A new memo from Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst Newspapers, outlines some significant changes in store for the chain. For one, it's going to start charging for some Web content --- although it seems local management will determine where to draw the line between free and premium material.
There is a belief that this firewall will effectively drive up ad rates. Lower traffic will mean fewer available spots for advertising, which in turn will create some scarcity, which should yield more demand and better fees.
Hearst plans to increase its Web staffing, offer self-serve advertising for small businesses, provide access to third-party printing and ad platforms, and develop electronic readers for its content.
Swartz's memo to staff comes in the middle of the chain's 100-day initiative to rework its operations. Earlier this week, Cablevision announced that its subsidiary Newsday would be discontinuing its free service online and shifting its content into a local news site under its cable operation for subscribers.
For just a moment, let's take the attention away from the plight of newspapers and have a look at the past, present and future challenges of the television networks. The demise today of the Rocky Mountain News set off a wave of essays, but the most interesting of the lot comes from The Daily Beast's Larry Kramer, a venture capital executive and former head of CBS Marketwatch. UPDATED: There was a bad link inside the story. Andrew Nachison has supplied a fresh link. Cablevision, the parent company of the newspaper/site Newsday, announced Thursday that later this year the site will stop being freely available. In its place will be a locally focused news site attached to its cable service, available to subscribers, presumably for a fee either explicitly or implicitly. There are some disconcerting figures from the IDC market research firm about online advertising. It's predicting a year-over-year decline in the first quarter of 2009, the first such decline since the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. A good post of common sense from CoPress on the cultural change necessary inside the newspaper newsroom --- among other things, the change in identity to one of a platform for content, an entry point for a facilitated (not created) community. Steve Yelvington could have written more, so much more, in his latest post on the silly ideas abounding for the newspaper industry: shut the presses, micropayments, the faith in Google as the rescue dog in the avalanche. Plenty of ideas abound on rescuing ailing newspapers. Lately we've seen debate on the non-profit model and the micropayment model. Now comes the community-owned model. Small Initiatives has a very simple look at how ESPN.com smartly nails search engine results by making its headlines fuller-fledged --- as in full names, not surnames, and full places, not their nicknames. |