AllThingsD » newspaper

Gannett Buying Belo in $2.2 Billion Deal

Peter Kafka — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:58:54 +0000

Gannett, best known as the newspaper publisher behind USA Today, is making a big bet on TV: It is paying $1.5 billion, and taking on $715 million in debt, to acquire local station owner Belo Corp. If the deal gets regulatory approval, Gannett will nearly double its portfolio of TV stations from 23 to 43.

Here's the Annual D: All Things Digital Tab From the WSJ

Kara Swisher — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:28:46 +0000

As usual, The Wall Street Journal today published its annual pullout tab in the newspaper, which is also online, focused on some of the onstage interviews at last week’s D: All Things Digital conference. Our 11th show featured a panoply of top Internet and media execs, as well as some pretty cool demos. The Journal special section includes edited excerpts from interviews with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SpaceX and Tesla Motors head Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook and more. You can read it all here (and complete coverage by ATD is here too, including the full videos of the conference).

Hearst Taps Demand Media's Bradford and Yucaipa's Johnson to "Redefine" the San Francisco Chronicle

Kara Swisher — Thu, 23 May 2013 19:49:46 +0000

Media giant Hearst has hired two senior execs — Demand Media’s Joanne Bradford and former Los Angeles Times CEO Jeffrey Johnson — in a significant move to digitally turbocharge and jumpstart its flagship but long-suffering newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle and its SFGate.com website.

“They have deep publishing and new media experience and believe in the power of great content with a valued brand,” said Heart CEO Frank Bennack in a statement. “We are excited to work with them to redefine the choices for how and where readers can experience the trusted Chronicle content they depend on.”

In the new leadership, Johnson will be the publisher of the Chronicle, while Bradford will be its president. Both will report to Hearst Newspapers President Mark Aldam. Current publisher Frank Vega — an old-style publisher who has had a controversial tenure at the Chronicle — will retire, though Hearst said he will continue as chairman through the transition.

“The San Francisco Chronicle should be a shining star and use case of how to build a community and cover local news,” said Bradford in a text to me today.

Indeed. While the Chronicle and its website is the largest for local news in the Bay area, it has lagged a lot in aggressively covering key trends — such as tech — and the fast growth of the region. While the area has blossomed, the Chronicle, like many big-city newspapers, has suffered, as digital businesses of all kinds have made incursions on its business.

Its daily print circulation is now 265,000, and combined with its website it reaches close to two million people.

Getting all that a whole lot higher — and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more relevant — will be a tough job and will likely require a major reinvention of the Chronicle brand.

That is especially true since the San Francisco area, including Silicon Valley, is the world’s key digital hub, as well as a leader in a number of areas — from top-notch sports teams to having one of the most innovative food and indie cultures. After a few years of rough economic times, the city is on a bit of a roll, including being the location of some upcoming major events such as the Super Bowl and America’s Cup.

Bradford has a lot of experience in both old and new media and is well known in the online media advertising space, having had top sales and media jobs at BusinessWeek magazine, Microsoft, Yahoo and, now, Demand.

She has been at that content site, where she has been its chief revenue and marketing officer, since 2010. At Yahoo, previous to Demand, she was an SVP in charge of North American revenue and also worked on branded entertainment partnerships. At Microsoft, she was a corporate VP and chief media officer of MSN Media Network.

And, although I have known her well over many years — full disclosure: We are very good friends — I had no idea she had an undergraduate degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

Johnson is also a longtime media exec. He has recently been an operating partner at the Yucaipa Companies — owned by kingpin Ron Burkle — focusing on media investments since 2007. Previous to that, he was president, publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times for just a year, but had been its SVP and GM since 2000. At the Times, he was responsible for the newspaper’s digital and print operations including editorial, advertising, circulation, consumer sales and marketing, finance and technology. Johnson has also worked at the Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel and has an undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The Chronicle is the largest newspaper in Northern California, founded in 1865 by Charles and Michael de Young. Its owner, the privately-held Hearst, is one of the nation’s largest media companies, with dozens of daily and weekly newspapers; has a huge group of television stations and cable network stakes, such as Lifetime, A&E and ESPN; hundreds of magazines, such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Elle; and many other varied holdings.

Bradford will be replaced at Demand Media by Jeff Dossett.

Syrian Electronic Army Leaves Its Mark on the Financial Times

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:52:19 +0000

You can now add the Financial Times to the steadily growing list of media organizations that have been attacked by the band of digital pranksters known as the Syrian Electronic Army.

The London-based financial newspaper (and competitor to The Wall Street Journal, which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) saw both its main website and several Twitter accounts attacked, according to a report by another British newspaper, the Telegraph.

As of 10:30 am ET, Twitter accounts belonging to the FT’s Lex column, its tech news section and a few others were all suspended.

But this attack was a little different from the more recent moves by the pro-Assad group. Lately, they’ve stuck to attacking the Twitter accounts of Western media organizations including CBS, the BBC, the Guardian and the Onion. This time, they actually attacked the main website, as well, and left headlines announcing that they had visited.

Zach Seward of Quartz.com nabbed a screenshot, which he shared on Twitter:

Syrian Electronic Army appears to have hacked the Financial Times tech blog http://t.co/M2RAVhgDP3 @fttechnews http://t.co/A3r2JVuZWm

May 17, 2013 5:03 am via webReply RetweetFavorite

@zseward

Zach Seward

Study: Online Media Pays Off for Consumers More Than Offline

Kara Swisher — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:21 +0000

Apparently, you can get media satisfaction — as long as you are online as opposed to offline.

According to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, consumers accrue more value from their online media usage than from their offline consumption.

The new research report — titled “Follow the Surplus: How U.S. Consumers Value Online Media” — calculated that the average U.S. online user got a “consumer surplus” of $970, compared to $900 from offline media.

BCG defines consumer surplus as “the value consumers themselves place on a media-related activity or product over and above what they pay for it.”

The report looked at seven categories — books, radio and music, U.S. newspapers and magazines, TV and movies, video games, international newspapers and magazines and user-generated content and social networks.

The largest chunk of online consumer satisfaction came from UGC and social, such as use of Facebook and Google’s YouTube, which makes sense since the actual cost is nearly zero — making any benefit essentially digital gravy.

Books were where the least consumer surplus was online. That’s not a surprise, said BCG senior partner John Rose, who coauthored the report, but it is likely to change soon with the increasing popularity and proliferation of a variety of devices.

That’s double from three years ago, with the average consumer now owning 2.9 devices, such as mobile smartphones and tablets. It will increase to 4.1 in three years, said the BCG report. Also up, of course, is the number of hours spent online, which — in turn — dramatically increases the value of online media consumption.

Advertisers still have not caught up with consumers, of course. “The value is from the consumers’ perspective and not the advertisers’ perspective yet,” said Rose, in an interview. “The business models are still not in place to support what consumers already know they want.”

Gender is not an issue, with men and women both consuming about 12 hours a week of online content. But men listen to more music, while women prefer social interaction more.

Another interesting result, read the report: “By a margin of some five to one, U.S. consumers are more excited about the Internet’s potential rewards than they are worried about the potential risks.”

In other words, they like online media, they really like it.

That’s why, said Rose, the medium and the business model will evenutally come together.

“Different people will say different things about when it will come together and not if it will come together,” said Rose. “Advertisers have always found ways to create value, even if they have not done it yet with online media.”

There are lots of other interesting findings and charts from BCG, some of which are embedded below (click to enlarge them and the whole report can be found and downloaded here).

Next Up on Chinese Hacking Media List: The Washington Post

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:12:04 +0000

According to a report in the New York Times, along with that newspaper, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, another media organization targeted by hackers apparently originating out of China is the Washington Post. But, it might be worse than that. Outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the issue in her final meeting with reporters, noting: “We have seen over the last years an increase in not only the hacking attempts on government institutions but also nongovernmental ones. [The Chinese] are not the only people who are hacking us.”

News Corp. Shutters The Daily iPad App

Peter Kafka — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 13:33:29 +0000

The Daily, News Corp.’s attempt to create a newspaper for the iPad era, is shutting down after less than two years.

The media giant, which also owns this Web site, said it will “cease standalone publication” of the app on Dec. 15.

It says that “technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into” News Corp.’s New York Post tabloid. The app/newspaper has approximately 120 employees.

News Corp. made the announcement in the midst of other organizational changes in advance of the company’s upcoming breakup, which will spin off the company’s publishing assets into a new, separately traded company. Here’s Murdoch’s take on The Daily, via a press release:

From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation. Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties. Under the editorial leadership of Editor-in-Chief Col Allan and the business and digital leadership of Jesse, I know The New York Post will continue to grow and become stronger on the web, on mobile, and not least, the paper itself. I want to thank all of the journalists, digital and business professionals for the hard work they put into The Daily.

Jesse Angelo, The Daily’s editor-in-chief, will become publisher of the Post; Daily publisher Greg Clayman will get a job heading up digital at the new publishing company. Earlier this year, The Daily cut a third of its staff.

Some of News Corp.’s other key moves in the split have already been reported: Robert Thomson, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s current managing editor, will run the new company, and Thomson’s deputy Gerard Baker will get Thomson’s old job.

The “new” publishing company, which includes Dow Jones, News Corp.’s other newspaper assets and HarperCollins publishing, will be named “News Corp.” The remaining part of the “old” News Corp. — primarily, its TV and film assets — will be renamed “Fox Group.”
Current New York Post publisher Paul Carlucci, who is also chairman of News America Marketing, will now “focus exclusively” on that job.

The Daily launched in February 2011 with a great deal of fanfare and a blessing from Apple, which worked closely with News Corp. to get the paper off the ground. But The Daily never clicked, and struggled to attract subscribers.

The app was initially hampered by technical problems, but The Daily’s key issue was a conceptual one. While the app boasted lots of digital bells and whistles, in the end it was very much a general interest newspaper that seemed to be geared toward people who didn’t really like newspapers. You can’t make that work no matter what kind of platform you use.

The real surprise would have been if News Corp. had found a way to keep The Daily around, since the tablet newspaper’s fate was essentially sealed this summer when the corporate split was announced.

The money-losing Daily has been on News Corp. COO Chase Carey’s pet peeve list for a long time, but it was also a passion project for Murdoch, whose first love was and is newspapers. And the old News Corp. structure let Murdoch subsidize passion projects with profits from his TV business.

Presumably he’ll still be able to do some experimenting at the new/old publishing company, but it will be much harder to do that stuff without TV money to prop it up.

UPDATE:

Like moving pictures? Here’s a clip of me gassing on with All Things Digital’s excellent Lauren Goode about the Daily’s demise, via WSJ.com’s Digits show.

[ See post to watch video ]

The New York Times Reports a Digital Success Story

Peter Kafka — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 12:40:38 +0000

The New York Times’ pay wall, long debated in and outside of the company, now looks like a bona fide success.

The company has more than 530,000 paying subscribers for its digital editions, and it credits the plan with a consistent increase in circulation dollars. Which it needs, because its ad dollars continue to shrink.

Here’s another data point in favor of the plan: A report from Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar, who estimates that the paper will have more digital subscribers than print subs within a couple of years.

The caveats: Even if Venkateshwar’s projections are right, the digital subscription story won’t solve all of the Times’ problems. For starters, each digital customer generates much less revenue than a print customer: The digital sub pays around $220 a year for the Times, versus approximately $730 for the paper-and-ink version.

And while the profits that each kind of sub generates for the paper should be roughly equal — because it’s a whole lot cheaper to produce and deliver a digital copy than a print one — that only holds true if the Times isn’t overly reliant on discounts to sell its digital subscriptions.

Still, Venkateshwar, who has been bullish on the Times for a while, argues that most of the digital subscribers to date seem to be new customers. So all of this is incremental revenue. That’s a best-case scenario for the paper.

Hey Internet Girl: Aaron Sorkin's TV News 2.0 Show Gets a Second Season (Video)

Kara Swisher — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:05:10 +0000

Hollywood super-writer Aaron Sorkin has already gotten his new show on the struggles of creating a new television news show in the Internet age renewed for another season.

The successful Sorkin made light of the struggles to attract a big audience for the HBO program in a recent onstage interview at the 10th D: All Things Digital conference.

Not so hard, as it turns out for the voluble scribe, whose “The Newsroom” got 2.1 million viewers in its opening two weeks ago, which is just behind HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire” and “Game of Thrones.”

Sorkin did manage to attract some controversy recently when he said in a tense interview with Sarah Nicole Pickett of Canada’s Globe and Mail:

“Listen here, Internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.”

The fab line did result in an even funnier Tumblr on the kerfuffle.

Here’s the full video of Sorkin’s interview with Walt Mossberg at D10, as well as another very funny recent viral video, titled “Sorkinisms,” in which the writer uses his best lines over and over, compiled from a variety of his shows.

[ See post to watch video ]

Hey, Internet Girl

Voices — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 06:59:00 +0000

Listen here, Internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.

– Aaron Sorkin, during a tense interview with Sarah Nicole Pickett of the Toronto Globe and Mail. His comments have spawned a site on Tumblr.

The New York Times Gets All the News That's Fit to Print -- All of It -- Into Flipboard

Peter Kafka — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 04:01:17 +0000

Like the New York Times? Like Flipboard? Here’s a corporate mashup for you: The Times’ subscribers will soon be able read the entire paper on the aggregation/recommendation app.

The news is important for Flipboard because it marks the first time the start-up has convinced a big publisher to give it full access to its “premium” content. Previously it has let users sample bits of stuff from magazines, newspapers and the like.

And it’s important for the Times because it’s the first time it has given anyone else full access to its stuff.

Up until now, the only way to read digital versions of the newspaper was via the Times’ Web site or its iOS and Android apps. Now the paper says it will emulate cable TV’s “TV Everywhere” strategy, where paying subscribers can read the paper using any device or software they want.

This doesn’t seem like a bad idea. But I’m not sure that it will do much for the Times, either.

The theoretical appeal of TV Everywhere is that it gives viewers the shows they want, without forcing them to watch it on their couch. The idea is that someone who only watches video on their laptop, iPad or Xbox would find plenty of stuff to justify continuing their cable subscription.

But Times subscribers already have access to the New York Times on just about any device they want. And the Flipboard version looks and acts almost exactly the way the Times apps act (see screenshot). This just means you don’t have to toggle between the Times app and Flipboard.

On the other hand, this deal does give the paper another place to market its digital editions, since nonsubscribers will get free access to a small sample of the paper’s stories, similar to the free offering on the Times’ free iPad edition.

And there’s the possibility of a new revenue stream as well, via Flipboard edition ads; the paper will share any of that money with Flipboard.

As for Flipboard, the vote of confidence from the paper of record is a nice momentum marker. Flipboard started out in 2010 with what was effectively a nice way to look at Facebook and Twitter streams. It has gradually added a host of traditional publishers, and has lately been spreading out beyond print, adding audio (SoundCloud) and video (YouTube), etc.

It has branched out beyond its initial iPad focus, as well, and last week announced that it was fully supporting Android devices. And it will now come preinstalled on Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III phones.

We’ll see what the increased distribution does for its take-up. Flipboard has yet to release monthly user data, but says that as of January, eight million people had downloaded and installed its apps.

A Sports Aggregator Finds a Home: Gannett Buys Quickish

Peter Kafka — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 12:00:45 +0000

The folks at Gannett, the newspaper publisher best known as the people who bring you USA Today, also want to be known for online sports. Here’s another move in that direction: The company’s USA Today Sports Media Group has acquired Quickish, a one-man sports aggregator run by Dan Shanoff.

This is a variation on your basic “acqhire,” the difference being that Gannett intends to keep Quickish operating once Shanoff starts working for them. Shanoff says he’ll also work on other digital projects for Gannett, as an “audience-development executive” working for USA Today sports-biz guy Dave Morgan.

Quickish is a fairly straightforward aggegrator that offers a summary and a link for sports stories throughout the day. Unlike aggregators like Techmeme, there’s no special algorithm here — just Shanoff or one of his freelancers picking stories to highlight and sources to link to. It’s closer to what Jim Romenesko does on his media news site.

When Shanoff launched last year, he had plans to replicate the formula with other subjects, but never got to it. More likely what happens now is that Gannett uses Quickish for more niche “verticals” — you could have one of these for Nascar, one for the NFL, etc. — and plugs it into various sites.

The deal is one more sign that Gannett wants to bulk up in digital sports. It has made a series of M&A moves in the last few years, the biggest being its purchase of Big Lead Sports in January.

(Image courtesy off Mike Flippo / Shutterstock.com)

Washington Post Finishes Digg Deal

Peter Kafka — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:00:20 +0000

The Washington Post has closed its deal to acquire some of Digg’s technology staff, who will go to work for SocialCode, a Washington Post subsdiary that helps marketers buy ads on Facebook and Twitter. AllThingsD had previously reported that the Digg hires would work alongside the team that built the paper’s Social Reader; that team works for WaPo Labs, a different subsidiary.

New York Times Sees Digital Ads Droop

Peter Kafka — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:10:05 +0000

The New York Times says its digital paywall strategy is a success with consumers. But its digital advertising business stumbled last quarter, and dropped by 2 percent.

Times CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr. blamed an “uneven U.S. economic environment and uncertain global conditions” for weak ad sales in general — overall ad sales were down 6.1 percent at the publisher’s core News Media Group — and said digital sales were “under pressure in the first two months of the year.”

The publisher says it expects to see similar ad results for the second quarter of 2012.

Meanwhile the Times’ About.com content farm continues to struggle, and saw its revenue drop 23.1 percent.

Times readers, though, seem happy to pay for the paper.

Circulation revenue was up 9.7 percent, and the Times has close to half a million people shelling out for digital access. The Times is trying to boost that number by pulling back on the free digital content it gives to nonsubscribers.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Ritu Manoj Jethani)

The Daily Has an Angry Birds App -- And the Start of a Custom Publishing Business

Peter Kafka — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 17:20:56 +0000

Hey! You like Angry Birds, right? Of course you do. So you’ll enjoy reading about Angry Birds, via a new, free iOS app about the newest iteration of the game, produced by The Daily. (An Android version is in the works.)

And if you like that idea, then you’ll love watching a promotional video for the app.

Hey! Isn’t the The Daily owned by News Corp., which also owns this Web site? Yes, yes it is. Good of you to notice, so we can deal with the disclosure here.

The Daily is also the real point of this post: The tablet newspaper is quietly getting into the custom publishing business.

Putting out other publications using the infrastructure you built to put out your own stuff is a mainstay of lots of traditional newspapers and magazines. But it wasn’t something that was in The Daily’s original business plan.

A year after launch, though, The Daily has put out several standalone apps, using the same Web app publishing system it built in-house in the fall of 2010. Most are put out using The Daily’s name and branding, like the gadget guide it published last fall.

Last month, though, The Daily helped the NFL put out a commemorative Super Bowl mag/app, and publisher Greg Clayman says more of this stuff should be coming down the line.

Right now, he says, the don’t-call-it-a-newspaper is using its existing staff to put out the new publications. Which must make News Corp. execs happy, since that means more revenue without more costs. But Clayman says he can envision building a standalone custom pub staff if this stuff takes off.

So It's the Kodak Strategy for Yahoo -- The Last Refuge of the Vaguely Patented

Kara Swisher — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:00:19 +0000

It was Yahoo legal head Mike Callahan who had the thankless task yesterday of calling Facebook’s general counsel Ted Ullyot to tell him the Silicon Valley Internet giant was intent on pursuing patent lawsuits against the social networking giant.

The charge was being led by Callahan, as well as Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and, especially, Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson.

Much of Yahoo’s senior leadership had no idea of the impending move until Callahan informed them it was about to happen at meeting Monday.

Facebook had known of the patent concerns of Yahoo for some months — the issue had also gotten some coverage in the media — but had not engaged formally on the topic, several sources said.

So, the suddenly aggressive call also apparently blindsided Facebook, even though it had been aware of the possibility of such an outcome.

Thus, it had little time to respond, since Yahoo was also simultaneously briefing the New York Times, according to numerous sources at both companies, and then released an astonishing statement to the newspaper:

“Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual property. We must insist that Facebook either enter into a licensing agreement or we will be compelled to move forward unilaterally to protect our rights.”

Apparently, Yahoo’s new motto: If you can’t beat ‘em — and it can’t — sue ‘em.

That would be Yahoo — the perpetual 98-pound weakling of the Internet these days — threatening powerful Facebook, which had cleanly bested it by attracting hordes of users with a plethora of popular products and services.

Yahoo has already lost its audience to Facebook, which was most recently followed by its frittering away a commanding lead in display advertising, too.

That would also be the Yahoo whose most recent success in improving its increasingly tenuous connections with customers was, in fact, by deeply integrating Facebook’s social hooks into its Web properties.

That would be the Yahoo which has failed time and again to innovate its own offerings so drastically over the years that it has now apparently decided that its first and best strategic move under Thompson’s rule is a shakedown.

Such a cynical move on rights Yahoo has long held seems more a play for the cheap seats of Wall Street, given that the company needs to look like it is doing everything it can to turn things around right now as it faces a proxy challenge.

First, it ended difficult talks with its Asian partners, Alibaba Group and SoftBank, over selling back lucrative stakes there.

Now, according to sources, Yahoo’s Thompson has actually been trying to make very nice with activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point — on-the-down-low chitchats that might have played a part of this latest unusual move.

At least Kodak had a good excuse. The once iconic camera company had recently been trying to take advantage of its trove of patents as a way to stave off declaring bankruptcy.

That didn’t work for Kodak, and it will also not work for Yahoo, whose only real option is to try to innovate its way out of the mess it has landed itself in.

You know, with good ideas.

Instead, the company’s leadership has opted for a road that could rain down trouble and paint Yahoo as a company bereft of talent to win any other way.

And while a range of intellectual property lawsuits have broken out all over the digital sector, involving Apple, Microsoft, Google and many others, such a strategy for Yahoo could be dangerous if it fails in its legal effort to take advantage of its 1,000-plus patents, including those related to search and advertising.

Others — including such tech luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, who co-owns the seminal Six Degrees patent for constructing a networking database and system — hold a number of critical social networking patents, too, so who knows where this thing will go.

Nonetheless, Yahoo has decided to emulate those companies with one of the few valuable assets it might have, waging its little war, right as Facebook is in the midst of its initial public offering period.

Yahoo has done this before, of course, having wrangled with Google until right before it went public in 2004 over search patents from its Overture acquisition. The pair settled 10 days before the Google IPO, with Yahoo getting several million more shares of that stock (which it then, of course, sold too soon).

That certainly could happen here, with Yahoo managing to grab a chunk of Facebook’s pre-IPO stock.

That would mean that Yahoo’s most valuable asset would be those shares, as well as its stake in Asian companies it bought a while back for a bargain and now makes up a bulk of the company’s valuation.

As to Yahoo’s core business — investors consider it almost entirely worthless.

And let’s not forget: Facebook could also sue right back, which it very well might do. Or, perhaps, cut off agreeable ties that have aided Yahoo in recent years.

In other words, in poking Facebook, Yahoo might now learn what it is really like to be de-friended.

New York Times Digital Subscription Numbers Grow 20 Percent

Peter Kafka — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:09:22 +0000

The New York Times ended 2011 with 390,000 digital subscribers, up about 20 percent from its third-quarter total. Some of the new subscriptions came from the publisher’s International Herald Tribune, which started digital sales last fall. The Times saw overall revenue drop 2.8 percent for the quarter, as ad revenue shrank 7.1 percent while circulation revenue increased.

A Year After iPad Launch, News Corp.'s Daily Comes to (Some) Google Tablets

Peter Kafka — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:01:25 +0000

A year after it launched on Apple’s iPad (and much later than AllThingsD had reported), News Corp.’s Daily tablet newspaper has made it to Google’s Android. It will come preloaded on some tablet models marketed via Verizon Wireless, starting with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 this month. Verizon was a launch sponsor for the Daily a year ago; News Corp. also owns this Web site.

New York Times Starting CEO Search Without a Search Firm

Peter Kafka — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:17:37 +0000

Did she jump or was she pushed? Either way, Janet Robinson seems to be leaving the CEO spot at the New York Times with great haste: The publisher announced that she’ll be leaving at the end of the month, which is just barely two week’s notice. (Update: She was fired, the Times says, without quite saying that.)

Another indicator that things moved very quickly: While the Times has said it will conduct an internal and external search for a successor, it has not hired a search firm for the job, according to spokesman Robert Christie.

That said, the Times has contracted with executive recruiter Egon Zehnder International to fill a board of directors seat vacated by former Drugstore.com CEO Dawn Lepore in June. People familiar with that search say the company has been looking for candidates with digital expertise — something they’ve also indicated will be important for Robinson’s successor.

Threatening Birds

Voices — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:33:16 +0000

The threat comes from the direction of everyone who competes with us for the readers’ attention. Even Angry Birds, for that matter, because it consumes people’s time.

— New York Times associate managing editor Jim Schachter, in an interview with Israel’s Globes, talking about who he sees as a threat

Singapore Press Holdings Sues Yahoo

Chun Han Wong — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:21:23 +0000

Singapore Press Holdings Ltd. is suing Yahoo Inc.’s Southeast Asian unit for alleged copyright violations, saying that the Internet firm reproduced news content from its newspapers without permission, the companies said Wednesday.

The Singapore-based media group, which publishes 18 newspapers here, seeks unspecified damages from Yahoo Southeast Asia Pte. Ltd. for the alleged copyright infringements, as well as a legal injunction to prevent further infringements, according to a writ filed last week to the city-state’s High Court.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Amazon Defends Warehouse Safety, Again

Peter Kafka — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:15:28 +0000

Amazon has posted a statement defending its worker safety record at a Breinigsville, Pa., warehouse, as well as its other warehouses, arguing that “it’s safer to work in the Amazon fulfillment network than in a department store.” It’s the company’s second public response to a month-old newspaper story about unsafe working conditions at the Breinigsville outpost.

Washington Post Chairman -- and Facebook Director -- Don Graham Talks About Social Reader (Video)

Kara Swisher — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:01:27 +0000

Last week at Facebook’s f8 developers confab, I ran right into my old boss, Washington Post Chairman Don Graham.

While I could go on about what a privilege it was to spend my formative journalism years at the legendary newspaper and how critical its steadfast owners were to exemplifying all that is quality about the media, all Don wanted to talk about was now and the future.

And that would be how to make sure his media company was going to successfully make the transition to social. Thus, he was at f8 not only because he is a longtime board member of Facebook, but because he was eagerly showing off the Washington Post’s nifty new app for the social networking giant called Social Reader.

With the motto, “News. Better With Friends,” it’s an elegantly done version of what other publishers are trying, allowing users to instantly share the stories they have read with friends and also seeing what those friends are reading.

Here’s Don talking about Social Reader and showing it off on his Apple iPad, as well as some choice words about the future of news in general.

Listen, because he’d know:

[ See post to watch video ]

Advertiser Reveals Rupert Murdoch's Daily iPad Numbers

Peter Kafka — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:36:13 +0000

The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s once-hyped iPad newspaper, has 120,000 readers a week, according to a media buyer who works with the publication. An executive at Zenith Optimedia told Bloomberg that the 120,000 figure includes both paid subscribers and free visitors. That circulation figure, Bloomberg notes, puts the paper at the same level as the Toledo, Ohio, daily Blade. News Corp. also owns this Web site.

Another 2008 Flashback: Ad Spending Already Contracting

Peter Kafka — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:30:38 +0000

Last week we reminded some of you that if the economy implodes, ad spending goes with it. Not news, obviously, but forewarned is forearmed and all that.

And now for our media bummer of the week: Even without a 2008-style meltdown, ad spending is already contracting.

Kantar Media says that U.S. ad spending grew 2.8 percent in Q2. That’s still growth, but it’s the smallest quarterly gain since the media business began crawling out of its post-Lehman hole.

In fact, it turns out that ad spending has been slowing since the second half of last year. Ad buys grew by 8.7 percent in Q3 2010, but have been shrinking since then.

Some sales guys I’ve talked with are still shrugging off the decline as the result of more difficult comps: It was a lot easier to post big year-over-year increases when the preceding year was the apocalypse.

And again, if you’re in digital ad sales and you don’t work for Yahoo or AOL, you’re probably not seeing any sign of a slowdown at all. And if you sell newspaper ads, you’re used to bad news because you haven’t really had good news in years.

But if things really do crater worldwide — and today doesn’t look like much fun at all — then all bets are off, no matter what you’re selling.