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Publishers see signs the iPad can restore ad money

By Andrew Vanacore for Associated Press

NEW YORK – Good news for the news business: Companies are paying newspapers and magazines up to five times as much to place ads in their iPad applications as what similar advertising costs on regular websites.

This doesn’t mean Apple’s tablet computer will live up to its hype as a potential lifeline for the media industry. Online ads still generate a small fraction of news companies’ advertising revenue, and it’s an open question whether print ads will return Read More

Yahoo Buys Associated Content for $100 Million

Published 05/19/2010 Content & Design , Mergers & Acquisitions , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

Deal Will Shore Up Portal’s Content Offerings, Help Produce Low-Cost Media

By Edmund Lee for Advertising Age

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Yahoo has acquired startup Associated Content for slightly more than $100 million in a deal that gives the portal new technology and a new strategy for producing low-cost media.

Associated Content receives more than 16 million unique users per month, according to comScore.

The deal, which will be announced later today, is part of an effort to shore up Yahoo’s content offerings and underscores the increased use of low-cost, crowd-sourced content, a strategy that AOL is pursuing through its SEED content factory, as well as by Demand Media, which reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO this summer. Read More

Newspapers That Now Charge For Online Access

Published 04/10/2010 Content & Design , Organizational Transformation , Paid Content , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

By Joseph Tartikoff for PaidContent.Org

In the mid-90s, at least 45 U.S. newspapers charged for online access, though almost all of them later hopped over the fence to the free side. Now, the paywall brigade is rising again—albeit slowly. On the eve of this year’s American Society of News Editors conference, where the question of charging for digital content will be center stage, we’ve assembled a list of the local and metro papers in the U.S. that have paywalls. We found more than 20 that charge online readers up to $35 a month, in an attempt either to read more

Demand Media to provide travel articles and videos for USA Today website

Published 04/08/2010 Content & Design , Organizational Transformation , Strategic Partnerships , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

By Alex Pham for Los Angeles Times.com

If you can’t beat ‘em, you can always join ‘em.

Demand Media Inc., often pilloried by the media pundits as a factory for online content, has struck a deal to provide travel articles and videos for one of the nation’s biggest media brands, Gannett Inc.’s USA Today.

The arrangement calls for Demand Media to create and maintain a new travel section for USA Today’s website called Travel Tips. The section, which debuted Wednesday, is populated by thousands of how-to articles created by Demand’s editors and freelancers.

The deal is the first of many that the privately held Santa Monica start-up hopes to ink with traditional media publishers, some of which have been among read more

Media General to consolidate copy editing, page design at its three metro papers

Published 04/07/2010 Content & Design , Organizational Transformation Leave a Comment

Media General, Inc. said today it will consolidate copy editing and page design for its three metro newspapers, The Tampa Tribune, Richmond Times-Dispatch and Winston-Salem Journal. The consolidated metro editing and design operation will have two groups, one in Tampa, Fla. , and one in Richmond, Va. The operation will be led by a single managing editor located at the Richmond facility. Each of the two groups will have primary responsibility for particular sections and pages for all three metro read more

How print publishers can win with iPad

Published 04/06/2010 Content & Design , Research & Development Leave a Comment

By Alan Mutter for Reflections of a Newsosaur

Magazine and newspaper publishers can win with the iPad, because it is the first digital platform that turns print-style substance into a strength, instead of the weakness that it has been since the inception of the web. As everyone knows excruciatingly well, print publishers blew Digital 1.0, because they thought they could get away with simply shoveling the usual words, pictures and ads onto the web or, later, scrunching them read more

Wolff to Newspapers: The Web is ‘Not Something You’re Ever Going to Understand’

Published 04/06/2010 Content & Design , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

By Mallary Jean Tenore for Poynter.Org

If Michael Wolff had his way, he would have told newspapers a long time ago never to go online. Newspapers, he believes, are stuck in an old-fashioned mentality that prevents them from giving online news consumers what they want. read more

Catching The iPad Wave: Seven Thoughts

Published 04/05/2010 Content & Design , Mobile Leave a Comment

By Frederic Filloux for MondayNote.com

1. Design

The iPad is all about design, and interface expectations. From a graphic design standpoint, with the iPad, the quantum leap is its ability to render layouts, typefaces, page structure. No more web HTML lowest common denominator, here. What comes read more

iPad video roundup: Who’s got game?

Published 03/22/2010 Content & Design , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

In the ten years that I’ve been working in the digital side of traditional media, I have never seen as much acceptance for a new technology as I have witnessed in the ereader and tablet space.

Normally, a disruptive technology emerges, and media professionals greet it with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Magazine and newspaper professionals usually resist adapting to new technologies until their impact is undeniable.

By Prescott Shibless for emediavitals.com read more

Managing the magazine component of newspapers

Published 03/21/2010 Content & Design , Strategy & Leadership Leave a Comment

Magazine writing is still an appealing attribute for a daily paper. Just take a quick poll among your friends: the most notable articles they’ll recall from a newspaper will be magazine-like treatments. From a pure editorial perspective, the “magazinification” of dailies make more sense than ever. Breaking news and even developing stories have been captured by the web and by the mobile internet. In itself, this shift would justify a massive resource reallocation in favor of digital medias.

Having said that, does it make an economic sense to maintain the large editorial operation needed to produce every single day a product closer to a weekly or even a monthly magazine? To what extent do we need to reconsider the journalistic morphing that appeared a smart move ten or fifteen years ago?

By Frederic Filloux for MondayNote.com read more

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