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

Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

  • Ad Age/Nat Ives: It's Back: 25 MORE Media People You Should Follow on Twitter
    25 media types worth following on Twitter.
  • 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."

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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September 06, 2006

Google's News Archives: Nine Questions

The introduction of Google News Archive this week kind of feels like the first significant chipping away of the Berlin Wall. You know, the wall that in this case has artificially separated today's news from last week's or last month's news. It's always been an artificial division, and one that hasn't served publishers very well, cutting off one of their very strengths, depth and context of coverage over time. Berlin_wall_crack

This has been the newspapers' promise over time: you can come to us to find out what's happened, what happened and when whatever happens happens, you can depend on us to bring that to your doorstep too. Well, the doorstep's changed to the desktop, but the promise of the brand shouldn't. From the the New York Times and Washington Post to the Eugene Register-Guard and Boulder Daily Camera, the promise should heighten in this, our digital age. We offer you the full spectrum of coverage online -- yesterday (research and archives), today, and tomorrow (alerts bringing the news to your computer, your phone or your TV; just tell us where to throw it).

Against that backdrop, the best- and worst-kept secret, Google Premium, I mean, Google News Archive finally arrived on the scene, just in time for back-to-school and back-to-work, and who says those Googlers don't care a whit a market timing? Holy Gutenberg, it's got some articles a couple of hundred years old!

It's an intriguing advance. But still there are questions. Here's my first nine. Can you add a tenth?

1. Isn't participation in the new program an offer that most publishers just couldn't refuse? They know who runs the traffic lights these days.

2.What happened to Yahoo's similar foray into pointing to paid content, Yahoo Subscriptions? It's still around, anemic in content, an afterthought in placement and one of the apparently owner-less islands floating in the Yahoo eco-system.

3. So where does the recent and mysterious Google/AP deal fit? The recent licensing deal doesn't apply to Google News or the new Google News Archives, but to a "new product" still in the works.

4. How many children will be in the Google family of news products? We've got Google News, Google News Archives, the new AP-involved product and then....

5. Why is Google's News Archive timeline a weak link? It can apply a lesson from the recent launch of the one-year Click 'o Meter put up by Topix or perfect its own Ajax-infused timeline on Google Finance, which sometimes allows for dynamic display of stories as you pick points on the calendar. (Or am I imaging that?)

6. When will we see a contextual ad stack on Google News and Google News Archive? We can believe that Google, already growing richly enough, has waited to put ads on the pages, making it easier to sign up publishers for its new program. Now that they are in the fold, and will rapidly become dependent on the new traffic, we can expect ads to appear sooner than later.

7. When the contextual ads arrive, will the publishers get a revenue split? There's a lot of value on the News Archive page itself -- a melding of Google technology and publisher content. The recent AP deal, very hush-hush in details, may set a precedent for publishers to start harvesting a piece of the action earned from readership on Google's (and Yahoo's and MSN's) own sites.

8. Isn't it amazing how many good-enough free sources for sports (MLB, ESPN), business (Marketwatch), news (Newsweek, MSNBC, CNN, Slate) there are out there, making the value proposition of $2.95 to $9.95 per walled, archived article from the Times, Post and other dailies obsolescent?

9. Isn't this just another step in Google's and Yahoo's (and the Web's) drive all content to be free to the user, monetized by contexutal and behavioral ad systems....that just happened to be run and owned by Google and Yahoo? Maybe we'll get an update on Google Base, or was that Googlezon, soon.

What's your question?



 

 

 

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September 06, 2006 in 9 Questions, Google |

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Stuart Schultz

I love googles new service but there is no access provided? Its just links to premium and subscription content that you need a credit card to access. What is google providing? I can go to lexis nexis or factiva for links to content that I have to pay for. Again I love the service but I could create this with off the shelf software so I wonder what everyone is so excited about??

Posted by: Stuart Schultz | September 06, 2006 at 07:45 PM

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