Gannett doesn’t disclose a purchase price in the press release announcing the deal, but notes that it was already a “significant minority shareholder” in Fantasy Sports. Chris Russo, who founded the property in 2006, says he’ll stay on as chief executive; almost all of his two dozen full-time employees will come aboard to Gannett, as well.

Fantasy Sports has more than 19 million unique users, and Gannett says that combining them with the audience for its existing sports sites will make it one of the Web’s top five sites. Boutique bank Mesa Global worked on the transaction.

The carrier is partnering with a consortium of TV stations and broadcasters to be the first to offer Dyle — their live TV application. The initial phone running Dyle will be an Android device from Samsung, MetroPCS said.

Of course, this is hardly the first stab at mobile TV. Although very popular in Korea, such service has not really taken hold. Some of the major carriers offer a limited lineup from MobiTV. Qualcomm had bigger visions with its FLO service, but shuttered the mobile TV offering and sold the spectrum to AT&T.

“We’re excited to be the first mobile service provider to deliver a unique entertainment offering like Dyle, but more important than being first is our belief that this service will meet the needs of our customers and deliver an exceptional mobile experience,” MetroPCS President Tom Keys said in a statement.

Dyle Mobile TV is the brand chosen by a consortium of content providers and broadcasters including NBC, Fox, ION Television, Univision, Hearst, Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps and Gannett. At launch, the group plans to offer more than 72 stations in 32 TV markets.

For its part, MetroPCS plans to offer Dyle in Atlanta; Boston; Dallas-Fort Worth; Detroit; Jacksonville, Fla.; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Miami; New York; Orlando; Philadelphia; Sacramento, Calif.; San Francisco; and Tampa, Fla.

According to sources close to the situation, longtime Yahoo front page chief Liz Lufkin has parted ways with the company.

The departure last week appears to be related to a reorg by newish editor-in-chief Jai Singh, who used to run the editorial efforts for the Huffington Post, at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Singh appears to be setting up his own team and, thus, Lufkin was out.

Lufkin has been at Yahoo for many years, most recently as VP of front page programming. In that job, according to one bio, she supervised “editors in Sunnyvale, Santa Monica, New York and Dallas and consult[ed] to various international Yahoo! sites. Liz’s group contributed to the successful development of Yahoo’s pioneering content optimization personalization system, improving the relevancy of Front Page for users and providing new insights on audience behavior.”

Previous to Yahoo, she had been deputy managing editor at Gannett’s USATODAY.com and USA Today. She had a similar job at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle.

Lufkin’s job at Yahoo is a critical one, given how powerful the front page of the site is, with 600 million unique visitors and billions of page views.

While the portal system has been under siege in recent years, it is still a massive driver of traffic to Yahoo’s own Web properties and elsewhere on the Internet.

Yahoo declined to comment (but I am right!).

UPDATE: Yahoo said that it had hired CNET editor-in-chief Scott Ard to take Lufkin’s place. Ard, who worked for the CBS-owned tech news property for 12 years, will report directly to Jai Singh, editor-in-chief of the Yahoo Media Network.

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Sorting out the good from the lousy–or at least the OK from the spam–is an important task Twitter hasn’t figured out how to do on its own yet. So it’s getting some help from outsiders: The service is working with “realtime media” startup Sulia to provide curated Twitterstreams to apps and publishers including Flipboard, the Washington Post and Gannett.

Sulia’s pitch is that while Twitter is a free-for-all where anyone can say anything about anything, most people still want to pay attention to a handful of experts. The service says it can find those experts on thousands of topics, using a combination of algorithms and humans, and it assembles them into curated lists.

If you’re already an expert on a particular topic, you may not want to use  Sulia, because you’ve got your own list of sources. But if you’re a general reader who wants a quick snapshot about something you don’t know much about, it can be useful.

You can get a sense of what Sulia is doing by comparing the Sulia “Libya” stream with the results you get if you type “Libya” into Twitter’s basic search tool.

Sulia’s Twitter deal lets it provide custom streams to app-makers and publishers in exchange for a license fee or a share of ad revenue. Sulia hands some of that money back to Twitter. (Disclosure: Sulia is working with WSJ.com, which like this Web site is owned by News Corp.)

“Curation is one of the top five business opportunities for developers on the Twitter Platform, and Sulia is a great example of the innovation we’re seeing in this emerging space,” Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver says via e-mail. “We made this special agreement with Sulia because publishers are eager for tools like this, that bring the best of Twitter content to their sites and apps.”

Any money Sulia generates for Twitter will be helpful for a service that’s still trying to figure out which business model will work.

More important, if Sulia works as advertised, it will make Twitter that much more useful to mainstream users.

And doing that will also make Twitter much more useful for advertisers. One of the big weaknesses with the ad products Twitter has rolled out so far is that they often require users to look at a string of data that’s confusing or worse.

Take a look, for instance, at the Tweetstream associated with “HTC EVO“, Wednesday’s “promoted trend.” There’s a link to an HTC-sponored Tweet at the top, which arguably has some utility for HTC and for users. But this is what the next four items looked like when I checked in last night:

Twitter isn’t talking about using Sulia within the service itself. But if it works for outsiders, it seems like it’s something Twitter would want to use on Twitter.com and on Twitter-owned apps.

And if that’s the case, then Twitter will either end up buying Sulia, or building its own version of the service. It’s worth noting Twitter has already built an internal “reputation score” system that it hasn’t talked about much. But it’s not a leap to imagine it using that tool to help sort streams on its own.

[Image credit: Library of Congress via Flickr]

Latest example: A $6 million B round for Medialets, a two-year-old New York company best known for making “in-app” ads for Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone platform, as well as for Google’s (GOOG) Android, etc.

Existing investor Foundry Group, which led a $4 million A round a year ago, leads this one as well. DFJ Gotham is also in again, and new money includes Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator and Chris Saridakis, who until recently was Gannett’s (GCI) chief digital officer.

A good chunk of this deal already closed months ago and leaked out via a Series D filing; I assume that new investors have joined the round since then, but I don’t have details.

August 10, 2010: NEW YORK, NY – Medialets, the most widely deployed cross-platform rich media advertising provider for mobile, today announced the closing of a $6 million Series B financing round led by investor Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham, 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis. Medialets will use the funds to expand the capabilities of its mobile rich media ad platform and supporting tools in order to bring rich media ads to the broadest range of advertisers possible.

“Medialets was founded in 2008 on the understanding that mobile would unleash a powerful engagement opportunity for advertisers,” said Medialets CEO Eric Litman. “Since then, not only has Medialets enabled the industry’s most compelling mobile rich media for premier publishers, agencies and brands, we’ve also built out a one-of-a-kind cross-platform infrastructure that brings greater efficiency and scale to mobile rich media campaigns. This Series B funding allows us to continue to evolve the Medialets’ platform to meet the phenomenal demand for high-value mobile rich media.”

Since its inception in June 2008, Medialets has pioneered the creation, delivery and measurement of the most highly engaging rich media ad formats for mobile. In 2009, Medialets created and served the world’s first rich media ad for mobile apps. Earlier this year Medialets followed up on the release of its Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad with the launch of Android advertising support, making Medialets the first provider of cross-platform rich media ads for mobile apps. More recently, Medialets introduced Medialets Enrichä, a partner program that significantly reduces the complexity of mobile advertising for buyers by enabling them to deliver and measure the same creative campaign on different mobile platforms and across Medialets’ partner ad networks, mediators and ad servers.

“Medialets has set the standard for creative and technological innovation in mobile rich media,” said Seth Levine, Managing Director of Foundry Group, Medialets lead investor. “By providing a scalable platform that uniquely addresses the challenges of mobile for both publishers and brands, Medialets has staked out its position as market leader early in the game and will continue to be a driving force in the rapidly growing mobile advertising market.”

A world-class executive team, assembled within the past year, has spearheaded Medialets’ tremendous growth. Keith Gelles, co-founder of PointRoll, joined Medialets as Chief Technology Officer joined the team in July and Aaron Mittman, a former executive at Panther Express and DoubleClick, joined the team in September as Vice President, Global Sales. More recently, Andrew Eisele, formerly of TargetSpot, joined Medialets as the company’s first Chief Financial Officer. The executive team is supported by an advisory board that includes Greg Tagaris, former CIO DoubleClick, Andy Ellenthal, CEO Peer39, Ari Paparo, VP Digital at Nielsen and former Group Director of Advertiser Products at Google, Shervin Pishevar, Chairman SGN, and Colin Crawford, former CEO MacWorld/PC World.

One problem: That service is supposed to feature content from publications other than those owned by Murdoch. And sources familiar with News Corp.’s plans tell me Murdoch has yet to sign partners on to the venture.

News Corp. officials do say Murdoch is hopeful about bringing on Gannett (GCI), the publisher behind USA Today and 82 smaller papers. A person familiar with talks between the companies described them as “late stage.” A spokeswoman for News Corp. (NWS), which owns this Web site, declined to comment; Gannett officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.

And it’s possible that Murdoch’s lieutenants, led by digital boss Jon Miller, have other deals in the works that they’re close to closing.

That’s certainly what Murdoch hinted at in the prepared remarks he delivered at the start of his May 4 earnings call:

Today, we are in final discussions with a number of publishers, device makers and technology companies…and we will soon develop an innovative subscription model that will deliver digital content to consumers…wherever and whenever they want it.

Later, in response to a reporter’s question about the subscription plan, Murdoch went further, announcing that his company would be “giving a press conference in about three to four weeks which we hope will have some important announcements in.”

But that would be a more effective press conference if Murdoch could announce that he has convinced other big publishers to embrace his model. Right now, at least, he can’t say that.

This might seem like a classic example of Murdoch going off script during an earnings call, which happens with some frequency. But in this case, News Corp. officials have been working on a similar timetable behind the scenes. For instance, I’m told that they have been casting about for a public relations agency to help promote the plan and have been telling prospective candidates about their proposed schedule.

So it seems that Murdoch may have been intentionally placing his cart pre-horse in hopes that doing so would speed negotiations along. Can’t wait to see if he’s right.

Even though they are two of the Internet’s largest advertising businesses, both Yahoo and Microsoft are without top execs to lead those units.

Worse, both are just entering a complex online ad sales and search partnership together, which will require a lot of management firepower.

Last week, BoomTown reported the departure of Yahoo’s head for the key North American market, Joanne Bradford, for a new job at social media start-up Demand Media. She starts there Monday.

It was a move that sent reverberations throughout the online ad market.

Less known, though, is that Microsoft (MSFT) has also been looking for almost a year for someone to head up its online ad sales force globally.

Yahoo (YHOO) is just starting its search to replace Bradford–with her boss, U.S. head Hilary Schneider, taking over on an interim basis.

In fact, even Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is pitching in, giving Bradford’s staff a talking to earlier this week about the need to press on.

Both Yahoo execs said the company will be looking at both internal and external candidates.

Until then, said a Yahoo spokeswoman, in the boringest quote ever uttered: “Yahoo! has leadership bench strength and we continue to be committed in delivering wow experiences to both users and advertisers.”

Not to worry about obfuscation, as BoomTown has the scoop!

Internally, the key execs being eyeballed include 11-year Yahoo veteran Mitch Spolan, VP of North American sales, and Seth Dallaire, a former Microsoft exec whom Bradford brought to the company last fall as VP of mid-market sales, a newly-created role responsible for all mid-market sales efforts across search and display advertising.

Another former Microsoft exec, Erika Nardini, VP of brand packaging, is also mentioned a lot as a possibility and is well-liked by the sales force at Yahoo.

Still, many feel that with the exodus of such a high-profile exec as Bradford, Yahoo has to attract another big name to replace her.

But externally, the pickings are much slimmer, with only two key names popping up as top choices.

One is a former Yahoo, Jacki Kelley, a longtime online ad exec who is now North American president of Universal McCann, a unit of the Interpublic Group (IPG) agency. Besides Yahoo, Kelley has worked at Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia (MSO).

The second is Kathy Kayse, a well-regarded former AOL (AOL) ad exec, who now is in charge of digital ad sales at Discovery Communications (DISCA). Kayse also had a long career at Time Warner (TWX).

(Both are pictured here, Kelley at left and Kayse on the right.)

Microsoft is a dicier proposition, with exactly zero internal candidates considered qualified to lead the online ad sales effort, a job that would report directly into Corporate VP for Consumer & Online Darren Huston.

Microsoft has been searching for a long time now, with feelers all over the industry. A variety of names pops up, from new MySpace ad head Nada Stirratt to Bradford–also a former Microsoftie–herself.

In fact, the paucity of experienced execs to handle these complex jobs–which include the need to understand premium, network and search ad sales, as well as highly technical systems–is clear.

“Neither of these jobs are easy and, in many ways, a giant nightmare,” joked one online ad sales exec.

How else to explain a weird spike in New York Times (NYT) shares?

Sometime after noon today, traders started bidding the stock way up, from $11 to $12, though it’s now dropping back down again. As I write this, shares are moving down to the $11.60 range, which is still a jump of six percent, without any obvious reason.

Unless you count the news today that the paper is printing international editions in Bosnia and El Salvador (really).

Looky here (click chart to enlarge):

Briefing.com (via Barrons) posits that the spike is based a supposed rumor that Carlos Slim, the billionaire who made a high-interest loan to the paper last year, now wants to buy the whole thing.

But if something that nonsensical can move the market, why stop there? Why not suggest, for instance, that investors were tickled pink about the new photo slideshow tool the Times is showing off on its front page? (It really is pretty cool. You should check it out.)

Oh, for the record, the Times has nothing to say about this. Per spokeswoman Diane McNulty: “It’s not our practice to comment on Internet rumors.”

Meanwhile, as Adam Isserlis at Rubenstein Communications notes, the Times isn’t the only newspaper stock popping today: E. W. Scripps (SSP) is up more than 12 percent in a flat market. No discernible reason for that rise, either. Oh, and Gannett (GCI) and Media General (MEG) are up too.

For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

How to help marketers to better understand the site and, therefore, spur this significant monetization will be his main focus at the Huffington Post, said Greg Coleman to BoomTown in an interview over the weekend.

Coleman–a former Yahoo (YHOO) advertising exec, as well as one for Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL–was named president and chief revenue officer a month ago by Huffington Post’s new CEO, Eric Hippeau.

Hippeau, who was himself just appointed in June, is another well-known online media exec and has been a big investor and board member of the Huffington Post. (You can read a thorough interview by Staci Kramer with Hippeau on paidContent.)

“It’s important for advertisers to know how big we have gotten, while also highlighting this amazing audience of influencers we have gathered,” said Coleman, in his first media chitchat since taking on the job. “I think it is the beginning of a tipping point.”

Well, of course, Coleman would say that, as the guy looking to drum up interest among marketers in spending their money on the Huffington Post.

But stats seem to indicate that consumers are increasingly liking what the Huffington Post is creating, because it is starting to surpass some well-known media icons on the Web in traffic.

While more of this increase is going to be due to a socialization of the news–the Huffington Post has an aggressive deployment of Facebook Connect called HuffPost Social News–the growth is more about building a brand people trust and seek out.

According to recent reports from both comScore (SCOR) and Nielsen Online, for example, the site just became larger than several online brands of big media companies, such as the Washington Post (WPO), in terms of unique monthly visitors.

In its September report, Nielsen clocked the Huffington Post at 9.47 million uniques, up 26 percent, while the Post site was at 9.2 million–a drop of 30 percent.

According to the Nielsen, the Huffington Post is within spitting distance of USA Today’s Web site (9.9 million), a Gannett (GCI) property.

And, it is bigger than Hearst Newspapers Digital (7.9 million) and the BBC (7.2 million).

For September, comScore has the Huffington Post (at 6.83 million) besting the Post (6.77 million)–as well as WSJ.com (6.7 million), a unit of Dow Jones, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS).

(The Wall Street Journal site, to be fair, makes a chunk of its revenue from subscription fees, rather than relying solely on advertising from traffic like the Huffington Post. And full disclosure: Dow Jones owns this site.)

In any case, big traffic is key for most news sites, and internal numbers from Google (GOOG) Analytics that Huffington Post execs cite are higher, as is typical for most sites, pegging traffic at about 27 million monthly uniques with more than two million reader comments per month.

Huffington Post co-founder and blogging icon Arianna Huffington attributes the recent boost in traffic to the site’s proclivity to “start conversations” that interest readers, such as her recent suggestion that Vice President Joe Biden should resign.

“We are aiming to go beyond just facts, to create a narrative,” said Huffington, who thinks the speed of news helps attract visitors to the site. “We think bringing journalism to a new level is exactly what people are looking for.”

Perhaps. But, even if traffic increases continue to bear her theories out, she and others have said that the Huffington Post still has not been regularly profitable despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

While the site is aiming to invest rather than focus too hard on showing profits, Coleman said he would like to make revenue seven times larger in the next years, building on the performance of the site to vaunt past old media giants online.

“This kind of thing is a milestone for the marketing community,” he said. “Our goal is to be the top Internet newspaper, and this points out that we are on our way.”

To do that, he will have to spend some of the $37 million in funding that the Huffington Post has raised from venture investors.

While the edit side is using the money to expand the number of news categories, Coleman said his focus will be on building a higher caliber team of sales and marketing execs with deeper relationships to big clients.

“Unlike selling an auto page on Yahoo (YHOO), our site has a more complex sales process that takes some time for people to understand,” said Coleman. “But once they get it, it should be an easier sale.”

Until then, check out the video of the entire interview I did at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference with Huffington and Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth in which they talk about the future of journalism and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091020/as-traffic-booms-is-huffpo-ready-to-make-some-real-dough/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090921/newspapers-bad-news-get-less-bad-but-not-by-much/ http://allthingsd.com/20090921/newspapers-bad-news-get-less-bad-but-not-by-much/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:00:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11113

Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.

The New York Times polled some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, and concluded that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent, or “possibly a bit less.” Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.

Worth noting, but not in a newsworthy way: We’ve been headed in this direction for a while. Publishers, including the New York Times (NYT), Gannett (GCI) and McClatchy (MNI), started making hopeful murmurs–or less hopeless murmurs, really–earlier this summer. But all they’re really saying is that:

• Things don’t seem to be getting any worse, and
• It’s nearly impossible for year-over-year comparisons not to improve for the rest of the year since results will be measured against those posted in the fall of 2008, when the economy was in shocked-and-awed mode. Which we knew. But still worth repeating, and something we’ll probably repeat many more times through the rest of this year.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090921/newspapers-bad-news-get-less-bad-but-not-by-much/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090916/news-aggregator-daylife-ties-up-with-getty-4m-investment/ http://allthingsd.com/20090916/news-aggregator-daylife-ties-up-with-getty-4m-investment/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:32:21 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=11024 Daylife, a news aggregator that launched a few years ago with a good deal of hype but has since retreated to the back pages, has landed another investor: Getty Images has bet $4 million on the company, which has raised some $15 million to date.

Getty’s involvement with Daylife is actually several months old. The amount of the investment, but not the investor, was previously disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Daylife announced the deal today in conjunction with another Getty tie-up–a deal to create photo-curating tools for online publishers.

Daylife formally launched in January 2007 with a good deal of buzz, due primarily to its high-profile investors, which included the New York Times (NYT), Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington. The initial plan was to create both content-aggregation tools for publishers as well as a destination site, but the latter never took off and is now just a demo site for customers.

CEO Upendra Shardanand says the company has found traction as a white-label aggregation engine, though he won’t disclose revenue for the 26-person company. Clients include Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today, GE’s (GE) USA Networks and News Corp.’s (NWS) Sky News.

[Image credit: Tallest man in the world visits London, via Getty]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090916/news-aggregator-daylife-ties-up-with-getty-4m-investment/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090722/is-the-newspaper-ad-slump-ending-no-but-its-looking-less-lousy/ http://allthingsd.com/20090722/is-the-newspaper-ad-slump-ending-no-but-its-looking-less-lousy/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:19:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=9572 Be very careful about reading too much into this. But for what it’s worth, several newspaper publishers are now announcing that things are looking…“up” is the wrong word. Let’s try “less bad.”

Last week, Gannett (GCI) said national ads had only dropped 12 percent in June, compared to a 24 percent slide the previous year. Yesterday, McClatchy (MNI) said that while ad revenue was down 30 percent in the last quarter, this figure was at least stable compared to the previous quarter, and that things were picking up, just a bit, this summer. And today Media General (MEG) said its declines had also become a bit less severe.

Tomorrow we hear from the New York Times (NYT), and if we use the the very low bar set by its peers, there’s a decent chance the publisher will have a not-terrible story to tell.

That’s because the Times had previously warned that its Q2 would look as unpleasant as its Q1, when its ad sales dropped 27 percent; anything less lousy will constitute a win. Investors seem eager to hear about it: NYT shares are trading up today along with many other newspaper publishers.

And again, be very wary of overvaluing these numbers, particularly as we get farther along into summer and fall. At that point, the comps will be measured against last year’s black hole of an economy, and any company that can’t show an improvement against that performance will likely be DOA.

Still. It’s a very nice day in New York, and newspapers deserve a shot of good news. Enjoy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090722/is-the-newspaper-ad-slump-ending-no-but-its-looking-less-lousy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090529/secret-newspaper-cabal-agenda-sort-of-revealed/ http://allthingsd.com/20090529/secret-newspaper-cabal-agenda-sort-of-revealed/#comments Fri, 29 May 2009 14:55:28 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=7808 So what exactly were the 24 newspaper publishers who gathered in suburban Chicago yesterday talking about? We don’t know, because the meeting was held off the record and participants like the New York Times (NYT), Gannett (GCI) and Hearst aren’t talking about it. Except we do know, sort of.

We know that, in general, the papers have been talking about ways to make more money from their products, including subscriptions and microtransactions, and have been talking about this for months. And we know, via the Atlantic’s James Warren, that the subject of yesterday’s meeting was “Models to Monetize Content” and that the agenda included sessions titled “Journalism Online: Presentation on proposed service to charge for access to newspaper content and to license that content that (sic) online aggregators” and “Fair Syndication Consortium/Attributor.”

That first session sounds pretty straightforward. What’s that second one about? I asked the PR firm that reps Attributor, the content-tracking service referred to in the session’s title, and it declined comment. But it did refer me to the Web page for the Fair Syndication Consortium, which it turns out is the name for the Attributor-led program that wants to get the likes of Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) to share some of the ad revenue they make when they sell ads against copyrighted content.

You can read more about that in this Wall Street Journal story published in April. See? Not so mysterious, after all.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090529/secret-newspaper-cabal-agenda-sort-of-revealed/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090416/google-braces-for-its-first-quarterly-decline/ http://allthingsd.com/20090416/google-braces-for-its-first-quarterly-decline/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:18:20 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6357 Let’s get this out of the way in advance: When Google delivers its first-quarter report card today, it will likely mark the first time the search giant sees revenue decline from one quarter to the next.

So that’s a big deal. But it has also been expected for some time now. So what should you be looking for?

As Barron’s Eric Savitz notes, Wall Street analysts have been furiously tweaking their estimates–generally downward–in advance of this afternoon’s report. Citigroup’s (C) ever-helpful Mark Mahaney provides the following “cheat sheet” that lays out the key metrics, along with a range of possible results (click to enlarge):

I’ll also be interested in what, if any, color Google (GOOG) offers about its nascent move into display advertising and if it can clarify exactly what is going on at YouTube–is the video site bleeding $500 million a year, as Credit Suisse has recently suggested, or is it “nearing break-even,” as Bernstein’s Jeffrey Lindsay argued in a note yesterday?

And given that Google is the first big Internet company to report this quarter–and, aside from Gannett (GCI), the first big media company to report–I’ll also be interested in whatever Eric Schmidt and company have to say about the advertising market in general. The Google earnings call is scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m. Eastern; you can find live coverage here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090416/google-braces-for-its-first-quarterly-decline/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090416/gannetts-disappearing-ad-revenue-bodes-badly-for-newspapers/ http://allthingsd.com/20090416/gannetts-disappearing-ad-revenue-bodes-badly-for-newspapers/#comments Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:15:29 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6352 Yesterday we got a sense of how bad the first quarter was for the magazine business. Today we get a report card from the newspaper industry, and it’s equally grim.

If you’re one of the few people gambling on Gannett (GCI) stock, you’ll want to note that the company’s earnings per share, after factoring out one-time gains, came in at 25 cents. That’s a penny better than the street’s estimate. And the company recorded $1.38 billion in revenue, missing the $1.44 billion consensus.

The rest of you care about Gannett because you want to get a sense of how bad the advertising market was for newspapers and local TV during the first three months of 2009. Short version: Very bad.

Relevant numbers:

Publishing advertising revenue: Down 34.1 percent (or down 29.8 percent if you exclude currency fluctuation)

Classified ad revenue: Down 46.5 percent

USA Today ad revenue: Down 33.5 percent (which is where Gannett had warned it would be

TV revenue: Down 14.9 percent

Later this afternoon, we’ll get a look at a different media industry bellwether when Google (GOOG) provides its report card. It’s not going to look nearly as bad, obviously, but by the very high standards of the search giant, it’s still going to be upsetting. More on that in a bit.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090416/gannetts-disappearing-ad-revenue-bodes-badly-for-newspapers/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090414/ad-forecasts-crummy-offline-ok-online-sun-to-rise-in-east-set-in-west/ http://allthingsd.com/20090414/ad-forecasts-crummy-offline-ok-online-sun-to-rise-in-east-set-in-west/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:15:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6268 Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected.

In the old days, this might have qualified as news. But for the past year or so, Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been revising its forecasts downward every couple of months as the reality of the financial meltdown sinks in. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff.

More stuff you pretty much knew already: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.

Citigroup (C) analyst Mark Mahaney summarizes his chat with the CEOs of PubMatic and the Rubicon Project, which help online publishers sell inventory through ad networks. Their takeaway is that while pricing for online display ads has dropped dramatically in the past couple quarters–by as much as 50 percent in some cases–overall spending should remain flat this year. And as we all know, that’s the new up.

If you’d like to see concrete numbers from the ad market, hang tight until Thursday, when we’ll get earnings reports from two companies at the opposite end of the media spectrum: Gannett (GCI) and Google (GOOG).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090414/ad-forecasts-crummy-offline-ok-online-sun-to-rise-in-east-set-in-west/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/ http://allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:26:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6232 This is what passes for good news in the newspaper business these days: Someone bought some shares of one of the industry’s biggest companies.

That revelation is supposedly what goosed shares in Gannett (GCI) 34 percent today. The problem with that theory: The same news–that Ariel Investments LLC had more than doubled its stake in the company, from 4.5 to 12.5 percent–had already caused Gannett shares to jump 39 percent last Thursday when the news was first disclosed.

The more obvious and less savory reason for Gannett’s share swings today, as noted by Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen:  a short squeeze. About 30 percent of the company’s shares are shorted, and now that GCI shares are down in the $5 range–less than a year ago, they traded above $31–you’re likely to see this kind of volatility on any given day.

In any case, the excitement appears to be over: As I type this, GCI shares are back down to the $4 level, just a bit above where they opened this morning.

If you’re looking for actual news about Gannett’s performance, you can tune in on Thursday, when the company releases its quarterly report card. Or you can read this prediction from The Wall Street Journal, which wins the concision award–spoiler alert!–with this headline: “Gannett Earnings Set To Show Depth Of Industry’s Decline.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090225/gannett-cuts-dividend-90-percent-so-much-for-the-44-percent-yield/ http://allthingsd.com/20090225/gannett-cuts-dividend-90-percent-so-much-for-the-44-percent-yield/#comments Wed, 25 Feb 2009 23:22:03 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=8841 Surprising no one, Gannett (GCI) this afternoon cut its quarterly dividend rate to four cents from 40 cents, a reduction of 90 percent.

The publisher of USA Today and other newspapers said the move is “another prudent response to the full-fledged recessions in the U.S. and the U.K. and the continuing difficulties in the credit market.” Gannett says the move will free up $325 million in cash to pay down debt.

I would note that at the old rate, GCI shares had a yield of 44 percent. And of course, the only time stocks offer a yield of 44 percent is when investors know the current rate isn’t going to last.

Read the rest of this post

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090225/gannett-cuts-dividend-90-percent-so-much-for-the-44-percent-yield/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090122/4info-gets-20-million/ http://allthingsd.com/20090122/4info-gets-20-million/#comments Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:07:38 +0000 Emily Steel http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=7843 Mobile marketing network 4INFO plans to announce Thursday that it has received $20 million in venture funding led by Peacock Equity, a joint venture between NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance’s media, communications and entertainment business.

4INFO works with media companies, including Yahoo (YHOO), IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACZ) and Gannett (GCI) to provide weather updates, sports scores and other information via text messages that contain small ads. The Silicon Valley start-up sends more text messages in the U.S., by volume, than any other provider, according to Nielsen. 4INFO says it delivers more than 80 million user-requested text messages per month and that its network includes 16 million users.

Read the rest of this post

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090122/4info-gets-20-million/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090105/for-sale-at-the-new-york-times-the-front-page/ http://allthingsd.com/20090105/for-sale-at-the-new-york-times-the-front-page/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:11:56 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=2730 The New York Times (NYT) is already trying to mortgage its headquarters and unload assets like its stake in the Boston Red Sox.

So what’s left to sell? The front page.

Today’s edition of the Times features the first display ad the paper has ever sold on its front page. We’re talking about the print edition here–the Times Web site has long been strewn with ads, including those annoying/awesome Apple (AAPL) ads that stretched across most of the front page.

Given that it’s a historic move, the ad in question is a pretty dull piece of marketing: A modest little thing promoting programming at CBS (CBS). Behold! (It’s all the way at the bottom, in case you’re confused.)

Then again, this is only historic because the Times management has been so stubborn about keeping its front page pristine. It’s hard to imagine that any reader will care.

As the Times itself informs us, The Wall Street Journal (owned by Dow Jones, which also owns this site) sold ads on its front page even prior to its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. (NWS); so does Gannett’s (GCI) USA Today and Tribune’s Los Angeles Times. Now the only major holdout is the Washington Post (WPO).

But the Washington Post is owned by a parent company that’s still actually relatively healthy (because it’s not actually a media company, but an education company).

And you can’t say that about the Times, which reported a miserable November and has a looming cash crunch. So if the paper can find anything else it can sell, expect to it part ways with that, too.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090105/for-sale-at-the-new-york-times-the-front-page/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20081203/fired-newspaper-reporters-still-reporting-for-fired-newspaper-employee-blog/ http://allthingsd.com/20081203/fired-newspaper-reporters-still-reporting-for-fired-newspaper-employee-blog/#comments Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:06:01 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=1634 I’ve already pointed out a number of sites dedicated to layoff/shutdown news, and unfortunately we’re going to see more in the coming months. So I don’t intend to highlight every one. That said, here’s an illustration of  what happens when a large company full of reporters fires hundreds of its workers: They report on their own firings.

That’s what’s happening at Gannett Blog, where former Gannett (GCI) employee Jim Hopkins is asking other former Gannett employees to share the details of their layoffs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them to talk about–Hopkins, via a network of Gannett tipsters, has tallied up about 1,000 cuts just in this round alone.

Some of them pass along memos from managers announcing cuts at specific papers and publications. Others pass along unverified tips. Hopkins, a 20-year Gannett veteran who took a buyout from the newspaper chain in January, is asking people to send in their personal stories. Here’s one:

I sat across from Executive Editor and heard words: restructuring, position, sorry, future. I said nothing. I listened to HR woman painfully recite her lines and all I could think was: her day is as bad as ours. She was the only one close to tears. I walked back to my desk to get my things and gave my colleagues a sad smile. I said nothing. I started forwarding emails to my editor, tying up loose ends and then I thought: just say nothing.”

And, yes, I’m reporting on layoffs too. At Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., for instance, where cuts are still ongoing, I’m told a few dozen people were laid off at the company’s IT department last week.

So if you want to pass along information, please do. It’s more helpful if you send it directly to me via peter@allthingsd.com. But if you want to be completely anonymous, you can use the blind tip box here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20081203/fired-newspaper-reporters-still-reporting-for-fired-newspaper-employee-blog/feed/ 0