Content Bridges

Frankly, Candidly, Truthfully: Newspapers CEOs Talk About 2Q

It's time for second-quarter newspaper earnings reports, with Gannett leading off Wednesday, with the long tale of woe to follow. Given the many newspaper staff cutbacks, which I thought might include the investor relations people, I've put together a few boilerplate remarks that I hope are helpful.

Good morning. Let me say I’m glad that the few remaining financial analysts covering the industry want to hear about our second quarter results. Our CFO will be giving you the details on those in a few moments. But let me make a few introductory remarks first.

Frankly, visibility has gotten worse. We told you in the last quarter that it was limited. Well, now – did you see that George Clooney movie “The Perfect Storm” -- we’re smack in the middle of the biggest fogbank you’ve ever seen. Some of you have asked why print revenues have fallen off the table. Frankly, I don’t even see the table anymore. What I see though, I don’t like. Some of you have asked to see what I see, and I’ve got to tell you, it’s better not to.

Excuse, me, I think I’m being Twitterized, isn’t that what you call it? Rupert keeps buzzing, like I’m media so I can be in Sun Valley and you newspaper rats are stuck in your hot, brick buildings. But back to the subject at hand.

First, let’s address costs.

We’re having our people talk to Dean Singleton’s people – I’m not talking to Dean directly; I think that’s how Ganzi got in trouble – about centralized printing. Frankly, Dean’s better than us at thinking outside the box, and we’re talking about one large printing plant, somewhere in the low-wage rural West, and then distributing the papers almost instantaneously, through some kind of system of high-tech pneumatic tubes. Apparently, it’s part of that Google Print deal, involving Google Flux technology. Sounds almost like back-to-the-future, but my people tell me it’s got potential.

You all know that Goldman Sachs is now predicting 30% year over year increases in newsprint pricing for the second half of the year. For some reason, all those Indians and Chinese are buying up newspapers like there is no tomorrow, driving up paper usage and pricing; I’d like to know their secret sauce.

As you know, our biggest cost is people.

On staffing, some of you have asked why we don’t cut more, and some of you have asked why we cut so much. Which proves I think that we’re taking the right, down-the-middle approach.  To tell you the truth, it’s a whole new world out there. Journalism schools seem to be stealing away our most experienced talent. Then there’s ProPublica, which considers itself some kind of high-minded, non-profit, picking off our highly prized investigative reporters. Then there’s the allure of these pajama blogger start-ups; did you see that Rafat Ali guy just got a big payday selling his site to the Brits? I always wondered if his work permit was in order.

We do realize that we need reporters, but frankly, they are a pain in the ass to deal with in good times. And, now, always in a bad mood. I’m told all the so-called “content” they create will prove very valuable online, even if we have to shrink the paper to the size of a menu. I just keep asking how soon?

Now let’s talk about revenues.

On ad sales, we’re thinking of adopting more self-service techniques. Hey, if you haven’t seen that YouTube video on how publishers can make more money using Google’s system, you should.

Our big initiative, of course, has been our work with Yahoo through the consortium. We’ve bet most of our 2009 growth on using its AMP system – or whatever they call, seems they have some legal problem on that, but they’ve got enough lawyers to work it out. Frankly, we love it. They do all the technology hocus-pocus, and our sales people just sell more stuff. You know, when they are over there golfing in Scotland with the car dealers and all, they just ladle on some more online products, and we can make some new revenue.

Some of you have asked what if Yahoo gets sold or split up like an estate. To tell you the truth, we haven’t a clue. Frankly, we don’t think it’s fair. We finally get our, excuse me, stuff together with the consortium, and then Steve Ballmer and Carl Icahn have to spoil the whole thing. We can’t seem to catch a break. We try not to think about how we’ve placed the continued viability of the American newspaper industry on the fortunes of Yahoo. I, for one, sleep better, not thinking too much about it, after 9 p.m. Anyways we have the firm assurances of Hilary Schneider that one way or another, it will work out okay, and my people say her track record certainly bears that out.

On content, you’ve asked what we’re doing in video. Lots, I’m told, though it’s not easy getting those union photographers to deal with things that move, my people tell me. Anyhow, AP’s on top of it, I hear; and yes, we plan to stay part of the AP. We’re now paying on a month-to-month basis, though I think we discontinued the use of the IndyMac card on that one.

Now, let me talk about the company overall.

We’ve previously announced that we’ve engaged strategic consultants, which – I won’t be fancy about it – is a way to say we’re offering for sale anything anyone would like to buy. Sam’s running a seminar on selling the real estate out from under each of us; my people are going, and I told them to watch their wallets. Craig still seem to have some cash – I want you to know that while I’m sure he earned every penny of that $7.9 million last year – we’re a tad more prudent than Gannett, and my compensation shows it. 

The Newest Barbarians, Toting Spreadsheets

Sam, I get it. You're being aggressive. When you add to Randy Michaels' aggressive talk about cutting newspaper size and staff that "I promise you he is underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge," you seem to be proudly announcing that the newest barbarians may well be inside the gates. I'm not sure who that impresses aims to impress -- your employees are fairly shell-shocked already -- but it does capture attention.

What I don't get is why the aggressiveness seems to take us back to 1980 rather than forward to 2012? (Though 2012 may seem even further away to Zell and Michaels than it does to Hillary Clinton.)

It's little surprise to keen observers of the new Tribune that more draconian cuts had to be on the way. Zell relied on this trading acumen, and luck, to create an auction for Newsday, and that netted him tens of millions more than most people will tell you the paper is worth. The Cubs, Wrigley Field and cable network assets are next, but the deepening downturn in the industry (and as of Friday, maybe the cyclical economy as well) tell us that those asset sales may not even be enough to get Tribune through 2009.

What is surprising is that in publicly announcing cutbacks, Randy Michaels, Zell's radio guy-turned-Tribune czar, is focusing on, of all things, PRINT.

Take his notion of how to make the papers more readable and sell more of them.

Michaels saying the papers will become more USA Today-like, with:

"a new look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research: charts, graphs, maps, lists."

Wow. Great solution for 1992 perhaps, 10 years after USA Today turned the newspaper world, Pleasantville-like, from black and white to color. The problem with that is that USA Today is essentially flat last several years in circulation, and it's got a national base and multiplicity of hotel/travel programs to keep the numbers up. The biggest innovation of the last couple of years isn't the color weather map on USA Today's back page; it's Google's ability to map everything and anything, instantly -- at the customer's fingertips and choice, 24/7.

Which takes us to the bigger news that Tribune figured out that the problem is one of ratios, now believing that a 50/50 ratio of ads to news is right.

Michaels' reasoning:

"If we take, for instance, the Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio … the smallest paper, Monday and Tuesday, [would be] 56 pages. That would be substantially larger than that day's Wall Street Journal. We don't think that's a bad value to the consumer. And we think that by doing that, and then by being able to produce less editorial content … we can save a lot of money by producing the right-size newspaper.

Let me hear that again. You're going to decide how much editorial content to produce by seeing how much will fit into the new downsized papers? You're going to ratchet down the amount of editorial content (and staff), leaving the decision of what you are going to give your print readers essentially in the hands of print ad buyers?

Surely, we can make good journalistic arguments about the folly of that. Journalism's never been mainly a quantitative business. But let's look broadly at "product." Would Randy Michaels, who rebuilt Clear Channel on a low-cost model, let the amount of radio ads sold determine how much programming listeners got? I don't think so; you've still got to have a consistent product for listeners or readers.

Readers are already fleeing newspapers -- and I'm talking about decades-long readers, not the young whom the industry too often blames -- because they see every day that less is less. This change, however it looks on a spreadsheet, will only hasten that decline.

That's a decline that is, at this point, inevitable anyhow. I give Michaels' credit in publicly announcing some thinking about how to justify cuts, but he could have put it more simply. People and paper are our two biggest costs, and we don't have enough money to maintain current levels of spending. That's less fancy, but more to the point.

What we'll soon see is "daily" papers becoming, uh, less daily. Monday and Tuesday editions are a sinkhole, with the latest evidence here, as MediaNews looks to those days as "quick-read" editions. Those days could soon be dropped completely, at smaller operations here and there. Anyhow, the whole notion of a daily newspaper is now obsolescent. It has taken way too long to get to 24/7 newsrooms and news output, but that's what the national players -- from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC -- have adjusted to. Even TBO.com, in Tampa Bay, has made a centerpiece of its new "Continuous News Desk" and committed a couple of dozen people (print, broadcast, web) to making it work.

The old daily paper is being -- as we watched Hillary Clinton's concession on Saturday and its instant analysis on TV and web -- replaced by the web.

Charlie and Phil's Excellent Global Adventure

Call it physics. Call it Zen. Call it journalism.

As I cover the waning fortunes of legacy media and rising fortunes of start-up journalism sites, I can't help but think of equilibrium. Maybe it's being back on the Left Coast too long, but somehow the scales seem to be balancing. Recall that Americans still read news 62 minutes a day, just as they did 10 years ago. But of course they spend less time with newspapers, TV and radio, stealing some of those minutes for the web.

It's certainly not a gainly equilibrium, but the announcement that Charlie Sennott is joining Global News Enterprises as executive editor is just one more sign that it's happening.

Sennott, award-winning and industry-esteemed, swings out the Boston Globe door, taking the increasingly familiar buyout route after 15 years there, and busts open the portals of Global News.  The site is the first embrace the (lower-case) globe as its reporting assignment. The plan: launch in early 2009, with a complement of 70 corresponents, reporting in from all corners of the world. The correspondents won't be full-time staff, but rather stringers drawing stipends for a weekly report. The site will be staffed initially by 10 full-timers, with the editorial operation headed by Sennott. Over his time at the Globe, he served as Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem,  as European bureau chief in London and then worked on the Globe's special-projects team, doing year-long work in both  Iraq and Afghanistan. His recent work has tracked the Iraqi war, including this piece -- "New England's Own" -- on veterans returning home from Iraq. It's an impressive multimedia package, one which Sennott says is a "raw prototype of what the in-depth reports might look like on GlobalNews".

Of course, Global News is just one of many new news sites emerging, from its national cousins Politico and ProPublica to its regional kin, MinnPost, PegasusNews, CrossCut, Voice of  San Diego, the New Haven Independent, VillageSoup and more. Their business models vary, from profit-seeking to non-profit, with differing views on advertising, sponsorship, membership and angel funding. But I'm beginning to believe their most important business model is one that's been sucked out of the newspaper industry: enthusiasm.

It is one of the common denominators of all these site founders, and the 45-year-old Sennott's got a good case of it:

"I leave the Globe April 4. I start [on Global News] on April 7....I want to be in the revolution. I want to jump the barricades... Global News will be a dream team of reporters who are at places they don't have to be, ready to commit themselves..."

Sennott was just back from Baghdad, from an embed assignment in a patrolling Humvee, when we talked. He can talk traditional Ernie Pyle war correspondent lingo and the language of 2008. "It used to be you took a brick of notepads," he remembers. Now it's Kevlar, Marantz (as in digital recorders) and a host of audio/video gear to get the whole story. "And I've learned Final Cut Pro."

The site has got more than enthusiasm going for it. It's got almost $8 million to start (intending to raise $2 million more pre-launch), and Phil Balboni as a co-founder. Balboni founded New England Cable News, and he's pulled in as investors former Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor,  Akamai president Paul Sagan and Continental Cablevision co-founder Amos Hostetter, Jr. Balboni, whose business and journalistic acumen is well-regarded, will be CEO.

Charlie and Phil's Excellent Global Adventure is one to watch. They put it together as both had separately noodled on the idea. Sennott has been working on the notion for a couple of years, thinking "non-profit", and seeking funds from the Knight Foundation, among others. When they came together, they decided that a profit-seeking model was better, better at raising capital and in providing some skin in the game to the fledgling correspondent corps, who will get options.

Freelance Organizer Helium May Be User-Gen 2.1 for News Sites

Consider it user-gen 2.1.

It's easy to see Helium, whose Marketplace product comes out of within the next week or two, as a website organizing the loose and large gaggle of freelance writers out there. It's attempting to do that, and that in and of itself is interesting. Even more curious though is how it points a way toward organizing user-gen and/or citizen journalism, separating wheat from chaff, providing some hierarchy of value to the booming, buzzing confusion out there.

Think about the main argument against user-gen out there: Sure, there's a tiny amount of great stuff among so much junk, and how can you find the good stuff? Helium's answer to that is to throw a set of 2.0 tools against the problem. User rankings, star ratings, a meritocracy that rewards the best stuff with money and recognition. It's a set of tools -- but more importantly, a way of thinking -- that should have a lot of resonance with those news sites trying to figure out how to engage and to apply quality-centric standards to non-staff written content. (More on applications for news sites below).

Mark Ranalli started Helium in fall of 2006. Check out the site, and you can see its basic intent, that organziation of freelancers. Ranalli 's argument is clear: why should freelance be bought and sold the same way it has for a couple of hundred years when web tools can make the selling -- for freelance writers -- and the buying -- for editors of all stripes -- easier.

To that end, Helium offers what seems to me to be a straightforward approach, adapting web tools pioneered by sites as disparate as eBay. Amazon and NewsTrust, Fabrice Florin's fledgling news-rating and rater-ranking site:
---Freelancers sign up and then can "publish" their articles on Helium
---The Helium community then rates the pieces. Ranalli says he has put into action a set of anti-gaming-the-system processes to prevent ratings click fraud and friendly logrolling.
---Articles are categorized by topic (this week, for instance, "What impact will Ralph Nader's Candidacy Have on the Presidential Race,"  and  "Is the New Contraceptive Pill  That Stops Menstruation Healthy for Women". Each topic had about two dozen pieces written by freelancers, and by my quick read, is, politely, all over the board. I can see more value in the feature (travel, pets+) topics than in political ones, in which the level of content is subpar. But as Ranalli suggests, the system may improve the content over time.
---Would-be buyers then can buy any of those articles, and of course will gravitate to the top-ranked ones. In additon to the ranking of individual articles, the writers themselves are rated (1-5 stars), on a tough curve. Ranalli says only 4.5% of the 100,000 writers (who have added 625,000 articles to the site) have earned a single star, with two dozen attaining 5 stars.
---A new Marketplace allows buyers (who would be editors of newsletters, magazines, websites, etc.) to let it be known that they're seeking an article on particular topic, say "The importance of self-image in the business world" or "Best vacation destinations for a nature-filled getaway" Publishers set a fee (currently there's a range of $16 to $100). Then Helium writers submit pieces, the publisher selects its fave and the piece is bought. Helium takes a 20% fee of the total paid by the publisher as its cut. Helium provides a standard freelance contract, further smoothing the buy/sell transaction.

So far writers' incomes are small: "A handful have made thousands of dollars, hundreds are making hundreds and and tens of thousands less than a hundred," says Ranalli.

There's a community section of course, and overall the functionality looks well-thought-out and works well.

So for any of us who have ever bought or sold freelance pieces, we can see the potential value here. It's kind of like Mochila's web-enabled syndication system. It's well-thought-out, taking what people do in the terrestrial world and using web tools to simplify and expedite it.

Rupert and Jerry Could Mean More than "Our Space"

Okay, I've pulled myself away from the larger American drama of Barack and Hillary, and her coming "Alamo Firewall." Which brings me to another reality show. Maybe we could call it "Rupert and Jerry's Our Space." (You know "Our Space is a very, very, very nice, place, with.......")

At the core of the proposition we know is a MySpace for 20% of Yahoo swap, providing a News Corp tentacle into the web's largest aggregator. We can debate relative values of that swap every which way. What's the real value of Yahoo; Microsoft's current or next offer? Jerry's $40 number? A real break-up number? The future value of MySpace itself? That's a big number if you look at the out-sized duration and frequency numbers of MySpace and Facebook. That's a smaller number if you absorb the lessons of Facebook's Beacon -- it's hard to find socially acceptable ways to monetize a social site.

But beyond that path, I think News Corp's further interest in Yahoo has all kinds of interesting angles. We can talk gaming (News Corp's IGN/Yahoo Games), movies (News Corp's Rotten Tomatoes/a struggling Yahoo Movies) and endless potential for sports (News Corp's highly successful regional sports networks and Yahoo Sports. That's just a few of them. You can play your own mix and match; just check out News Corp's "Other Assets."

All those have interesting potential, but let me focus on two others, both of which seem like naturals of this moment in web time.

First consider business news.

Remember the justification for Rupert's 60+% premium for Dow Jones? It was global domination of business news, in print, online and on cable/satellite (in addition to mobile, no doubt, as it develops). Sure, Rupert's pulled back from a free wsj.com -- apparently accepting the advice of his execs that the market for business advertising on the web, while lucrative, just wasn't ready to support a free product. But that doesn't mean he won't relentlessly seek new audiences to monetize that costly content.

So put together the Dow Jones brands with the considerable power of Yahoo Finance. For Yahoo, the semi-exclusive ability to display DJ content would help Yahoo Finance break away from the pack of too-indistinguishable Google Finance, MSN Money and AOL Money and Finance.  It could integrate lots of Marketwatch and selective WSJ and Barron's content. Then there's the fledgling Fox Business Network, which produces lots of content, but, oh, doesn't really have an audience yet.

For Dow Jones, Yahoo brings many more eyeballs to the content and the parties can figure out how to sell and share the advertising. Wouldn't that make a lot of sense for both companies, especially if Rupert has an equity piece of Yahoo as well?

Second, consider news video. One of the first areas that News Corp has moved on in achieving synergy out of the DJ deal is in video. Remember, Fox produces lots of news video and it is gearing up to produce even more with the web now firmly in mind. So just recently we've seen (check the brand) lots of Fox video showing up at wsj.com Video Center and the Marketwatch Multimedia (the two now offering the same videos).

Already, those in and around the industry tell me that $25 is the average CPM for news video, with top-branded business video selling out at $90 and now surpassing $100 CPMs. So if News Corp can gain preference on the web's largest news audience, it can make a lot of money fast. Preference, you know, like Yahoo newspaper consortium members are getting on Yahoo Local pages. Preference works, creating new pages views and new monetization.

How well-equipped is Fox video to compete? Well, let's think about what we watch.

Of the breaking news we watch, how closely do you watch and know whether the breaking news video is coming from? Whether it's coming from Reuters or AP -- now in fierce competition and producing more than 1000 news videos a month -- or CNN or....Fox. If Fox can gain greater access to audience -- beyond the newly bought Dow Jones properties, the monetization of that video can skyrocket.

Yahoo itself, as in so many other areas, has been behind the curve on video, with Comscore assigning a 3.4% of the video market to the company. Hence, its Maven purchase.

What's news video worth? 2007 revenue totals weren't huge -- $500-750 million is the range of estimates -- but it grew 40% YOY. It's expected to grow 40% again this year and credible estimates put 2011 market size at about $4 billion. So yes, a News Corp/Yahoo video play could yield big and growing dividends as well.

If, against Microsoft odds, Jerry and Rupert do team up, expect a scorecard that goes well beyond social networking.

 

(News) Time, Time, Time: What's Become of You

It used to be simple: today's paper and birdcage material. We published the paper, and never looked back, almost literally. The trusty librarians could dig through yellowed files, should we need to find something written some time back. But we relied more on our memories, or those growing stacks of papers in our offices and cubicles.

Pre-Internet, the readers did the same. Some newsprint lovers nursed stashes of old papers, some containing precious articles, some big stories worth keeping, some untapped treasures to be gotten to some day.

In the first 10 years of the Internet, that's begun to change, but slowly. News publishers early on recreated the doorstep/birdcage divide. Soon as they figured out they couldn't charge for today's content, they felt compelled to charge for something. Hence, archives. Walled-off and searchable, but through separate interfaces, at per-article and bundled costs. These products have created good revenue streams, but not major ones. That's what has led both Time Inc. and the New York Times to unbuckle their archive belts and open them up to the public.

As Dan Gillmor sagely pointed out as the Times announced the freeing of the archives (and the termination of Times Select), the Times seized the opportunity to become the publisher of record, instant world news, everywhere, a real platform for 21st century growth. Local news publishers are now scratching their own heads, wondering if they can become the publishers of record for their metro areas and communities, and whether they'll be similarly (though on a smaller scale) rewarded. There are many edges to that argument, and I won't go into them here.

But I do want to point to what I think is a set of breakthroughs in how we think about and access those yellowed pages (what colors do pixels turn?). It's a simple timeline, and I think we'll see it become mainstream, and as much a part of news consciousness as the empty search rectangle has become.

Consider three timelines, pioneering Topix', the BBC's and Google's.

Bringing Google Checkout to News Archives?

Google Checkout has been one of those stealthy projects, seemingly in permanent beta. But we've always known it could be a potential force -- and competitor to Paypal -- as it gets connected with more of the matching and mating that Google Search does.

Lately, I've been noticed the Google Checkout logo popping up in the right-hand column paid search results. It says to the consumer: here's not only an ad, but you can easily buy here, through your new friend Google Checkout. Potentially, a huge competitive advantage to advertisers (who may be fourth or eighth in the rankings -- Google is really selling prominence here) and of course to Google, which will take a share of each and every transaction.

Now, on Google, the content world is separate. Search on Archives, left hand nav of any News page. You'll still the first-gen look there. Some archival stories are free. Others run anywhere from $2.95 to $7.95, as publishers and their representatives try to recoup a little of their investment in producing those stories. You can see prices from the New York Times, Lexis Nexis, Proquest, NewsBank, Access My Library and many others. But the action now is this: click through to the publisher or aggregator and use its e-commerce system. Not only does the consumer pay; he or she has to master a new interface, add a credit card, etc., etc., etc. Wouldn't it be easier if Google just offered a Google Checkout option?

Of course, and you know it will. We just don't when. And many content sellers will of course say yes. After hemming and hawing, the volume of traffic and the prominence offered will be irresistible. That's why Google is becoming Syndication Squared. Matchining all content to all advertising and taking a Ma Bell-like cut of it all.

That's LIFE: R.I.P., R.I.P, R.I.P

I couldn't help but be struck this week by Time, Inc.'s final (?!) closure of Life Magazine. Life, the magazine, had moved from iconic to ironic to occasionally moronic. As Time revived it for a third time and turned it into of all things a largely Friday-oriented newspaper supplement, you got the sense it was a Parade Lite or a USAToday Weekend wannabe. And unfortunately, there are only so many Franklin Mint ads to go around.

When I saw Ann Moore, Time Inc's chief speak in New York at SIIA in January, she was proud to unveil a new initiative: having Google digitize the photo legacy of Life, which of course for many years served as the unofficial history of the U.S. Bourke-White, Parks, Eisenstaedt. How will Time harvest value from these photos and how much Google will take, we don't quite know, but we do know there's a lot of value there.

In a sense, Life is worth more dead than alive. It is it's past that is compelling, that is unique and that is proprietary. Putting out a newspaper supplement is, with apologies to the President and Ford Motor, not the way forward.

Moore saw this, as others had seen, but she's acting more quickly to prune off the vestiges of the company, re-allocate spending to where it makes sense at this digital moment -- video, community, celebrity -- and that makes sense. It's a time to move for all old media companies sitting on assets and on opportunities.

We'll miss Life, but the first version, not the subsequent revivals that diminished its value.

Google, After Brussels: "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)"

Okay, how many Google attorneys can you fit on the head of a pixel? The growth in Google's Legal Department may soon be paralleling the hockey stick growth of its ad business.

Just last week, Google lost one court case, as a Belgian court decided that, non!, it couldn't take headlines and briefs from news sites, put them up on Google and share no revenue. The Belgian case brought by Copiepresse gives further mojo to Agence France Presse's case against Google, to be played out in a D.C. courtroom. In addition, the work of European consortium in putting together a more trackable news content tracking system -- ACAP -- all lead to the same set-to. 

News publishers want a better deal from Google.

Why is this important? Sources in and around Google News will tell you that of all those visitors coming to Google News --   8 million uniques in December -- only about 5% of them click through from the headlines/briefs to the originating news site. That would mean 95% stay in and around Google, satisfied with their news briefing -- just give me the top of it in one place, thank you.

In the U.S., there's been less litigation, though talk of it pervaded U.S. news company law offices on and off for years. Can they do that? Could we stop them? The grayness of the legal area has largely led news companies away from the courts and, haltingly, into the business of business development. There have been many discussion between news publishers and Google, Yahoo, MSN and other players. Certainly, the newspaper consortium deal with Yahoo on recruitment ads is a step toward a wider agreement on news content as well. And Google has already agreed to license AP content for a still-unspecified new product.

Heavens, Google wouldn't acknowledge that it can't take heads and briefs without paying for them.

"We have always explained that any licensing agreements Google does with content providers is for use that goes beyond indexing or referencing," Paris-based Google attorney, told the Times.

Mais, bien sur. As in the AP agreement, which has been shrouded in public grayness, it's clear that Google plainly saw it was side-stepping that legal indexing question by finding a way to push some money in the direction of AP.

Let's parse Googlespeak. What Google is really saying is, "Let's Make a Deal! (Privately)".