Content Bridges

Attributor "Fair Syndication Consortium" Completes Newspaper Trifecta

With today's announcement of Attributor's "Fair Syndication Consortium," we see the third piece in what's emerging as a new news industry reckoning with the Web as a major distribution point.

Attributor's new service basically says, "Let the web be the web" --- let news and information flow freely without walls -- and let the technologies of the day loose on the business problems. 

Attributor's piece is one "anti-piracy" initiative. Anti-piracy, of course, came up in the San Diego industry meetings last week. That issue got conflated with Rupert Murdoch's and Dean Singleton's statements on copyright infringement, which further got conflated with how news companies should reckon their relationships with Google and other search aggregators, which further got conflated with the increasing talk of paid content models.

So, the three, fairly distinct pieces -- which, combined, represent a trifecta of web reckoning -- I see going forward now are:

• Renegotiation of news producers' relationships with Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. I've written about my notion of Fair Share (no relation and coincidental timing with Attributor's "Fair Syndication Consortium") and numerous others, including Maureen Dowd, have been exploring the issue. 
• Paid content models.  Janet Robinson today pointed out that the Times had recently studied 30 top publishing models and came away with the continuing belief that the ad-friendly model was the most lucrative. She also noted the Times will continue to look for other ways to monetize its content. Journalism Online's entry into the discussion here provides new firepower. Ultimately, I think we'll see greater concentration on niche pay models, rather than lots of new pay walls. 
• Anti-Piracy: Then, there's anti-piracy. Attributor will try to make its new solution an industry standard. Publishers will like the technology and the idea, and will have to sort through what role they want Attributor to play. Attributor points to a potential gold mine, saying that as much as $250 million annually in new ad revenue could be gained if the system were fully deployed. 

Collectively, these three initiatives constitute an attempt by news publishers to get a grip on how they can best use the web, as they quickly accelerate their businesses from print to digital. That acceleration -- largely fueled this year by the deep recession -- is underway. Publishers, though, must feel like they are riding in a rollercoaster just reaching the crest, with little idea what the fast-moving trip ahead will be like.  

I've gotten a quick look at and talk-through on the Attributor report on illegal use. While the degree of clear piracy -- using more than 50% of articles, not just headlines and snippets -- seems high, the point it makes is a good one. Whether or not major publishers are seeing "piracy" at more than five times their own destination traffic, the point is the same. Don't line up the lawyers to demand takedowns of content, or even distribution links that may provide more difficult-to-monetize traffic. Instead, let the content appear most everywhere (all kinds of exceptions can come to mind), and just take a rev share.

It is a rev share economy on the web. Turning "anti-piracy" into rev share just makes a lot of sense.

It seems like a smart play, if Attributor can achieve scale, first among publishers. Only three -- Reuters, Politico and the German Press Agency -- are on board for the announcement, though the company is hosting a big confab in New York City Thursday, showing off the product and hoping to get more big publishers signed on. 

Attributor already has 28 publishers as clients, so it needs some of those, including AP, the Financial Times and CondeNet  to sign on. Look at AP's up or down on this push as being significant, given both its public profile on piracy and the on-again, off-again weight it shows in the industry overall. 

AP -- and the news industry -- has to decide its comfort level with Attributor's role as a middleman here, just as it has to decide that about Journalism Online. Clearly, Attributor is trying to position its new service as a "consortium." I'm sure it listens to its publishing partners, as does Yahoo in its "newspaper consortium," but Attributor's role -- and rev share -- is clearly one that will get a lot of scrutiny.

If it can get scale there, then, it has a stick to bring to talks with Google (AdSense and DoubleClick) and Yahoo; those talks are in process at this point. Those two companies served more than 90% of the ads on the pages of pirated content, in its study. Paid search companies have long been able to say, "We just serve ads. We don't know who's licensed what content or not." If Attributor's system works as advertised, technology would make the knowledge of illegal (remember, significantly more than headlines and snippets) more transparent. All parties -- sites using content without license, search engines, ad networks -- could be forced to set up a new, and fairer system. 

Journalism Online: Part of the Web $2.0 Goldrush

Maybe we should call it Web $2.0. 

There's a goldrush underway, all of a sudden, though no one can yet pinpoint the location of the precious stuff. Will this be an El Dorado fantasy or is it say late 1847, a couple of years before modern California took shape as miners hit vein after vein of shimmery gold? 

Clearly, though, there are dollar signs in many publishers' eyes. Part-Google envy, part desolation over the busted business models newspapers are now operating on, these dollar signs are lighting up several new initiatives, some announced, some coming soon. Let's look at the latest entry.

The latest to join the would-be party is Journalism Online, LLC. Journalism Online has set out its shingle, with a website and sufficient firepower to engage in discussions with the captains of news publishing. At this point, it has neither technology nor staff. What it does have is the intention to build the next-generation platform for news e-commerce and a wide and ambitious range of potential products it is willing to take on. If it were just another Silicon Valley Web 2.0 (without the dollar sign) start-up, you'd say, haven't I seen this movie before?

Most curiously, behind its facade, we may see something of a strategy/back-up plan, a kind of "Who Do You (Anti-) Trust". More on that below, as we get to its emerging board of advisors.

Journalism Online is headed by a triumvirate of well-known execs.

Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Crovitz took a nice payout in Rupert Murdoch's buyout of Dow Jones. Of the eight or nine post-Journal pursuits he's taken on, he says this new one as co-founder of Journalism Online will get a lot of attention. Crovitz, of course, brings the cred of having been in at the founding of the most successful U.S. pay news model yet birthed. 

Then there's Steve Brill, late of Contentville, an early paid content aggregation site that flickered brightly and then died in 2001. He founded Court TV and American Lawyer, and is a principal in the company that brought us Clear, a quick-pass (do we see a theme here?) through once-crowded airports. Brill got a lot of digital ink this year, in suggesting that the New York Times had blown its paid content opportunities, and offered his own prescription, to Times scion Arthur Sulzberger. 

Leo Hindery, a successful Internet private equity and pipes (cable, Yankee sports network+), rounds out the threesome.

Then there's Merrill Brown, a savvy, web (Real One, MSNBC+) veteran, who worked with Brill to start up Court TV.

Maybe most intriguing are two non-media business names: Attorneys Extraordinaire David Boies and Ted Olsen.

As in David Boies, who defended IBM in an anti-trust suit. David Boies, who defended Napster in a copyright case. David Boies, who led the federal government assault on Microsoft in, you got it, an anti-trust case.

As if Boies' name weren't enough, add in Ted Olsen, former Solicitor General. (Yes, you remember correctly. Boies represented Gore and Olsen represented Bush in the 2000 Supreme Court Case that decided the Presidency.) He's got anti-trust experience within his diverse resume as well. 

I see a theme here. No, of course, Journalism Online hasn't brought in David Boies with the notion of litigating. After all, it's a company that is in the talking stages, first with publishers, but presumably soon with search aggregators. You don't even have to mention "anti-trust" to Eric Schmidt, in setting up a meeting. You just have to say, we may bring along David Boies and Ted Olsen.

"Fair Share": Google, Trust, Anti-Trust....and What Happens Next

Maybe we've found an answer: get Dean Singleton, Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Jarvis, Nick Carr, Mathew Ingram and Danny Sullivan in one room, charge admission and use the proceeds to pay for American journalism.

Last week may have shed as much heat as light on the trials and tribulations of the American press, as visceral responses to the state of the trade grew sharper. 

We saw a number of newspaper sentiments, from enlightened to reactionary, conflated together, given their paid-fire presentation in San Diego, as a multitude of fighting words pouring into the debate from San Diego's Newspaper Association of America/AP board meeting confabs, and its aftermath. "Anti-piracy". "Copyright". "BS detectors". "Ads with narrative and engagement.”  "OEMs, OPMs and VARs." 

We've seen name-calling, thoughtful response and ping-pong intellectual matches that make your head hurt, like this one on the always-engaging Nieman Lab

To the debate, I modestly had added the notion of "Fair Share," a new business reckoning between search engine aggregators, led by Google, and major news producers, old and new. That reckoning, I suggested, should recognize that Google is getting too much value and news producers too little out of of the current relationship. 

To my reckoning notion, I got a lot of response, with a wide spectrum of approval ("This is one of the most clearheaded, lucidly written analyses I've encountered regarding this situation") and disapproval (My fave, off Twitter: "I rarely agree with anything Ken Doctor writes.") Some dismissed the notion of righting news producers' relationship as "philanthropy." Far from it. I'm keenly aware of the separate battle over profit-seeking vs. non-profit journalism, and I'm an agnostic about that. Whatever produces more good journalism I favor, and there's no doubt it will be some mix of profit- and non-profit-based. 

My Fair Share argument, though, has nothing to with philanthropy, and everything to do with plain old business. 

In basic business terms, the news industry is a supplier - and an important one - to Google and the other search engines. In fact, it's a supplier/manufacturer (of traffic and ad revenue) relationship that has gotten out of whack, and is therefore useful for both parties to adjust. After all, manufacturers, too, have problems as their higher-quality supply lines dwindle.

Individual news companies, and here I mean the Politicos, the MinnPosts, the Techcrunches, the Global Posts as well as Media News, Gannett, New York Times, ABC and the BBC, have had relatively little leverage of late. Their inability to exercise leverage made sense historically. 

Take us back in the news time machine to 1998, a nice tweener period, and one that predated many of the companies above. Legacy news companies -- big 'ole big iron media -- could sense that their dominant place in the world was being shaken a bit, but AOL, Yahoo, Lycos (!?) and a couple of others didn't seem like Big Brother. So that legacy news industry had to tread lightly in pressing its case -- anti-trust seemed real for an industry in part built on city-by-city monopoly. 

In 1998, Google was born, and in the decade since the roles have been reversed. What was city-by-city monopoly has splintered, with local and regional advertising marketplaces much more diverse. 

On the other hand, Google, in particular, has become the gateway of our times, making a can't-refuse offer. It is the number one sender of traffic to news sites -- 25-35% as a rule. In saying that news companies are free to tell Google not to index them, and that Google will be glad to comply, you can practically hear the smile behind the statement. It's like Microsoft telling suppliers they were welcome to work with others if they didn't like the rules on Windows partnership. 
It's a choice that's not really a choice at this point. 

So as suppliers -- and here again I look broadly from AP and Business Week and USA Today to The Huffington Post to PaidContent to Demand Media -- it's about renegotiating the supply relationship. 

It doesn't mean having to erect pay walls. It doesn't mean a pause in radically reorganizing and rethinking news companies structures and products in this new hybrid age. it doesn't mean philanthropy. It doesn't mean calling Google evil or denying its genius. It doesn't mean limiting the free flow of content and debate on the web. 

It is about re-setting a new relationship of trust, trust that there's some equity in the deals. 

In the always quotable expression of Michael Corleone, ""It's not personal, it's just business."

So, let me suggest four forces that will move the recent web parlor talk into action this year. Each of the forces will have an impact on each other, and it's impossible to say at this point, which will have the greatest impact. 

The New PI: A Quick Interview with Michelle Nicolosi

PI print readers woke up Wednesday morning to find their daily paper replaced by mere pixels....and Tweets. The online-only PI, seeking to define Second Life anew, added a Twitter feed to its home page. "Seattle Tweets" captures a few Twitter microposts, this afternoon heavy on TV station tips to whale video. Hey, it's the Northwest.

Reporting that its daily pageviews have grown a bit to 1.9 million on its first of school, from an average of 1.7 million pre-switchover, the new PI is heavy on blogs Seattle 911 (crime), Seattle Sports Blog and The Big Blog (a lively pastiche of local culture and news), a smattering of breaking news and featured photos. An easy-to-launch live March Madness CBS is featured the top of the page. A personalizable mypi down the right rail. Lots fewer PI stories, of course, with the reporting staff gone.

Many AP stories, some of them regional/local (which may ironically show AP's ramping value to shrinking newspaper companies).

And: no links (today) to the Seattle Times or the more direct media competition, Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, and Crosscut. 

Yahoo HotJobs has already been plugged in as the jobs site, through Hearst's involvement in the newspaper consortium. Autos is a link to Kelley Blue Book, real estate is mainly (archival) editorial for now.

Amid the maelstrom of change, I asked Michelle Nicolosi, who heads the site, to answer some basics. She's the Executive Producer of the new PI, and you can see from her resume, she's been around the online newspaper world. 

Day 2, here's a sense of what's inspired her, how she hopes to distinguish the site  her online philosophy and how her 20-person staff will do the new journalism:

Q: Which sites -- newspaper or non-newspaper -- do you look at for inspiration or as models? 

A lot of ideas come from looking at all the cool new tools that are constantly being developed, and sitting back and thinking, ‘hmm, how can I use that?’ Google Reader inspired me to ask some of our staffers to start creating "what I'm reading" headline lists that we surface on their blogs. Cover it Live gave us a new way to run conversations online. Twitter's been a great addition to the tool kit—we're using it to surface a running narrative of what's happening now across the city by creating a combined Twitter feed from the Tweets of 15 or so local agencies and leaders.  I love to run through the winners of the Webby Awards and the SND online awards every year, there are always great inspirations there. The Guardian  and The Sydney Morning Herald have always been two favorite sites to look to for innovations and inspiration. The New York Times is incredible of course, and I love El Pais.  

Q: Much has been made of your linking to Seattle's main non-newspaper sites and perhaps following a strategy of becoming a central point of regional aggregation. How central to your strategy and operation will linking out be and how have those sites responded to the move?  

Our mission is to be the best source of news in information in the Northwest—to put together the best mix of content for our readers. We'll do this by producing lots of original content, but we'll also point offsite to great content by other publishers.   Refusing to tell readers about stories we didn't write feels kind of old school to me. We know what our readers are interested in. Why not put together the best mix, regardless of where the stories came from, and who wrote them—so long as the sources are credible, of course. Linking to other credible content of interest will make us more useful to our readers. 

Q: If PI is a regional aggregator, why are there no links to Times stories specifically and to Seattle Weekly, Crosscut, The Stranger. Are you defining linking as all but competitive media?
   
We're linking to all credible sources -- if you're not seeing it there right now, that just means it's not in the mix at the moment. That doesn't mean we're not linking to them. In fact, we linked to The Stranger the very first day we started doing this.  

Q: How do you compete with a direct (newspaper) competitor, The Seattle Times, which now will have 10X the staff resources?  We’re going to focus on what readers are telling us they want and on what makes seattlepi.com essential and unique—within the context of our local news mission, of course. We’ve been successful thus far by paying close attention to our readers and will continue our “survival of the fittest” attitude about content that isn’t working.  

We have partner content from TV Guide.com, business publisher Xconomy.com, and starting today, a lot of great new content from Hearst magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics and Redbook. We'll continue to develop partnerships like these as we go to create the best possible mix of news, information and entertainment.   As I already mentioned, we're putting together a more useful home page that points you to the best mix of news, regardless of who wrote it.   We're going to have a great assortment local leaders joining seattlepi.com as columnists. We've got dozens of folks ready to write for us now, and hope to keep expanding.

 We have a collection of more than 150 reader bloggers, sharing their passions and stories.  We've got one of the best video game reviewers going blogging for us, and wonderful people writing about everything from politics to cooking to dating to living with cancer. 

Q: How traditionally story-driven and how blog-driven will the site's content be? 

We'll still write stories, of course. We'll also write a lot of briefs and quick updates. Being online-only means we won't always have to write a full story when there's an update—instead we can point readers to previous coverage for the background. In the paper you can't do that.

We're going to be doing both, depending on what's appropriate for the subject/circumstances. Last night for example we live-blogged a school board meeting (in the blog tool) then wrote a story and published it as an article.  

We'll focus our staff efforts where we have something unique and civically important to offer: coverage of government, spending, crime, and harder news in general. A recent survey of our readers—and traffic patterns on seattlepi.com—tell us that readers are most interested in breaking news and hard news stories. They’re also interested in both news and feature photo galleries. The ‘daily news of the world in photos’ gallery is one of the most popular features on seattlepi.com.

Online-Only PI: 22.....and the Rest, Skidoo

And the envelope, please: How many people does it take to run an online-only metro news site?

The answer appears to be 22, a number some occultists are said to believe holds psychic powers. Hearst, psychic, who'd a thunk it? That's the number I've heard from outsiders and that's the approximation we're seeing leak out of Seattle as the stories surface of who will be among the chosen to move online and who will be riffed. (Writing about death throes is now getting to be a modern art form, here ably done by the PI's own Dan Richman; next new Pulitzer category?).

Now 22 is an interesting number. Let's do the math. The PI starts with 170 newsroom staffers. Online-only, it moves to 22, which would be 12.9% of its print staff. That's a number worth remembering.

As the Christian Science Monitor, the Capital Times, the East Valley Times and the Detroit papers, among others, all engaging in one form or another of flipping the switch (going from print to digital) or dayscrapping (reducing the days of print publication or delivery), I've often gotten this question from the press: "Why don't papers just go online-only?" We talk about the economics of print vs. online vs. hybrid, and I've guesstimated that if metro dailies indeed flipped the switch, they'd be able to "afford" about 15% of their newsroom staffs. So that 12.9% number confirms my guess.   With metros taking in 10%-plus of their revenues from digital advertising now, that's about all the current business will support.

It's a sobering number.

Let's figure there are 44,000 journalists left in US newsrooms, an up-to-date tally hard to come up with. So, if the industry magically flipped that switch tomorrow, we've got an estimate of how many online-only published could pay: 6600 journalists, and that's at the optimistic 15% number. Of course, many papers don't need to and won't flip the switch; recall that the US news industry should still take in $36 billion+ in revenues this year (down from $47 billion in 2005). But the number -- 6600 -- sticks in your brain.

Let's compare that number of 22 to a couple of others. One of the online-only PI's new competitors is Crosscut, a site with great verve and and newspaper roots of its own. It supports a staff of seven, after having just moved from profit-(seeking) to non-profit. If you talk to the start-ups from MinnPost to Voice of San Diego, they'll tell you something less than a dozen can be supported, and that's with foundation support. 

The P-I, of course, has a few things the start-ups don't:

How Will Carol Bartz Feel About Consorting with the Press?

And now, putting shivers into executives and managers everywhere, the words, "let's do a reassessment."

It's as predictable as Claude Rains' Captain Renault in Casablanca. Instead of rounding up the usual suspects, thought, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will be rounding up the usual assessments. You know, what do we have?/what should we keep?/what should we get rid of? That's not a stack the newspaper companies want their hugely important Yahoo Consortium ad plans dropped onto. But, there's an inevitability to it.

The fact that Carol Bartz' first act was to announce that Sue Decker is out undoubtedly sent a shiver down newspaper spines. Decker and her protege Hilary Schneider, late of Knight Ridder Digital, have been the high-profile champions of the consortium. So after the Decker shoe dropped, the next one to look for is Schneider's. Golden slipper or Goodwill model? If she stays in place or ascends, the consortium can breathe easier. If she's gone soon herself, all bets are off.

Operationally, the project is in Vice President of US Partnerships Lem Lloyd's well-organized hands. Dozens of newspapers are finding some new gold in selling Yahoo inventory in their own markets. In addition, there are now more than three dozen sites up on the APT ad platform -- the first two (the Chronicle and Mercury News), Belo's four sites and a phalanx of North Carolina properties that are starting to bring the full bore of behavioral targeting to the Tar Heel State. Next up in March: the New York Times Regional Group, Media General, Lee, Journal Register, Philly, Paddock and the Columbus Dispatch. Then more into summer and fall. (Good take overall from Alan Mutter, and to the point of what's going on with local salesforces, Newsosaur.)

In total, Yahoo Consortium members account for about 40% of US newspaper circulation. So the Yahoo deal -- and much-anticipated Yahoo Bump is a big deal. It's one of the few growth stories newspaper companies have any hope of telling in a dismal 2009.

While early sales are good, Bartz is going to be asking the ROI question. With the dozens of Yahoo staffers building and supporting the newspaper consortium, how much ROI is in it -- compared to what else Yahoo could be doing with those resources, if it keeps those resources at all. 

Observers have already pointed out that Bartz has no background in advertising, in the Internet or in media, though her management credentials are well-attested to. Her lack of experience in advertising and media doesn't mean she doesn't appreciate them, but they are clearly not in her comfort zone. Curiously the consortium is a B2B ad play, and Bartz does know B2B, and maybe she takes Yahoo more in that direction. The newspaper consortium has turned out to be Yahoo's first big B2B play, and it has learned some hard lessons -- early uneven execution, the difficulties of dealing with diverse customers who each like it their own way.

Or maybe it's part ROI and part gut instinct. Maybe Bartz reads the (thinning) newspapers and decides that there's not a lot of upside in her company investing its resources heavily in association with what looks like a dying industry.

Yes, the dreaded reassessment, and it will come quickly. Despite her words -- "Yahoo has unfortunately been battered a lot in the last year. Let's give this company some friggin' breathing room." -- she knows the economic times don't provide much air.

Meanwhile, from Mountain View, Google waits, watches and drops 100 recruiters (leaving 300! in place),  understanding it missed a major opportunity to align its ad programs with newspaper companies more than a year ago and considers what it might do with a second chance.

Coming: The Newspaper Recovery Classified Stimulus Act of 2009

We've seen lots of wry, earnest and soul-searching comments about whether newspapers should get in line for federal bailouts, since all other pillars of society seem to be stretching their hands out.

Most, I think, are missing the point. The bailout is on the way. Thankfully, it's not coming in the form of direct federal payment to newspapers. It's coming in the largest stimulus package in US history. $100 billion, are you kidding? $300 billion? How about $500 or $700 billion? That stimulus, combined with other economic recovery programs, gives newspaper companies a new shot at getting some growth in 2009.

We could even think of it as the Newspaper Recovery Classified Stimulus Act of 2009.

Think about it. What are three top sectors targeted by the NRCSA?

• Jobs! So far, President-Elect Obama has pledged 2.5 million new jobs by the end of 2010. That might make up for the jobs lost in 2008-2009.
  
• Cars! As the Big Three make their case, Congress will find a way to shoot them money. Yes, we know that bankruptcy beckons if loan money doesn't prop up the companies in the next several months. The big problem though is car sales, which have plummeted to about 11 million a year from a high of 18 million. However, the car makers and Obama's new economic team work it through, the clear goal is to sell more cars more quickly. 
• Houses and Condos! The least best-kept secret of the recovery attempts has been their failure to deal with the underlying problem, foreclosure. Obama's people know that until the foreclosure river is staunched, there's little hope of returning to a more normal real estate market. Mortgage interest rates are coming down, but key to any recovery/stimulus plan is restoring real estate values, incenting buyers to mate with all those sellers.

Jobs, cars, houses and condos. Those are what used to be the backbone of newspaper profits -- code name "classifieds -- until each of those markets got pecked away at by Internet competition and then chomped whole by the recession. Recall the NAA 3Q numbers: classified revenue was off almost 31%, with recruitment down 43.6% in the quarter, real estate down 38.6%; and automotive down 29.2%.

One key question as those real estate, recruitment and auto markets recover -- whenever they recover -- is how much of their related ad dollars will return to newspaper companies. How many will return to print? How many will return to online?

If the return number is 90%, we'd see rejoicing. If it's closer to 70%, we'd see how today's cutbacks in staff, newsprint and even days of "daily" publication were intended to anticipate permanent advertising decline.

As we stand on the precipice of national, global and newspaper economic disaster, news companies need to do more than pray and hope. What I'd like to see them do is muster the new energy to anticipate the recovery now, before we see any sign of it, in hopes of grabbing a bigger piece of it and reviving their businesses and newsrooms. 

Yes, it's tough to energize the troops and their managers as layoff notices plaster the doors, but the companies really have little choice. Recall the pivotal political moment of the Presidential race. Economic meltdown was becoming apparent, and John McCain halted his campaign, in a vain effort to provide leadership in fighting it. Barack Obama kept campaigning, incorporating the meltdown/recession in his thinking and in his campaign, and famously said that presidents have to be able to do more than one thing at a time.

That is the state of newspapers today. They must fight fires and fight for their future. Of course, they are doing that, some better than others.

I'd suggest that as the stimulus -- sure to be passed by Feb. 1, not far off -- becomes a reality, newspapers take clear steps to mobilize their staffs to take full advantage of it. That means focusing on the two areas that will distinguish all media companies going forward, product and sales.

• Product: Americans aren't terrified, but they are shell-shocked. They need help as consumers, as parents, as employees, as job seekers. That's an unprecedented opportunity for American newspapers to become more essential in their lives, mostly online and somewhat in print. Think Green Tech jobs, just as an example. Americans will be hearing lots about those, come January, but don't know what that term really means. Certainly, good analytic stories will help, but what will make a difference in essentiality and consumer use is news-you-can-use journalism. Think of each local news operation hosting a local Green Tech Central. Identify Green Tech companies in your area. Note what kinds of people work at them. Who is hiring, for what kind of skills? What kinds of skills translate to those skills? Where can I get those skills -- quickly? Which leads us to education, and retraining, a key part of this economic transition. How about a Retraining Central, incorporating similar ideas. On the web, such a public service can be about lots more than text stories. Think videos and instructional videos (Apple's QuickTips are a short-form masterpiece, here) and interviews. Think interactive quizzes and databases that use the power of the web. Think blogs from those in the economic fray, talking to their fellow citizens, on recovery strategies. Sure, even throw in a little Zillow-like Zestimator shtick, as useful and addictive.

         You get the drift: use the web to both reclaim newspaper's central community role -- especially, but not only -- in times of crisis and to win loyal customers. The Tech Central idea can be applied, with differing nuances of course, to cars, real estate and many other jobs areas. Tech Central isn't a let's-take-advantage-of-all-this-Green-talk, with a single local/wire page a week. It is a new commitment and a chance to find new footing on shaky ground.

• Sales: Arguably, 2008 has been a watershed year for newspapers as some have managed to show online revenue growth, even as bundled classified sales hurt everyone's numbers. Those -- McClatchy, Hearst, New York Times, come to mind -- have been aggressively pursuing online-only sales.  The Recovery offers local marketers unprecedented opportunity to gain and regain market share. Realtors, mortgage brokers, car dealers, builders and employers generally will be looking to the web to re-start their businesses. For local news sites, that means putting their online-only re-toolings into hyperdrive. Yes, it's about retrained staff. But, it's also about innovative ad products -- how can Yahoo's APT (and for Gannett, AOL's Platform A) power such products -- and flexible sales and marketing programs. As with more interactive products, as above, marketers want more ways to reach customers. Newspaper sites must offer them. Newspapers may need to get more flexible on pricing, moving to add more than CPM deals, and share some more of risk and reward, with more innovative CPA-like, lead-gen arrangements. Print plays a role, here, as special Recovery-oriented sections -- written as highly useful editorial, not advertorial -- become must-reads and circulated beyond paid circulation.

We've laughed, amid the recent pain, that the wider global economic meltdown has to some degree sheltered newspapers, which are now only a part of it. Laugh, or cry, the business of 2009 is to meet unprecedented times with unprecedented efforts.

Gannett: See You in January

Newspaper people like to think of themselves as good storytellers. But, lately, newspaper execs find themselves with fewer good storylines to share. In fact, Gannett -- the world's largest newspaper company -- is going to tell its official stories less often. Of course, we'll see interim announcements, like yesterday's stunning one that another 10% of its local workforce is getting the axe the first week in December. (To get the color of what that cut means, check out Jim Hopkins' independent Gannett Blog today, with such tidbits as why "dead wood" at USA Today is immune to the cuts, how the Indy Star could lose 95 positions and a building necrology of those to be cut.)

Joining a trend among its smaller brethren, Gannett told analysts last week that it will now be reporting quarterly rather than monthly. It's not a big surprise, as other news companies have made that change as well. 

What's most interesting about it is how hard it is to gauge print companies' progress to digital, which is of course the key metric telling analysts, journalists and small-d democrats what the chances of their survival are.

Take Gannett's last reporting. It made a point of saying it was now breaking out its "Digital Segment," this after acquiring majority control of CareerBuilder, by paying Sam Zell $135 million for another 10% of the company in September, and acquiring the rest of ShopLocal from Tribune and McClatchy. According to the stats on its site, this division took in $77 million in the third quarter. It's good that Gannett has brought all those numbers together -- some were previously in the impossible-to-decipher "all other" category. Until we get some quarter-to-quarter and YOY stats with the new accounting, though, we won't know much. 

You get confused, though, if you listen to or read the company's webcast remarks and answers to analysts' questions. There, the number we hear is $177 million in digital income for the quarter, with the $100 million difference apparently due to much revenue counted more in the print and broadcast divisions than directly in the new digital division. 

Wow. I'm assuming Gannett, good operator that it is, real does have a handle on how much of its business is really digital and how much legacy, print or broadcast. But I'm not sure. In addition, it's clear that many newspaper companies as they bundle, unbundle and re-bundle legacy and digital products have a hard time both internally and externally sorting out what's what and what's where.

This last quarter, Media General, for the first time I believe, provided a number for its Yahoo!-related revenue, focusing on the HotJobs program. It brought Media General $1.7 million in the third quarter.

Most importantly going forward, whether monthly or quarterly, is to get a sense of the Yahoo Bump overall. That'll be a combination of the HotJobs recruitment revenue and the display ad revenue earned by papers' deepening participation on Yahoo's APT ad platform. Since Yahoo-related revenue is likely to be the prime driver of growth for those companies in the news consortium  (40% of US papers), we'll need to see that number to really see how much of a transition papers are making.

Overall, the early 2009 numbers will put to the test one of the surprising points made by Gannett CEO Craig Dubow in last week's call.

I believe all of this makes it clearer than ever just how much our industry has been in the throes of a downturn that is more cyclical than secular. Next, I want to remind you that Gannett has faced cyclical downturns before and we have a proven ability to manage through them. That hasn’t changed. Also, I will stress my confidence that once this downturn cycles through, our core revenues will rebound and together with that improvement in the core, we will see continued growth in digital.

More cyclical than structural? I hope he's right, but I think the reverse is true. Newspaper fortunes continued to decline and more deeply, in the recent relatively good times. The financial meltdown is plainly adding on to all that structural change, and we'll see some bounce if consumers buy houses and cars and HDTVs some time next year. A bounce will not be a rebound though to halcyon days, and Gannett shows it knows that, as we see in what are major job cuts.

Make no mistake. Gannett matters. While often the whipping boy among journalists for its often-middling journalistic performance, it is still the largest newspaper company on the globe, though Rupert Murdoch's news group may surpass it soon. 

APT Launches. Now Let's Track the Yahoo Bump

Open your windows, and you can almost hear a muted "Yahoo!," wafting out of the windows of many newspaper buildings across the land this week. "Yahoo!," as in the long-awaited launch of the ready-for-newspaper-integration ad platform has begun. Though I have doubts that this is the cavalry coming finally to save the beleaguered newspaper industry, it clearly should mean some long-needed supplies -- in the form of advanced targeting technology -- are on the way. Kind of like replacing balky cannons with laser-sighted rifles.

Now renamed APT, after responding to Collective Media's contest of the AMP name, and introduced by Mad Man honcho Don Draper, or actually actor Jon Hamm in his civilian guise (great "Fresh Air" interview of Hamm and on the Mad Men ad show phenomenon, here), the new platform is launching at two pilot properties. The Media News-owned Mercury News and the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle go up first. Then other properties in those two chains join in. Wave 2's in 4Q of this year. Then, Wave 3 in 1Q and the waves keep rolling out into the deep end of 2009. Properties are added roughly in the order that their companies joined the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium.

Two big points about APT's launch stand out:

1. Now it is time to track and report the The Yahoo Bump. If you talk to company CEOs, or listen in on their (increasingly) occasional conference calls with financial analysts, you hear "Yahoo", "Yahoo", "Yahoo", coming up repeatedly in response to the questions of where growth is going to come from. Admittedly, most companies don't have many bright spots to report, so the First Coming of the Yahoo Ad Platform has been handy. 

But now, the question: how big a bump will Yahoo provide? Overall online revenue increase will be one indication of the Yahoo Bump. Even better, it will be good to have more companies break out their online-only ad revenue, publicly, something few companies do. McClatchy recently said it had almost reached the 50% point, at which online-only revenue will surpass bundled (with print classified, largely) revenue. The New York Times also tells me that for NYTimes.com (not the company overall), online-only is a majority of digital revenue. Few other companies, public or private, have given an indication of those numbers. The reason they are important: Crossing over the magic 50% line is essential to creating a booming online business going forward, as challenged bundled advertising inevitably is dragged down by the vicissitudes of the print business.

      2. The Yahoo Bump won't make up for lost print revenues. It's a nice pipedream to believe that one supercharged digital line going up will magically erase the pain and lost revenue of the limp print line going down. The numbers, though, just don't support it. The industry overall is still dependent on print for 92% of its revenues in the US, having failed to make a sufficient digital transformation. So as we've seen the turndown in revenues -- 2.4% by NAA's own reckoning in the first half of 2008 -- we see literally billions going out the door. That's about $3 billion for the first six months. The Yahoo Bump should be worth, well, tens of millions, properly executed. But that's millions against billions.Those are important millions, though, the building blocks of the new digital businesses

Beyond those two big points, here's what we know -- and will track -- about APT and the newspaper industry:

• Early experience with Yahoo's BT system, done manually pre-platform, has been good. Houston (Hearst), Milwaukee (Journal Sentinel) and Atlanta (Cox) have all gone to town with it. They're selling audience, better targeting of it (300+ audience types will be targetable through the new system) and making some money. One has reached the million dollar mark already.
• The spoils go to the trained. Public focus on APT has focused on the technology. Its BT base is the essential sauce. It is the massive sales re-training of sales managers and salesforces, though, that will separate the big winners from the also-rans, as APT rolls out. Training has never been a strong point of newspaper companies, so the Yahoo-related sales training -- conducted in Sunnyvale and newspaper HQs around the country -- probably constitutes the most major massive sales training the industry has ever seen. Some companies have hired up, moved out salespeople who can't cut it and got their long-time print reps (with long-standing local sales relationships) up to speed. Others face the persistent cultural problems of changing habits and sales pitches.The first step is the training; the next is acting when some results are below expectations.
• That sales training is a boon to newspapers -- and Yahoo. By one calculation, when APT is fully deployed, almost 10,000 newspaper-related sales people across the country, selling off it. That's a lot of feet on the street. For Yahoo, it's a way to get a huge sales staff, without having to pay it or manage it directly. While technology's great and self-service is a major innovation, feet on the street are an essential third leg on the modern ad stool. Those sales people will be out selling local Yahoo inventory -- Yahoo users identified as local (whether in News, Local, Finance, Sports, etc.) -- and when they do, Yahoo's take is 50% of the sale.
• The newspaper opportunity is two-fold: Yes, newspapers should be able to increase their rates on inventory on their own local sites, as BT's increased effectiveness pushes up clickthrough rates. Early indications are good, with some buys going out at 50%+ and more. Secondly, though, newspapers are now  able to sell Yahoo inventory have greatly increased the amount of stuff can sell. The amount of increased inventory varies market by market, but ranges from 2 to 4 times the amount of inventory newspapers have available on their own sites. The 50% share to Yahoo is high, but if the rates are high, it's a good new revenue stream for newspapers.

9 Questions on GooglyHoo: WAN, the EU, ACAP, Joe Nocera and the Consortium

You got your East Coast news. You got your West Coast news.

Something about the cratering US financial system going on out there on the isle of Manhattan, sources tell me. Meanwhile, here on the Left Coast, it's round 74 of Google and Yahoo. GooglyHoo is giving lots of people a case of the hives, an itching reaction in search of a rash.

The latest scratcher is the World Association of Newspapers. Today, it denounced the proposed Google/Yahoo search "cooperation" deal as anti-competitive. For good measure, its statement released lots of frustration about newspaper companies' diminished standing in this new world order in creation. In part, WAN points out that of the $48 billion in online advertising revenue that Google has collected since 2001, less than one-third of that has been shared with online publishers. Those big numbers are of course the ones that hurt, more than the cost-per-click impacts of GooglyHoo.

So nine quick questions on the boiling Google/Yahoo cauldron:

1. Who gave the pile-on signal? Now, according to Bloomberg, the EU is joining the fray, asking for a few Yahoo and Google documents (no, not Google Docs). That makes the Department of Justice, eleven states and the EU. No word yet from Bruce Sherman.

2. Why is the inquiry only about Google's search dominance? Yes, it controls 70%+ of the paid search market, but it's goals are clearly global ad dominance. It has made forays into print newspaper, print magazine and broadcast advertising. It bought YouTube, becoming a major video ad player. It bought DoubleClick, planning a major move into the display market. So on the sell side, it will be able to offer integrated packages of advertising -- a little search, a little display, a little pre-roll -- to ad buyers. While today, much of advertising buying is segmented by type, I've got no doubt that there's a Starship Enterprise console out there in the ad buyer's future, with audience targetable, using various types of advertising through a single interface. Without legal roadblocks, today, you'd have to bet that the console would be branded "Google." Shouldn't DOJ ask P & G, GM and Walmart (all companies that have criticized the Google/Yahoo proposed combo) about Google's wider ad role?

3. Didn't Joe Nocera nail it in his Saturday New York Times column, describing the experience of one company, Sourcetools, as it first won big and then lost big in the Google ad world? The AdSense/AdWords stuff makes so many heads hurt; telling the story (journalism!) through one company's experience is a great analgesic.

4. Does it help or hurt newspaper companies? That kind of depends on whether they are bigger buyers of AdWords or bigger displayers of AdSense. There's little doubt that the further monopolization of paid search will lead to higher pricing -- there's not sufficient alternative inventory to buy of significant scale. So if you are buying AdWords, they should cost more. But if you're a big AdSense partner, like the New York Times, your share of the take should increase as well. We don't know the particulars of each affiliate deal, but would hope that newspaper companies could get a fair packaged deal from Google. And yes, having Yahoo out there as somewhat of a paid search competitor, has made the chances of getting a better deal better.

5. Will it make a big difference to Newspaper Consortium members? Apparently not much. The Consortium members, almost half of US papers by circulation, take Yahoo search as part of their wider participation. For their participation, they get a contracted minimum payment, and sources say that earned ad payments haven't reached the minimums yet, generally. So, if GooglyHoo does increase pricing of ads, earned revenue should increase, but wouldn't result in actual new dollars falling into newspaper company pockets, at least for awhile.