The Financial Times is not the first place that anyone thinks of to search for things, at least in the Internet sense. That’s not to say that the FT isn’t interested in changing a few perceptions. The Pearson-owned paper, or more specifically, its Web operation Rather: The Pearson-owned FT Group is launching a business news search engine designed to get past the idea of relying on keywords to search for important infomation. The idea, boiled down, is that a business search engine is more likely to give you the results that you want than a massive search engine that yields results for people in every walk of life.

Here is a quick excerpt from the press release. It explains in pretty plain English what the search engine does, though it veers into press-speak territory — that twilight zone of marketing that assigns biblical proportions to earthly things:

The Financial Times Group is announcing the BETA launch of Newssift.com - a next generation search tool that, for the first time will allow business professionals the opportunity to execute a “qualitative” business news search - think a more sophisticated business search equivalent to Google. This one of a kind search tool will provide comprehensive results that contextualize the trends, opinions, and qualitative events that shape business decisions and impact corporate reputations. The groundbreaking semantic technology, aims to create a user-friendly and meaning-based platform that easily locates and compares business news in a qualitative not quantitative fashion. Think of a traditional search as delivering results in buckets, while Newssift.com offers results that passed through a magnifying glass or prism; moving search beyond traditional results and towards refinement.

Here’s TechCrunch, which wrote at length about Newssift:

A search for “Sun Microsystems” brings up further suggestions for refinement, including “IBM,” “Jonathan Schwartz,” and “market share.” You sort of graze around, adding new keywords as they are presented to you. Each keyword you select is added to your string, and corresponding article results appear below. A sentiment pie chart indicates what percentage of the stories are positive, negative, or neutral. Another one breaks the results down by source (Online News, Magazines, Newspapers, Blogs, Research). Clicking on any shaded area filters the results further. …

… I am not sure I would use Newssift every day to stay on top of the latest news, but I can see it as a useful research tool when I have to really dig deep into a topic. It does better with business news than technology. Still, it is worth checking out in that it employs several subtle navigational techniques that make it more of a discovery engine than a search engine.

This sounds like the kind of thing that you will hear about from the FT’s rivals once they’re ready to launch.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Boston Globe, the revenue-challenged sibling of The New York Times, is laying off employees as it copes with a decline in advertising revenue made only worse by the recession. The thing is, it’s laying off advertising staff.

From the Globe:

The Boston Globe said yesterday it reduced by half the sales force that takes classified advertising over the telephone. Thirty classified employees, including two managers and 13 part-time employees, lost jobs. In addition, the positions of two other advertising managers were eliminated, said Robert Powers, the Globe’s spokesman.

The reason? There are fewer classified ads coming in because everyone does it for free at Craigslist and other free classified sites. Some papers have lost more than half of their classies.

Does it seem like newspapers are abandoning the classifieds battle instead of trying to win it? You tell us.

Slightly down is the new up.

At least judging from the reception that advertising giant WPP received today after it predicted like-for-like revenue would drop 2 percent this year.

Shares were up about 5 percent after the report from WPP, the last of the big three advertising holdings to post quarterly results. For all the worry about the advertising recession — and no doubt advertising is bad right now — WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic also showed some bright spots in their numbers.

WPP, in fact, said the in the ”long-term” the outlook for the advertising and marketing services business “appears favorable.” “Long-term” isn’t a particularly well-defined timeframe, but nonetheless those are pretty upbeat comments coming from an industry that has seen auto, retail and financial services spending drop like a stone.

“The fact they’re saying revenues in 2009 will be down 2% is relatively reassuring given the current climate,” RBS analyst Justin Diddams told the Wall Street Journal.

Keep an eye on:

• ABC is hoping the financial crisis makes for some good laughs, as it readies two Wall Street comedy pilots ( AdAge.com)
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper is pressing ahead with plans to turn into an online-only publication (WSJ.com)
• CNBC takes it on the chin — yet again (Gawker)

(Reuters photo of CEO Martin Sorrell)

Covering the decline of the U.S. newspaper business is the extreme sport of journalism. Ask American Journalism Review, which is pleading for funds to help it survive. Here’s an excerpt from a letter I got in the mail this morning (haha. Letter. Paper.):

The many daunting challenges facing the news media today, coupled with the nation’s economic crisis, have worsened the ongoing financial pressures on American Journalism Review.

That’s why we have formed “The Friends of AJR,” bringing together those who believe in the need for deeply reported, non-ideological media criticism, in an effort to ensure the magazine’s future. While AJR has been a critical success, keeping it going has never been easy. No journalism review has ever been self-sustaining. No exception. AJR is dependent on fundraising.

The “Friends of AJR” is designed to help meet this financial challenge. The Friends’ goal is to raise a minimum of $100,000 a year to help subsidize printing, distribution and online operations. To become a “friend” means a financial commitment on a level appropriate for each donor. A contribution of $1,000 or more puts you in the “Publisher” category. A donation of $500 to $999 lists you among the “Editors,” and a gift of $100 to $499 puts you in the “Reporter” category.

Typical, isn’t it? Reporters are always at the bottom.

The attached sheet offers readers the chance to make one-time or monthly payments ($88.34 a month for publishers, $41.67 for editors, $10.42 for reporters).

I don’t know what it says about AJR’s chances for survival when it is asking its core audience to help save it; after all, more of those people are getting laid off. Then again, this former Dallas Morning News foreign correspondent and editor has switched to running a high-end strip club (see fourth paragraph from the bottom). There’s a man who might be able to generate a few ducats to save journalism.

As for AJR, I called Editor Rem Rieder to ask how long the magazine has if it fails to meet its goal. I had to leave a message.

Found on Romenesko on Wednesday: The Dallas Observer reports that AH Belo Corp paid out manager bonuses at the same time that the newspaper publisher said it would get rid of 500 employees. An accident of timing, especially as other U.S. newspaper publishers cut bonuses?  Here’s AH Belo Executive Vice President and Dallas Morning News chief Jim Moroney, quoted in an interview with the Observer:

Did you think the timing — announcing layoffs and handing out bonuses — was, to put it mildly, bad?

Yeah. Obviously, the bonus thing gets put into to the sequence based on approval by the board and getting it into the payroll cycle, and once you decide to make announcements, you don’t want to sit on that either. I would say it was unfortunate coincidence. If you could have control over all these things better and see father into the future, yeah, you could have tried to separate them. But I don’t think the fundamental question would change: They’d still say, ‘Should they have been paid?’ and ‘Why were they paid?’ even if we’d waited two weeks.

This could not have made employees very happy.

I am holding meetings with employees, 50 at a time, and it’s come up. I’ve had two meetings, and it’s come up in both of them. And I get cards … People don’t always raise their hands at meetings, and I want them to say what’s on their minds. So, out of 10 comment cards, two or three of them ask about the bonuses.

AH Belo, which also publishes The Dallas Morning News and The Providence Journal, set the bonus targets in 2008 — before it decided to cut jobs, Moroney said. As for 2009, there won’t be any bonuses, he added.

(Photo: Reuters)

 If that notion of a recession-resistant entertainment industry hasn’t already been debunked, just get in touch with one of your pals out in Hollywood. They’ll tell you how bad it is — how jobs are disappearing.

Warner Brothers Entertainment is the latest to cut staff, announcing 800 jobs would be lost, or 10 percent of its worldwide staff.  NBC Universal and Viacom have already cut jobs, and industry watchers expect more job cuts to be announced by Walt Disney and Sony Pictures.

Perhaps more than other layoffs, the Warner Bros cuts send a signal of just how bad business look, The New York Times points out.

While not unexpected — Warner had been quietly preparing Hollywood to expect cuts — the layoffs rattled the movie capital because the studio is regarded as one of the industry’s healthiest. With a parade of hits like “The Dark Knight,” “Sex and the City,” “Get Smart” and “Four Christmases,” Warner recorded global ticket sales of $1.77 billion in 2008, up 25 percent from a year earlier.

But DVD sales plummeted in the fourth quarter and orders of scripted television programs — a huge Warner business — are expected to decline as networks cope with tumbling advertising sales. The struggles of Warner’s parent company, Time Warner, in the publishing arena have also put pressure on the studio to increase profitability.

The Wall Street Journal  also notes the challenges faced by parent Time Warner.

The deepening economic downturn has heaped added pressure on Time Warner to cut costs. The company recently announced a $25 billion fourth-quarter write-down to account for the tumbling value of its cable, publishing and AOL businesses, and once again scaled back its advertising outlook.

Warner Bros. was always seen as one of Time Warner’s more bloated divisions, with significant room for trimming and margin improvement. Time Warner’s movie business has already gone through one round of around 300 job cuts last year when Time Warner folded its New Line Cinema unit into Warner Bros. and shut down two boutique labels, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures.

Keep an eye on:

• Google will halt its Print Ads program on Feb. 28 because the program to help newspapers make more money in online advertising sales was not working (Reuters)
• Tensions are rising at Sony over a restructuring aimed at cost cutting (FT.com) 
• Russian billionaire and ex-KGB agent Alexander Lebedev is buying a majority interest in London’s struggling Evening Standard newspaper for a nominal sum (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

The Newspaper Association of America released numbers on Tuesday showing how ever more people are turning to the Internet to get news.

That’s good news in the sense that it presents an ever-more convincing case to advertisers that they should be working with their friendly neighborhood newspapers, ie, giving them lots of money and helping them survive. On the other hand, those online readers used to help those papers a lot more when they bought them in print… But that’s another story.

Here’s the release, which includes some links to the NAA’s latest pitch to advertisers on why newspapers are the right place to buy ad space:

Arlington, Va. - Newspaper Web sites attracted nearly 66.4 million unique visitors on average (40.2 percent of all Internet users) in the second quarter of 2008, a 12.2 percent increase over the same period a year ago, according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

In addition, newspaper Web site visitors generated an average of just over three billion page views per month throughout the quarter, compared with nearly 2.7 billion during the same period last year.

“The Internet has become the news destination of choice for many sophisticated consumers and newspaper companies continue to meet their evolving demands,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “The latest audience figures provide further evidence that newspapers’ digital properties deliver highly-accurate and hyper-local content that consumers can’t find anywhere else.”

As newspapers continue to grow their audiences online, NAA has created a new online destination for advertisers: www.newspapermedia.com. The site, redesigned in flash format, highlights the benefits newspapers’ multi-platform offerings provide advertisers, complete with enhanced details on reader engagement, ad ideas, audience data, production specifications and much more.

“With newspaper sales staffs placing an unprecedented emphasis on digital advertising, newspapermedia.com offers the information they need to demonstrate the effectiveness of the medium’s multi-platform offerings,” said Randy Bennett, NAA’s senior vice president of Business Development. “We have loaded the site with the latest data and research, captivating slides for presentations and a section on advertising ideas that have proven highly effective.”

For a mogul who’s spent a lifetime snatching up newspapers across the globe — and who spent the better part of his time talking about them on Wednesday’s quarterly earnings conference call — we found it surprising that he insists he’s not spending more money on the dying print business.

Murdoch: “From day one, the financial press has been fixated on portraying this move as a change in strategic direction; the company is now focused on allocating more of its capital on print businesses. That is not our intent, nor is it factually correct. We have not changed our playbook.”

Murdoch argued that Dow Jones, the splashiest of his newspaper buys yet, is barely a newspaper publisher at all. To lay out that argument, Murdoch appears to have abandoned his earlier argument that a free Wall Street Journal online would be better than a subscription-based site.

WSJ.com still has more than 1 million paying subscribers, up 11 percent compared to last year. (It’s unclear if he meant that the site added 11 percent more subscribers compared to the same period last year.)

Then there’s the paper itself, where Murdoch sees big opportunities to boost ad sales and circulation volume and revenue. Individually paid subscriptions rose 1.6 percent to 1.46 million and overall circulation rose 0.3 percent to 2.07 million. Circulation revenue rose 6.8 percent in the quarter, slightly below the 7.3 percent growth in 2007.

Its biggest growth area remains its enterprise division, which houses the Dow Jones Index, Factiva and Newswires — all of them subscription businesses. He says the Dow Jones Indices business revenue rose 37%, with profits up nearly 50% in the quarter ended March 31st. Factiva revenue grew 10 percent.

Dow Jones’s financial information and services group revenue rose 13% , with profits up over 8%.

All this in the first quarter after the purchase! Then again, maybe Murdoch thinks some people have set the bar higher than that.

This is destined to be an extra-inning game; to use an overly used metaphor, we’re only in the first innings. Those of you expecting to see immediate dramatic results in 12 weeks are kidding yourselves and setting an unrealistic bar. Over time, as we have done dozens of times at News Corp, most recently with SKY Italia and MySpace, we’ve made our acquisitions work, generating great returns to our shareholders. We’ll do it again at Dow Jones. It may take time, but I am as confident of it as any acquisition I have done.

Then there’s his Newsday bid, which was one of the more exciting parts of the conference call. Boxed in by Newsday reporters on the call, Murdoch spoke frankly about his confidence in landing the Long Island daily.

No, I don’t think Cablevision will prevail. Just be patient for a couple of days (inaudible). We’re certainly not in the business of getting into an auction here …

We’re hoping to wrap it up within the next week. And I don’t mean the end of next week, I mean within the next seven days … It takes two to agree. But we’re at a pretty advanced stage. I’ll just leave it at that at the moment.

Nope. No newspapers here.

(Photo: Reuters/David Moir / News Corp. Chairman and CEO Murdoch stands with Scotland’s First Minister Salmond during the official opening of the News International press printing plant at Eurocentral near Glasgow in central Scotland.)

Who says the newspaper business is doomed? Circulation and advertising may be in the dumps, sure, but judging from the bidders lining up to buy Newsday there are plenty of moguls still keen on newspapers.

The latest development: The Wall Street Journal reports that Cablevision is planning to bid as much as $650 million for the Long Island daily, which likely catapults it ahead of other bidders like News Corp, which owns the New York Post, and Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the Daily News.

Cablevision’s bid could come within two days, the report said, adding that it was unclear whether whether Cablevision is working with New York Observer owner Jared Kushner in its offer. Beyond Cablevision’s cable assets, it owns the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers, Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall.

The New York Times offered a different view. It, too, said Cablevision is preparing a bid, but it reported that the owners of the New York Observer have dropped out of the race.

Cablevision? Zuckerman? New York Observer? News Corp? What’s going on here?

These are smart, successful media companies and executives, so they must know something. Indeed, the New York Times reported that people briefed on its finances says that Newsday last year generated more than $80 million in income and about $500 million in revenue.

And it is, after all, the key paper in a relatively affluent area.

But get this: The New York Times also reports that some executives at companies interested in Newsday “learned over the last month that its printing, trucking and subscription operations were more troubled and inefficient than they knew. Paradoxically, that has persuaded them that the paper was worth more than they initially thought.”

Go figure.

Keep an eye on:

• With time running out a self-imposed deadline in contract talks with actors, major Hollywood studios say the two sides remained far from a deal and that excessive union demands are to blame (Reuters)
• Comcast Corp, the largest U.S. cable operator, on Thursday posted a fall in first-quarter net profit as it lost basic video subscribers because of fierce competition from phone and satellite companies (Reuters)
• Microsoft indicated a willingness to up its bid for Yahoo to $33 per share, but Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has also appeared ready to walk away from the deal altogether if need be, the Wall Street Journal reports , quoting people with knowledge of the situation. It reported that Microsoft’s board met Wednesday without reaching a decision.
• Talk at the 2008 leadership conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies centered on politics and the economy (The New York Times)

(Photo: Reuters)

Newspaper circulation: It’s rising! Well, at some papers it is. That’s according to figures that came out from the Audit Bureau of Circulations on Monday morning. Most papers, as everyone knows, are reporting falling circulation in all their editions, whether during the week or on the weekends. Still, out of the more than 500 papers that reported, there were some more positive stories to tell. Here’s a list of the top circulation gainers, according to the ABC.

The big gainer? El Diario La Prensa , in Spanish, serving a growing part of the U.S. population. The Miami Herald has published El Nuevo Herald for years. Is it time for more big-city dailies to consider a Spanish edition?