Robert MacMillan

I wrote an analysis on Monday about the possibility that News Corp might take its news search results away from Google and list them on Microsoft's Bing search engine instead. My conclusion: This one isn't such a hot idea. Then I read John Gapper's Financial Times item about how it *could* be a hot idea.

To recap, here's how it would work.

• Microsoft would pay News Corp for the privilege of being the only search engine to carry results from papers including the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Times of London.
• Microsoft thinks it can get more people to use its search engine, drawing them away from Google.
• News Corp could punish Google, in essence, for making tons of money from the ads it serves alongside news search results. Why, the thinking goes, should Google make a bunch of money off the news that we produce and our newsrooms go starving and our ad sales tank?
• Other newspaper publishers, if they see Murdoch making it work, might think the same thing and abandon Google en masse.

I and many others wrote that it would be a gamble at best. What if people don't care that much about news? If the 70 percent of the search market that uses Google discovers  the news is absent, will they switch search engines? Scientists of misanthropy like me say it's unlikely. If they don't find it, they won't seek it.

Gapper at the FT has another way of looking at it:

In effect, (Murdoch) would be swapping his revenue stream from online advertising with a payment from Microsoft for drawing visitors to Bing. That suggests one of two things: either, as a lot of digital evangelists have suggested, he is getting old and does not "get" the internet, or he has looked at the figures and decided that Google traffic is not worth very much. Personally, I think the latter is more plausible. ...

Mr Murdoch appears to have decided he will not lose very much by ditching Google traffic and even a fairly small payment from Microsoft would compensate. He is attempting to get distributors to pay for content in the way that US cable operators pay cable networks for programming. ...  If the revenue from search traffic is low, why not swap it for something else?

In other words: You, Mr. or Ms. Newspaper Publisher, hate Google because you're in a co-dependent relationship. You need Google, but Google hurts you too, so you want to escape from Google, but you can't... But think about it this way: How much worse can it be? You're shedding hundreds, if not thousands of jobs, and you call 25 percent ad revenue declines an improvement over how they were a few months ago. What's NOT to lose? And if someone's paying you more than you're making now?

Not to add too many question marks to one blog post, but does this make Rupert Murdoch the smartest man in newspapers?

Several media reporters wrote on Twitter on Thursday that this was one of the worst weeks in journalism, and it's hard to argue with them. BusinessWeek is canning a third of its staff as Bloomberg gets ready to buy the magazine. The Associated Press is laying off 90 people as part of its effort to cut payroll costs by 10 percent this year.

And now The Washington Post is laying off staff, sources told me on Friday, and a spokeswoman confirmed.

The Post has cut an unknown number of washingtonpost.com workers, the website folks who until now have worked separately at the dot-com headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from the Post's headquarters in Washington, D.C. One source told me up to 10 are going. That's not as big a number as other places you've read about lately, but it's still a painful cut. (Disclosure: I worked for The Washington Post Co. from 1998 to 2005)

Sources shared several names with me, but until those people confirm that they were laid off, I don't want to publish them. What I can say is that there were several journalists and marketing people among the casualties. They are getting severance packages, but they are accompanied by non-disclosure agreements which prevent them from discussing their firings. Apparently, some of my sources said, they will be out of work by Dec. 31.

Why is this happening? Here's what spokeswoman Kris Coratti said:

As part of the work we're doing to turn around the business that supports our journalism, there were a small number of individual positions eliminated as a result of efficiencies we have found through our new structure and through new technology, and those have taken place in both print and online.

The background: The Post's web staff, as I mentioned, is joining the main newsroom as they eliminate the gap that the paper set up many years ago by making its website a separate operation. The company, all my sources tell me, want to cut staff before the end of the year because next year the remainder would become unionized. Web staff are not unionized now. That, my sources say, would make it much more difficult for the money-losing Washington Post to cut costs by laying off people because they would be protected to some extent by their contract.

With yet layoffs taking place at U.S. media outlets from Conde Nast to BusinessWeek to Time Inc., and advertising revenue showing little sign of rising anytime soon, I have a feeling that we'll continue to read grim entries like this one.

Top Rupert Murdoch adviser Gary Ginsberg is leaving News Corp after 11 years, the company said on Monday.

It must have hit New York Times reporter Tim Arango's e-mail inbox first (his writeup appeared about five minutes before I got the press release).

Here is what he wrote about Ginsberg, 47, the second senior executive to leave News Corp in recent months, following Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin:

Mr. Ginsberg, a former lawyer in the Clinton White House, was hired in 1999 to be News Corporation's director of communications. He was hired partly to refurbish the company's image after a controversy in which Mr. Murdoch was said to have stopped publication of a book by Chris Patten, the former governor of Hong Kong, to curry favor with the Chinese government. Mr. Ginsberg's portfolio within News Corporation expanded well beyond public relations. He gradually gained control over investor relations, marketing and corporate social responsibility. He also became an important bridge between Mr. Murdoch and Democratic politicians, particularly Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Ginsberg, Arango said, arranged a lunch between Bill Clinton and Murdoch in Harlem, and a year later with a New York Post newsroom tour. Eventually, the Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and Murdoch threw her a fundraiser at News Corp's headquarters. (Yes, that is quite a feat to arrange for a newspaper that under Murdoch has leaned Republican more often than not.)

It's also a feat to get a well-known Democrat to say what he said in the press release:

I will always be grateful to Rupert for the many opportunities he's given me over the years... It was a difficult decision to leave a company that has been such a vital part of my life and I'll miss the many talented colleagues who have helped make this such a thrilling and fascinating ride. But I've been thinking about leaving for a while now to pursue something new, and this seemed like the right time to do it.

Teri Everett, who spends plenty of time dealing with the horde of reporters who cover News Corp's every move, will take over as the new communications chief. Reed Nolte will run investor relations.

Covering Thomson Reuters Corp for almost two years has taught me that people like to cast my company in a recurring role in media deal parlor games. Now that the company's arch-rival Bloomberg LP will buy BusinessWeek magazine from McGraw-Hill, lots of my pals in the media world are wondering: Will Thomson Reuters buy a mainstream news or business news magazine? Or newspaper? Why not Forbes? Why not the Financial Times?

Keep in mind that Thomson Reuters likes to remind people when they ask these questions that Thomson Corp, before buying Reuters, got out of its Canadian newspaper empire for a reason. (See below)

I asked our chief executive, Tom Glocer, a question along these lines on a Thursday phone call he had with reporters to discuss the company's third-quarter financial results.

Here is what he said:

Thomson did a remarkable job, far earlier than any other company I know, of seeing what was coming and transitioning their business out of print for the most part... I don't see any particular time or reason at this juncture why we should go the other way.

Later on Thursday, when I interviewed Glocer, we returned to this theme. (I can't help it, I'm a print guy.) I used the Financial Times, owned by Pearson Plc and beloved of its CEO, Dame Marjorie Scardino, as a sample target:

Here is Glocer's reply:

When I came to London, Marjorie was famous for saying she would never sell the FT, or it would go "over my dead body." There were many years in which the FT had fallen on harder times when people held that up as well: Marjorie has to go before the FT.

That sounds like a "no" on the FT. What about other properties?

Is it impossible that somewhere in the world that we'd take a print property and move it electronic? No, but we're not looking to go out and buy consumer print publications. That's not what we think our business is.

That sounds like a "no" on print. At that point, Chief Financial Officer Bob Daleo took over, saying that Thomson Reuters is a company where "what we shy away from are advertising-based models. We charge for content, we charge for information and news."

What about Reuters.com, an ad-supported site that runs our news? Glocer said:

I would argue that the overwhelming amount of our news is behind the firewall in the sense that you only get it as part of a product that you pay for. It's great that we have it. I'm very proud of reuters.com. I use it on weekends and evenings when I'm not in front of my bigger service, my subscription service.

I asked one more question on print: Why did Thomson Reuters get involved in any way at all with ZelnickMedia's losing bid for BusinessWeek? What was that about?

We had no ownership interest or economics in the deal... We have done very similar things already. I would point you to the deal with the International Herald Tribune where Reuters supplies a couple pages' worth of business news. So the way I'd think of it is, we have a news agency providing television, text, photos, etc.... There is no particular magic about BusinessWeek. We stand ready to do sensible, commercial deals to help deliver value to media customers, and it's not a sort of, 'Well the TR play is BusinessWeek.' It never was. For a while it got reported like that because it was amusing to people."

And that's the last word on print...today.

Media and technology executives are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in New York City at a conference hosted by private equity firm Quadrangle. Note the word private.

When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they're not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that's no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?

Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of "MediaMemo" at News Corp's AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I'm talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta, etc).

Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I'm on a deadline that I can't shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It's a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you'll learn something interesting.

Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year's agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, "Annals of Communications", The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

(Photo of Barry Diller, who will remain away from prying eyes at Quadrangle's confab: Reuters)

Fifty-six. Is it the new 65? Ask Steven Ainsley, the 56-year-old publisher of The Boston Globe. He is retiring, parent company New York Times Co said on Thursday, after three years as publisher. His successor is Christopher Mayer, 47, who joined the globe in 1984.

In the press release, the Times Co noted the two Pulitzer Prizes that the Globe won under Ainsley's reign. It didn't mention that other thing that happened this year, which was the Times threatening to close the paper unless unions buckled and agreed to millions of dollars in concessions to stem outrageous operating losses that could have hit $85 million this year. It also didn't mention the layoffs, the closing of the Globe's international bureaus and the attempts to sell the Globe for next to nothing after buying it in 1993 for $1.1 billion.

But those are details.

The Globe's story says that Ainsley is considering nonprofit work after the Times. All we can add is: Isn't that what you've been doing at the Globe?

Here are a few excerpts, meanwhile, from the Globe story:

Ainsley said he was glad to have seen the Globe through to a stronger financial position. "It's been difficult but enormously gratifying,'' he said. "Clearly we've had a lot of work to do here this year. I think we've made extraordinary progress in getting the Globe on sound financial footing." Mayer, a native of upstate New York and a graduate of Yale University, said he is enthusiastic about the Globe's prospects. "It's a big challenge but it's also a great opportunity and a great institution,'' Mayer said.

Asked whether he anticipates making changes at the paper, he said the Globe has "very talented people,'' and that he and his team will be working on strategies to take the Globe into the evolving digital era.

"There's a lot of passion for what we do,'' Mayer said. "The journalism is important, and we need a business model that enables us to continue to do that."

UPDATE:

By the way, it looks like Ainsley is eligible to receive a $1,215,927 departure package of sorts. That is the total of various restricted stock units, deferred compensation and retirement benefits listed in the Times Co's most recent proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I asked a Globe spokesman whether Ainsley will take that money, or whether he'll leave any of that on the table in the spirit of the Times asking Globe employees to allow their benefits and pay to be cut. Can't hurt to ask, right? I'll update again when he replies.

Newspaper advertising is a joke, local TV stations are struggling to get ads of their own, journalists are losing their jobs and media executives are calling 25 percent revenue declines an improvement. It sounds like something might be amiss in the U.S. media world.

But don't take our word for it if you're the Federal Communications Commission, and you're about to revisit media ownership regulations and see if they need some changing. See this item from Inside Radio:

[FCC] Chairman Julius Genachowski hires internet entrepreneur and journalist Steven Waldman to lead an agency-wide initiative assessing the state of media. Waldman will lead a team to conduct what's promised to be an "open, fact-finding process" looking at how the economy is impacting media outlets and make recommendations for policy changes.

Waldman is the co-founder and former editor of the religious website Beliefnet.com, which was bought by News Corp. in 2007. ... Waldman will join the Office of Strategic Planning and serve as senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski says, "A strong consensus has developed that we're at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn."

Yes, but let's make extra-special sure and hire a guy to check out the situation. You never know; everything might be just fine and we're making a big mistake saying otherwise.

We had a hard time finding the good news in Monday's report that U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen more than 10 percent, based on an analysis of 379 daily papers. Thank goodness for the newspapers whose publishers helped them understand why losing hundreds or thousands of paying readers is good.

Most papers acknowledged deep declines in circulation, but explained it in one of the following ways:

• We had to clear out all the bulk copies sold at discount. (I'm still not sure how this one works because I recall publishers saying this a couple of years ago. How many deadwood readers are there?)
• We shrank our coverage area so of course we lost some circulation. It tells advertisers that they're getting a BETTER quality of reader.
• We're charging more for the paper so circulation revenue has risen, and anyway, who wants to rely on a business as fickle as advertising (the one that lined our owners' pockets for the past 150 years.)?
• Readership is rising on the Internet.
• At least we didn't get whacked as bad as the next guy.

All these statements are true, and they all are good business moves. What I can't find among the numbers is what percent of print decline at many of these papers is because of the other reasons that you hear from people. Some are legitimate, some aren't and some are just silly. All say one thing: Many people don't pay for the paper anymore, which means there's less money to keep them in business. (Don't believe us? Ask the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

• I hate my newspaper
• My newspaper doesn't have anything interesting in it
• News is boring
• News is free on the Internet
• My newspaper is biased to the right/left/middle/other Little League team than the one my kid is on
• My paper stopped running Garfield in the funnies. It doesn't run Hints From Heloise anymore.
• You can't get good TV listings anymore
• I don't care about anything that happens in the rest of the world or outside my front door.
• There's not enough local/regional/national/world news here.
• The sports section sucks.
• It always arrives too early/late for me to read it.

Here are samples of how some papers handled Monday's news:

San Francisco Chronicle headline: Chronicle's strategy shift starts to pay off

The Chronicle said Monday that reshaping the newspaper's business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation. For the six months that ended in September, The Chronicle's daily circulation dropped 25.8 percent to 251,782, compared with the same period in 2008, the steepest decline among major U.S. metropolitan papers. ...

Frank Vega, publisher of The Chronicle, said the newspaper's loss in circulation was an expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue.

The Chron also adds that subscription price increases and other changes have given it some profitable weeks after losing $50 million last year.

The Detroit News: Detroit newspapers lose less circulation than other big dailies

The steeper losses at other newspapers boosted the Detroit publications' rankings among the largest in the country. The News pulled ahead from 50th place to 46th; the Free Press jumped from 20th to 17th.

"We radically changed our delivery model and throughout the industry we have seen greater losses," Janet Hasson, senior vice president of audience development for the Detroit Media Partnership, said in a statement.
The Des Moines Register: Newspaper circulation falls, including at Register

Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth said much of the decline is due to strategic changes, such as eliminating discounts, reducing unprofitable delivery in far corners of the state and increasing home delivery and single copy prices.

"Our unduplicated audience reach in central Iowa is higher today than it was a decade ago," Hollingsworth said.

As you can see, things are doing well, so please stop telling everyone that they're not.

(Photo: Reuters)

MySpace, the online social network (can we still call it that now that it has ducked out of the Facebook/Twitter competition?), appears to be pursuing what I'll call the "two-pronged news strategy." You get used to it when you cover media and technology. For those of you who don't enjoy this privilege, it goes like this:

• Pick a news outlet that you like and whisper things to them about what you're doing. It doesn't have to be interesting, it just has to be exclusive. If you're in public relations, you don't even have to know that someone in your company is doing this. It works well for you.
• Let the rest of the press read the story and bombard your telephone and e-mail with messages demanding to know if it's true. Score a big hit on the news cycle. Because you either decline to comment or only want to talk "on background," it heightens the air of mystery -- and newsworthiness.
• The official announcement of the news, which will always resemble 90 percent or more of what you read in the first round of anonymously sourced stories, will get just as much attention as that first round. It's a 2-for-1 deal that is irresistible to many companies.

I don't know that MySpace is doing this, and wouldn't be able to confirm it if I asked. It could just be that the reporters who get the breaking news have great sources and the reporter asked smart questions that would yield good answers. I'll let you judge.

The first example comes from Kara Swisher, tech blogger at AllThingsD, which is MySpace's cousin in the News Corp family. She reports:

Microsoft's MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site's music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal. ...

Sources said Microsoft execs don't think they can do as good a job as MySpace is doing and don't see the point in striking needed but complex deals with music labels, which the News Corp. (NWS) property already has.

MySpace, Swisher adds, would get a "gusher" of traffic. I asked MySpace whether we could talk about this. From spokeswoman: "Off the record I can't comment." OK.

The second example is this story in The Telegraph from Monday:

Facebook and MySpace are in talks about sharing content across both sites, according to senior figures at the two companies. The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, told The Telegraph: "Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.

On this one, MySpace CEO and former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta confirmed the talks on the record. But I'm in the position of only being able to refer you to that article.

On the record, MySpace wouldn't comment. I suspect that the comments will come later when we rewrite the Telegraph's story along with the rest of the press corps.

Monday's newspaper circulation numbers please no one who makes their living from selling papers. That's evident when you look at the top 25 dailies by circulation and see that the best performance came from The Wall Street Journal, which rose less than 1 percent. Considering that advertisers use these numbers to determine where to spend their money, there is little reason to rejoice.

Tribune Co's two largest papers, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, both posted steep declines on Monday, but the company is urging advertisers to look beyond numbers that it considers less relevant than they were before the Internet. Instead, it wants them to look at how many people they can reach through Tribune's diverse lineup of papers, websites and television stations.

To make this easier, Tribune has started "Tribune365," a "multichannel sales solutions group providing customized marketing programs to advertisers looking to reach consumers across a variety of media platforms." (More on what this means -- in English -- below.)

"We want to change the conversation around both how we sell and how people perceive newspapers." Print circulation," said Vincent Casanova, Tribune's senior vp of publishing operations "just doesn't tell the whole story... The objective is to change the conversation from a narrow look at topline circulation results to a broader discussion of the power of newspaper advertising and how to deliver results."

For Tribune365, that means no longer selling ads to national buyers through a bunch of different sales teams that sell different kinds of ads for this or that part of a paper or this or that part of a website or TV station.

Tribune365 President Don Meek cited a recent ad campaign for big-box retailer Target, which set up one of a 16,000 square-foot "pop-up store" in Chicago (Those are the temporary stores that spring up in cities for a few days at a time, sell a bunch of stuff, and move on):

"We were able to put together an integrated program on WGN, WGN-TV, the Chicago Tribune, RedEye, Hoy... The only thing we couldn't deliver was the outdoor bus shelter advertising on Michigan Avenue. Not only were we able to provide real estate and promotional support, it was also a fully integrated ad program. They said it was one of the most popular programs that they ever did."

Here's another thing that ought to appeal to advertisers, thanks to AdAge's article on Monday that includes a section on Tribune365:

Big newspaper companies are also looking at putting all their data about their readers, in print and online, to work for marketers. Tribune's new Tribune365 unit is planning to introduce a universal registration system for all Tribune sites this year, with universal registration for mobile visitors in 2010. "We are getting such a fine degree of detail in terms of targeting that we will eventually be able to target a physical product to a household address, a digital product to the digital user in that household and a mobile product to the mobile user in that household," said Don Meek, president of Tribune365.

That kind of project, of course, benefits from the biggest possible audience of registrants, something that charging for even unique, niche content could undermine. Mr. Meek declined to discuss prospects for pay plans at Tribune. "We're going to try a lot of different things," he said. "Which ones ultimately prevail, it's too soon to tell."

And that, dear readers, is really the bottom line.