazon’s status page. The latest update on Amazon’s status page said the company was “now seeing significantly reduced failures and latency and … continuing to recover. We have also brought additional capacity online in the affected availability zone.”
Cloud computing solutions have advanced beyond storage to the point where they now provide businesses with ways to improve operations, writes Microsoft’s Cindy Bates. Among her tips for businesses to get more from the cloud: Deploy cloud-based versions communication/productivity tools such e-mail, phone, chat, contacts, calendars, and document creation software to gain access to enterprise-level capabilities; if your business provides Web services to customers, moving applications to the cloud will allow you to scale them up or down depending on your needs and gives your developers more choice in where and how they manage, deploy and store data; and the cloud can give your business the ability to maintain a remote workforce. Workers can access e-mail, documents, calendars and more, as well as collaborate with colleagues through document-sharing programs and video conferencing technology, essentially experiencing “in-office” scenarios wherever they have access to an Internet connection, Bates argues.
Google: We’re no media company – but read our magazine
Earlier this week, New York Times media columnist David Carr asked the question that is on the minds of moguls everywhere: Is Google a media company?
Google flat out rejected the description. Here’s Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, explaining the rationale to Carr: “We are in the business of media distribution, but I don’t think that we would be very good at media creation. I think it’s one thing that we have astutely avoided in the last 12 years.”
Umm, well, not exactly. The search behmouth just unveiled an online magazine called “Think Quarterly” that has a very high brow, old media vibe to it. The idea behind the quarterly publication? It’s best said by Google (and sounds suspiciously like old media):
In a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.
The fist edition, which they are calling a “book,” is all about data and certainly looks and feels like a magazine. There’s long form journalism such as a profile of Vodafone U.K. Chief Executive Guy Laurence, photos, and Q&As.
Watch your back N+1 and McSweeney’s.
No, they’re an advertising platform – they don’t write ads for people or create third-party goods and services. They only run their own in-house ads.
New York Times aware of buggy iPhone app
Frequent users of the New York Times iPhone application likely have noticed that the app has been a bit buggy of late. The New York Times developed a nicely designed means to get the latest news on your smartphone — when you can update it that is.
This reporter, who uses the app almost daily and depends upon it to catch up on news during subway rides, noticed that the app is having problems refreshing. Apparently others have noticed too.
A sample of some comments about the NYT from Apple’s App store:
“Freezes a lot”
“Cmon nyt pls fix the “no update” problem otherwise it’s a great app”
“Crashes and freezes all the time”
Wall Street Journal snags another hotel chain
Under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the Wall Street Journal has made no bones that the New York Times is enemy No.1. But that hit list doesn’t stop at the Gray Lady. From time to time, the Journal pivots to set USA Today in its crosshairs — and its latest actions mark a move in that direction.
The most recent flag the Journal captured involves Choice Hotels. Earlier this week, the Journal announced it will become the “preferred newspaper” beginning in January for guests at more than 3,700 Choice Hotel properties including Comfort Inn, Quality Inn and Clarion Hotel. What was the “preferred newspaper” before the Journal swooped in? That would be USA Today.
USA Today begs to differ. A spokeswoman for the paper emailed the following: “USA Today remains a preferred vendor for Choice Hotels in 2011.”
It’s a matter of semantics because guests have to request copies of newspapers. According to the Journal, the paper will be delivered as a “complimentary amenity” to guests who ask for it come Jan. 1.
There’s some history here. In April 2009, Marriott Hotels announced it would no longer automatically drop newspapers at the doorsteps of guests. Instead, it made copies of USA Today, the Journal and other local metros available upon request. What seemed like an innocuous, eco-conscious move on the part of Marriott only served to hurt the circulation of USA Today, which built a large part of its circulation on hotel-distributed copies.
Indeed, later that year in October 2009, the Journal overtook USA Today as the largest newspaper by circulation in the United States, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
(Photo: Reuters)
