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  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

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Press Mentions

  • Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble Globally
    The few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"
  • NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price?
    “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.” He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”
  • Economist: It isn’t just newspapers: much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
    Ken Doctor of Outsell, a research firm, reckons that the Kindle appeals to baby-boomers who would otherwise read a paper magazine or newspaper. The young prefer their iPhones and their aggregators. Indeed, the top four magazines on Kindle, according to Amazon’s website, are the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. Not much of a youth market there.
  • Forbes: San Diego News Shoot-Out
    "The Union-Tribune is cratering. That opens a hole in the market and the opportunity for some unconventional business models."
  • BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices
    “There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”
  • AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is saf
    The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."
  • Guardian: Seattle mourns the last day of its venerable Post Intelligencer
    "There's a lot less reporting happening, on a national scale. For the 1,500 or so daily newspapers, it's just a matter of getting smaller and smaller."
  • Seattle Times: Seattle's oldest newspaper goes to press for the final time
    "They're bringing the full force of their national relationships and content to bear on Seattle. They [Hearst] could sustain this experiment indefinitely. If it makes a million or loses a million, that's nothing to a company like Hearst."
  • AP: Hearst hopes Web-only Seattle P-I will turn profit
    "It [online-only PI] definitely can make money. They have a head start in terms of the brand and (Web) traffic. They have to run like hell to create a new identity."
  • Bloomberg: Seattle Post-Intelligencer to End Printed Edition
    “They are the first major metropolitan newspaper to flip the switch and go online only. This is going to be an important model for people to watch, whether this can survive as a Web-only presence.”

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

My Work as an Outsell Analyst

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« In Digg Nation | Main | Knight Ridder: Signage of the Times »

May 30, 2006

Career Builder: After the Dominoes Fall

The Knight Ridder/McClatchy deal feels like it has been playing out in slow motion. First pushed to put itself on the market in November, the deal should finally finalize around July 1. That's when all the golden parachutes should be deployed and all the properties change hands. McClatchy, buyer of KR, has been busy auctioning off the 12 low-margin newspapers it didn't want to keep. It's announced auctions and declared winners and losers of half of the 12, even though it hasn't officially bought what it's selling.

With the Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Monterey Herald going to Media News and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News going to Philadelphia Media Holdings, put together by a local business consortium, all the most important dominoes have fallen.

And as suggested here in March, newspaper companies may be smartening up,  using the newspaper consolidation process as a way of building national scale.

What's  likely to emerge as details of the sales become public is this:  CareerBuilder Career_builder_logo_1will become the recruitment site for the America's top 4 newspaper companies. I've got it on good authority that Media News, as part of the Merc sales deal, will get a piece of CareerBuilder. CEO Dean Singleton, then, presumably will bring in other of his 49 properties to the CareerBuilder fold, along with four new papers.

Media News is becoming the fourth biggest newspaper company, by circulation, with its 53 properties. Ahead of it are Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune, all of whom will be owners of CareerBuilder as well, with McClatchy acquiring its place via the KR deal, and sharing a piece of it with Media News.

Add it up and CareerBuilder becomes the default newspaper recruitment play, even more dominant than it has been.

How dominant? It is the online/print revenue engine for most of the newspaper companies in it, eclipsing revenue from traditional branded CPM ads, Google/Yahoo+ paid search ads and everything else.

Take Tribune CEO Dennis Fitzsimon's assessment of the jewel at the Tribune annual meeting, as reported in E and P:

But Fitzsimons made CareerBuilder.com exhibit number one in the case for optimism. He said the jobs site's monthly unique visitors now total 22 million--nearly double the 12 million visitors to Monster.com, the online pioneer in help-wanted. This year, CareerBuilder.com -- a partnership of Tribune, Knight Ridder and Gannett Co. -- will surpass Monster.com in revenue, he added.
 
"Everybody said we couldn't win with CareerBuilder -- and we did win," Fitzsimons says. "And we will win."

CareerBuilder has a host of issues.

  • How much should it continue with or sign up newspaper affiliates from outside its ownership group, and how much should it rely on its own better-trained, better-targeted, better-motivated team?
  • How does it meet the challenge of big companies moving quickly forward with smarter recruitment tools that allow the direct locating and hiring of talent?
  • What about craigslist, oodle, vast and the like?
  • How many dollars does it need to pour into renewing and making new distribution deals to get traffic? Monster often seems everywhere, now sponsoring the MLB All-Star ballot. Monster_allstar_ballot
  • Is a closer deal with Yahoo and Yahoo Hot Jobs worth it, combining forces in one way or another to vanquish the Monster?

Network, network, network. That's the lesson that AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google should have pounded into newspaper heads long ago. CareerBuilder is just about there.

Now how about a truly national network for that pesky thing called news?

 

May 30, 2006 |

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Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Ken, good column and I liked the fact that you brought up some good points about the new recruiting tools. In your article quite a few numbers were mentioned, and when you speak with sales reps from these job boards these numbers are mentioned again and again....unique visitors, jobs posted, resumes in the database...etc. The only problem is having spent my whole professional career in recruiting; it's not quantity...its quality. Employers don't care that job boards have that many people on them or have that many unique visitors because from a recruiting stand point more is more work. Thus I created one of those new recruiting tools that you mentioned. It reaches the passive job seeker and provides quality not quantity.

Jason Gorham
Chief Cook & Bottle Washer
CareerMetaSearch.com

Posted by: Jason Gorham | July 18, 2006 at 02:22 PM

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