Community Newspapers - Hear Them Roar

In a surprising announcement today, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has pulled out of the bidding for Newsday. This comes after Murdoch statements that a deal was imminent. Now the front runner is Cablevision, owners of the New York Knicks, but never owners of a newspaper. Does anyone see a pattern emerging? Read the full artcle on Wired. Oh, and as an added treat, when you click on the link in the Newsday logo above you can watch some hilarious Seinfeld clips and bloopers from the Newsday site.

If you didn’t hear, the Capital Times is now an online-only product. That’s a pretty drastic step for a newspaper. One of the most prolific and knowledgable industry bloggers, Rafat Ali, in his PaidContent.org (Do sign up for his free e-newsletter) offers an article by Lauren Rich Fine who talks about it, and the stumbling blocks that newspapers must face and resolve to replace lost print ad revenue with online. Cutting production costs, he says, is vital.

Fine is advertising and publish industry analyst at Merrill Lynch, and considered one of the most influential people on Wall Street in evaluating newspapers,

This editorial on How Not to do Newspaper Video comes from The Digital Journalist . Its editorial staff credentials are highly impressive. It’s a site worth bookmarking - definitely.

Dirck Halstead is the Editor and Publisher of The Digital Journalist. At 17, he became LIFE Magazine’s youngest combat photographer covering the Guatemalan Civil War, then worked for UPI for over 15 years. For 29 years he was White House reporter for Time Magazine. In 1992 he played an instrumental part in the formation of Video News International (VNI), which started what is now the Platypus movement, allowing still photojournalists to cross the barrier between print and television. He is now a senior fellow in photojournalism at the Center For American History at the University of Texas. He has won the NPPA Picture of the Year award twice, the Robert Capa Gold Medal for his coverage of the fall of Saigon, and two Eisies. In 2002 he received the lifetime achievment award from the White House News Photographers Assn., and in 2004 he was honored with the Joseph A. Sprague Award for lifetime achievement and service to photojournalism, considered the highest honor in the industry. In October of 2007 he was awarded the Missouri Honor Medal by the University of Missouri for “Distinguished Service to Journalism”. Halstead is on the board of directors for the Air Force 1 Museum.

Join The Suburban Newspapers of America May Classified Alliance Call Casting a Wide Net . Tuesday, May 20th at 1:00 PM EDT   As John, Paul, George and Ringo used to tell us, we can all use ”a little help from our friends”. In fact, in some cases newspapers have made new friends out of old enemies to the benefit of all. On this call SNA is going to look at the prospect of collaborating with other newspapers or even other media for expanded reach, traffic and revenue. It can work well, as its speakers will attest.   Matt Hayes, 21-year owner and publisher of East Bay Newspapers will share his papers’ success story as part of RIJobs.com, a Shaker Recruitment Advertising and Communications job board product. RIJobs teams his group of 10 Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts weeklies with other community newspapers in the area. He also has an exciting new automotive and real estate collaboration story to tell as well.    Gary Tyler recently left 20 years of advertising management at the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky to become Advertising Director at the Springfield, IL State Journal-Register. With partner TV Station Fox 55 - WRSP-TV, the Journal-Register sells a Digital Media Communications Jobs TV product that includes Web video and a weekly television show. Teamed up as well with Yahoo! HotJobs, the product is called HotJobs TV. Gary will tell us about his success.   If you’re a community newspaper who’d like to expand your audience, lure new or upsell current advertisers, and increase your classified revenue, join SNA to hear these successful collaborators.  SNA members Click here to access the registration page.  If you’re a weekly newspaper or a daily paper whose print circulation is 100,000 or less, and you’re not an SNA member, read the Membership Brochure. here.

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This informative interview with Health Lloyd-Martin, CEO of SuccessWorks, provides a lot of content and search guidance for journalists as well as online marketers. But it’s interesting for many other reasons. I found the interview via an RSS feed of a free e-newsletter of one of my favorite sites - WebProNews.  Reporter Abby Prince joined Lloyd-Martin on a park bench during a break from the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference in Houston. With just one right click I was able to save this video and bring it into my blog.

The result, then, is a combination of blog, Web site, e-newsletter, and video. It cost me $20 for a one-year upgrade of space to accommodate MP4 and a number of other formats include .mov , which this is. Newspapers can easily do this too.

 

If you’re a member of Suburban Newspapers of America, you’ve probably already read the great news about LocalPoint Media’s soaring April sales.  The May issue of Suburban Publisher, the SNA newsletter, is full of testimonial by community newspaper executives such as Gareth Charter, Publisher of Holden Landmark Corporation; Cliff Richner, Publisher of Richner Communications; Renee Brown, ad sales manager, Breeze Newspapers in Cape Coral FL; Wayne Courtney, Senior VP for HomeNews Community Newspapers of Nevada, and Kurt Ploudre, National Accounts Director for Independent Newspapers, Arizona. They all talk about the additonal ad dollars from new advertisers that it’s generating for them.

You don’t have to be an SNA member to be a part of LocalPoint Media - though joining both is a terrific two-pronged way to get help in your digital evolution and to gain incremental revenue.  For more information on this advertising network click on the LocalPoint Media logo above or go to www.localpointmedia.com .

 

The badge that you see here means that I’m an editor on the Topix.com site. I edit the business/advertising page. Purely voluntary, no money changing hands. But it’s a great marketing tool - and you can do it too. All it takes is an application and once you’re accepted they’ll send you all the tools. There’e an editor’s blog to help you if you get stuck but it’s so easy even I only stumbled a few times. One page for which Topix is soliciting editors is the Editor News page. 

What’s the point, you ask? Well the point is you control what goes on that page. Not entirely, but if you keep active what you submit is front and center - and your profile is on the page as well. So what you choose should be highly informative but it should also periodically take people where you want them to go - to your newspaper’s site.

Topix also has a free newspaper collaboration product you may want to check out as well.

 

Not only is this an idea that newspapers could easily accomplish to market their sites via a grass roots campaign; it’s also being done by an entrepreneur whose local news site is a content-sharing collaboration with nearby community newspapers.

Pegasus.Com started in the Dallas Fort Worth area as a hybrid - a news aggregator  that also has its own news staff and reporting, along with user-generated content. Founder Mike Orren plans to eventually move into other geographic areas throughout the country, partnering with local papers and other sites with a community focus.

Pegasus News is hosting a face to face gathering at a local retail store and winery in Dallas April 28.  The topic is learning how  to market your business online, with topics such as SEO and SEM, e-mails, local and national services that can help you promote with little or  no money, and so forth. Free wine and cheese is offered. But what makes this even more interesting is the way it uses its hyper localness  by announcing the meeting followed by information about nearby places to drink or eat that night, and even other local events.

While not written specifically for newspapers, this iMedia Connection article by Chris Lovejoy about using e-mails to drive traffic is excellent. Click on the iMedia logo to read the article about direct navigational links and e-mails.

Christopher Lovejoy has more than 13 years experience in the global hospitality marketing & electronic communications industry. Lovejoy has worked as the global marketing & electronic communications manager at Preferred Hotel Group as well as other account management and senior sales positions within the advertising and hospitality industry. In 2006, he joined Premiere Global Services as a strategic services account executive and is currently working with Premiere Global Services’ largest clients on eMarketing strategy and solutions.

 See the fantastic Suburban Newspapers of America Interactive Media Symposium agenda HERE

 If you’re a community newspaper (or any newspaper, for that matter - major metros welcome,) media industry vendor, advertising agency, communications educator or media buyer who needs to know about or wants to talk about the online evolution of newspapers, you’ll want to be in Las Vegas May 13. The line up for this conference includes: (more…)

If you’re a newspaper executive who cares about local - and that should be all newspaper execs - and one who wants to know what the competition and potential collaborators are doing, you should be at this Kelsey Conference April 30-May 2 in Seattle. Here you’ll also see many of the industry vendors that are powering and creating the latest multimedia products and ideas for local.

Avinash Kaushik is author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day (A book that benefits The Smile Train and Doctors Without Borders, 100% of the proceeds are donated to them; the Analytics Evangelist for Google (Data driven decision making uncomplexified) ; co-Founder and Chief Education Officer for Market Motive (Online marketing education, on demand, high quality, fresh!) ; and on the board of advisors for Coradiant (Web operations & end user experience management awesomeness) ; Commerce360 (Analytics & search marketing automation redefined) ; iPerceptions (Qualitative web insights & measurement turbocharged) ; University of California Irvine (Web Intelligence Certificate program.) He’s on the board of directors for Web Analytics Association , with responsibility for standards.

In his most recent post on his blog, Occam’s Razar, he says: “Web Analytics is like Angelina Jolie: It’s sexy, it kicks butt, and is a goodwill ambassador!! :”  The entire article, “:How to Excite People about Web Analytics: Five tips” (translation, how to excite your publisher), is here:

The economic stimulus package that the U.S. Congress passed this year provides  $50 billion in tax incentives to encourage American businesses to reinvest. ”These provisions would include a 50 percent write-off of capital equipment purchased this year and a $200,000 deduction for equipment purchased by small businesses,” points out Editor & Publisher magazine.

 

Now E&P is offering newspaper executives a free Neilsen Web Seminar April 24th to learn how to take advantage of this tax incentive.  Here’s the E&P page with the info and registration link:

I can’t take credit for finding this. Credit must go to Andy Beal, and his Marketing Pilgrim blog. Check it out - a downloadable, printable, Twitter Tweet Sheet. I have to admit I have yet to use Twitter, although my friend Shannon Kinney, sales & development manager for Classified Intelligence, swears by it. If she’s looking for info or resources she just texts everybody and gets multiple answers right away.

Any community newspaper executives or other business folk out there using Twitter for business?

 

This comes from the Marketing Pilgrim blog.

Google’s Web Analytics Software Out of Beta

Wednesday, April 16th, 2008;
– Janet Meiners |

Have you all read the article by Jim Rosenberg of Editor & Publisher about the lack of attendance at Newspaper Associatioin of America’s (NAA’s) Capital Conference / NEXPO? If not , go here:

I was there, and yes, there were times when I felt like I was walking the floors nearly alone - especially in the morning and especially on the trade show floor. Two folks mentioned they had heard 450 attendees total - I don’t have a way to confirm accuracy on that number and according to Rosenberg NAA won’t say until it’s over.

Certainly I understand why newspaper executives stayed away - money, downsizing, busy trying to do everything back at the office that they can to save their core and at the same time evolve. But I don’t see it as a wise decision. At first glance cutting “superfluous” items out of your newspaper budget might make obvious the decision to not attend NEXPO/Capital Conference. But what you’ve done when you do that is cut out the opportunity to learn from those who’ve succeeded with digital, with social, with motivating reps to sell multimedia, with turning print journalists into MoJos, etc. etc. etc. You’ve also cut out the opportunity to talk with vendors whose products might help you pare down costs, work more efficiently and bring in incremental revenue. And you’ve cut out the opportunity to network with your peers in other markets who just might help you - and you them.

I have a couple of suggestions, and I welcome feedback. (more…)

Okay, I know, I know. To some of you it’s not so exciting. But I’ve never been to D.C. Well, actually I was here once - driving through D.C. in 5:30pm traffic one Friday in 2005 after attending the first J-Lab Citizen Media Summit at the U. of Maryland in College Park. Everybody warned me to wait til morning but I didn’t listen and spent 2.5 hours seeing nothing of D.C. but hundreds of tail lights on the streets and highway in front of me. So this was really really exciting.

It’s not just about pictures of the White House and the U.S. Treasury, though. I just attended a NEXPO digital media session with Kate Marymont who just left Fort Meyers to join Gannett and Gina Wilcox at the Palm Beach Post and newly-trained News Journal mojo Rachel Kipp (www.delawareonline.com) talking about robust and interactive online newspaper ventures, as well as mobile delivery of news and advertising.

Now here I am, a total non-techie to the point of inept, non-geek, posting my blog. (more…)

I’m really excited. I leave tomorrow morning for DC. I’ve never been to DC and I’ve never been to NEXPO, the newspaper trade show of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) . And all three U.S. presidential candidates will be there, each with their own luncheon.
Is anyone else going? Anyone going to a candidate’s luncheon? What’s it like - NEXPO I mean?

I hope you’re using LinkedIn. If you want to network with other business people - to commisserate, collaborate, sell, network, buy, contract out, find a contractor, get or give advice or just about anything else you do business to business, LinkedIn is the place to be. I don’t know how I did without it. I’ve met people I never would have met any other way - many of them through the “friend of a friend” approach. I’ve come back from conferences and found most of the people I met and exchanged business cards with, on LinkedIn. Sure, I already had their business card but I didn’t have their bio and I didn’t know who else they knew. And I couldn’t talk to all or many of them at the same time without considerable more effort than it takes to send something in LinkedIn.

There is a free version but head straight to the $19.95 per month business version. You’ll be able to do a lot more.

I’d love to hear what others think about their use of LinkedIn - and maybe you have other social networks to recommend  - or warn us away from. Maybe you have one of your own. Or your company empowers them, builds them or helps market them.

Let’s talk about social. 

The following was posted on MediaPost’s MediaDailyNews this morning. (I hope you’ve all signed up for the numerous helpful MediaPost newsletters.) This is yet another good example of how social networking can pay off big if you have the patience to build your traffic before you set out to monetize. (more…)

If you’re looking for online help or an ongoing resource on the Web, check out Technorati. Here you can find relevant blogs as well as social networks. You can also list your own blog and profile. Check out mine via the link above.

 As a great example of the changes in the world of advertising, I was out on my LinkedIn looking for folks I should invite to my network and I found Josh Guttman at Sphere, and went to his blog, WaxingPhilosophic, where I found the video made by Jack Nicholson and posted on YouTube. It’s a promotional video in support of Hillary Clinton’s run for president. But newspapers can and should do this sort of thing as well.

Even if you don’t support Hillary Clinton - and that’s not what this is about - you’ll enjoy the creativity. Oh, and I’d recommend you sign up for Guttman’s blog.  Click here to play the video.

One of the blogs that you definitely MUST subscribe to, if you want to know the online marketing and advertising world, is Robin Good’s www.masternewmedia.org. I just came across his tutorial on Web Analytics.

For those of you who are new to analytics, the point and the process is to understand who and how many consumers are coming to your Web site, and to make use of the information they provide you when they visit. If, for example, you find that most of your site visitors are 25-45 year olds who love to follow their favorite bands, you may have found an idea for a musical niche product. You may also want to focus on the creation of a page, contest, blog, editorial content and so forth that goes after the demographics that are NOT coming to your site.

With Robin Good’s help you can gather and improve on your interpretation of the info you’re getting.

I just returned from MediaPost’s OMMA Hollywood, as a representative of Suburban Newspapers of America. As it turned out, I ended up being a representative of newspapers in general, as I don’t think others were there. It was held at the Renaissance Hotel, which shared the Grand Ballroom with the Kodak Theater, home of the Academy Awards on Hollywood Blvd. That’s exciting for about one day, as Hollywood Blvd has a few blocks of celebrity stars, Groman’s Chinese Theatre, and then becomes fairly seedy almost immediately.

The topics were excellent, however it was hours before I heard anyone said the word “newspapers.” (more…)

I was wondering how many of you take any time to join the various social networking sites, and if it brings you any business connections that help your newspaper?

I’m very fond of LinkedIN and have met or re-acquainted myself with several people through my profile or by posting questions, answering questions or sending invitations to join my network. I often have people see my profile and ask me about my telework book, join my telework blog, wwww.workathomejob.ning.com , or inquire about SNA. We’ve even recruited for new employees there. I pay $19.95 for the business level membership and it’s well worth it. I try not to violate its rules about not contacting anyone I don’t know or haven’t been “properly” introduced to , though sometimes I get warned just because people I thought would remember me did not.

 I just joined the MediaPost Community of advertising and media professionals and it’s group specific to those heading to the OMMA Hollywood Conference. That’s going to give me a chance to get to know a few people before I even get there.  

I find that even responding to a news or blog article with a comment gets noticed. I’ve had people email me about what I said.  They look at my profile and something intrigues them and they inquire about one of my business ventures.

How about everyone else? What social sites work for you? Which ones are a big annoyance?  (I’ve had those too. Like the woman who sent me 25 messages in one day, including “hugs” and “gifts.” That was the end of Facebook for me.