February 18th, 2010
A couple of “less bad is good” stories today:
Monthly magazines’ latest quarterly decline in ad pages, at 5.7 percent, is “not the same as a gain but a much smaller loss than the double-digit plunges that have been seen since the third quarter of 2008,” Advertising Age says. Ad pages fell in 94 monthlies this quarter and grew in 59, according to the Media Industry Newsletter.
Total revenue for Lee Enterprises fell just 9.2 percent in January compared with a year ago — the first single-digit percentage decline since 2008, and the fifth consecutive month in which the year-over-year revenue comparison moderated, according to Editor & Publisher.
Tags: Lee Enterprises, revenue
Posted in Advertising, Magazines, Newspapers | No Comments »
February 15th, 2010
A look at fourth-quarter 2009 financial results from five of the 10 publicly owned U.S. newspaper companies that have reported so far shows that “it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that better days are ahead,” says a Nieman Journalism Lab report.
The report says that in Q4 2009 the industry “saw its 14th consecutive advertising revenue decline; the last nine of those quarters were double-digit declines.” And nothing indicates that January, typically a bad month for revenue, is looking any better.
The report examines the five publishers individually: Gannett, New York Times Co., Lee Enterprises, Media General and McClatchy Co.
At McClatchy, it finds strong online revenue growth comparatively, but scoffs at CEO Gary Pruitt’s claim that expectations of revenue declines in the low- to mid-teens percentage range in January indicate a recovery. “In other words, McClatchy expects the Q4 decline of 20.5 percent to be followed in Q1 2010 by a decline of somewhat less than 15 percent, and considers that to be an ‘improving advertising trend.’”
In another problem area, “Besides nearly $2 billion in long-term debt, McClatchy also disclosed that at year-end, its pension plans were underfunded by $494 million in the ‘qualified’ plan (their standard defined benefit plan, which is frozen), and another $100 million in the non-qualified supplemental executive-level plan. This accumulation of future obligations makes McClatchy one of the most-leveraged publishers out there.”
Tags: Gannett, Lee Enterprises, McClatchy, Media General, New York Times Co., Nieman Journalism Lab, profits, projections, revenue
Posted in Newspapers | No Comments »
February 11th, 2010
McClatchy Company is looking to the leadership that steered the newspaper publisher nearly into bankruptcy to figure out the way forward as part of a task force to “strengthen newsrooms, modernize how we work, make the most of resources and consider how we can work together more effectively,” a memo distributed Wednesday says.
The task force of 10 editors and publishers is to review newsroom strategies over the next several months, beginning with “deep interviews with all McClatchy editors over the next two weeks.” The team’s work is to be completed in time for 2011 planning.
The task force will be chaired by Anders Gyllenhaal, executive editor of The Miami Herald (formerly of The News & Observer in Raleigh); and include Rick Thames, executive editor of The Charlotte Observer; Melanie Sill, executive editor of The Sacramento Bee (also a former N&O executive editor); Stan Tiner, executive editor of the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Mississippi; Pat Dougherty, executive editor of the Anchorage Daily News; Mark Zieman, publisher of The Kansas City Star; Mi-Ai Parrish, publisher of The Idaho Statesman; Eric Johnston, publisher of The Modesto Bee; Brian Kirlik, vice president for affiliate services at McClatchy Interactive (based in Raleigh); and Washington bureau chief John Walcott.
McClatchyNext is a blog that calls itself “a shared discussion for McClatchy journalists and others to talk about the way ahead for journalism, news companies and people who care about them” started by former VP for News Howard Weaver.
Here’s a piece of a discussion about top-down vs. bottom-up management styles from McClatchyNext:
“McClatchy is looking for a new way to do business and all the answers are already here, in house, waiting to be utilized to their fullest. By tweaking management styles to a bottom-up approach and looking to the people in the field, doing the work, we will find the answers we need to be an even better company and be leaders in the newspaper industry of tomorrow.”
“People in the field, doing the work” — like publishers and editors.
Tags: McClatchyNext
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February 10th, 2010
McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt said Tuesday that deriving online revenue from advertising is working just fine and there’s no reason to move toward paywalls, according to Editor & Publisher’s account of the speech.
Pruitt gave the keynote address at the Borrell Associates Local Online Advertising Conference in New York City.
Pruitt is also OK with aggregators like Google and Yahoo, because they send plenty of traffic — 20 percent, he said — to McClatchy newspapers’ sites.
“In fact, McClatchy credits its success in building online revenue to its alignments with several different Internet players including Yahoo, Cars.com and CareerBuilder,” E&P says. “Pruitt told the Borrell conference that online revenue in 2009 accounted for 16 percent of total revenue — up from 11 percent in 2008.”
“We are very comfortable with free content supported by advertising,” Pruitt said. “We don’t view it as fatally flawed. That said, if we could make ad revenue with paid products we would.”
Tags: Borrell Associates, Gary Pruitt, Google, revenue, Yahoo
Posted in Advertising, McClatchy, Newspapers, Online | No Comments »
February 10th, 2010
A move by Nielsen, the television ratings giant, could result in online presentations of TV programs carrying just as many commercials as broadcast does, according to Advertising Age.
Nielsen’s new methodology to compile data that take into account viewing of commercials that run in a particular show, online or off, could be in place by September so it can be used for ad sales in February 2011. “If this system were adopted en masse — and it’s not clear that it would be — online viewing might be crammed just as full of commercials as the more traditional TV-watching experience,” Ad Age says.
And, while online sites like Hulu and Disney’s ABC.com typically have few ads, “many TV executives say these methods don’t bring much, if any, profit — and therefore cannot continue.”
Tags: Disney, Hulu, Neilsen, online TV
Posted in Advertising, Online, Television, Video | No Comments »
February 9th, 2010
One count from the Super Bowl says there was an all-time record “nearly 39-and-a-half minutes” of ads during the game, about 90 seconds more than what was shown in 2009, says Media Daily News.
The half-hour-plus included 66 ads run by 41 different marketers (excluding NFL “house” ads), according to Kantar Media. On top of that was about eight-and-a-half minutes of CBS promos — also about 90 seconds more than 2009.
The game itself was 30 minutes shorter than in 2009, the report says.
In addition to the record number of commercials, the viewership numbering 106.5 million beat the 27-year-old record held by the final episode of “M*A*S*H,” and there were many records set during the sporting competition itself, as anyone who watched the CBS broadcast can surely tell you.
Also, “Multiple analyses were issued Monday about which ads were the most popular. … [V]otes cast via Twitter and Facebook … found that a Snickers spot with Betty White topped the charts, while one for Google about finding love in Paris was second,” Media Daily News says.
Tags: M*A*S*H, NFL, Super Bowl
Posted in Advertising, Television | No Comments »
February 8th, 2010
Newspapers can expect to see less than 8 percent of the $4.2 billion to be spent on political advertising in 2010, a new report from Borrell Associates says. That share comes out to $329 million.
Most will go to broadcast TV with 61 percent, or $2.6 billion, Editor & Publisher’s reading of the report says, followed by cable TV at a very distant second with a 9.1 percent share. Only 1 percent, or $45 million, of political dollars is expected to be spent on Internet ads — 73 percent more than in 2008.
“Last year was relatively quiet on the political front, yet spending outpaced 2000 levels,” E&P says. “The recent Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations to now spend on politics caused Borrell analysts to bump up its forecast 10 percent.”
The Fitz & Jen blog charts the numbers for each medium.
Tags: Borrell Associates, political ads
Posted in Advertising, Newspapers, Online, Television | No Comments »
February 5th, 2010
Running a commercial before a video on your newspaper Web site is a good way to lose about 25 percent of your audience, a new study says.
TubeMogul, an online video research and analytics outfit, according to Media Daily News, “found that one-quarter of visitors who click on an online video link on a newspaper Web site will close or navigate away from the video window without watching the video if a pre-roll ad begins playing.”
The number is the same at magazines’ sites, but fewer visitors to broadcast media Web sites — about 11 percent — peel away, apparently because commercials are expected.
The general “quit rate” for online video links preceded by video advertising averaged around 17 percent.
TubeMogul observed online interactions with 1.8 million video streams over a two-day period, Media Daily says.
Tags: TubeMogul, Video
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February 3rd, 2010
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Communications Subcommittee, says there needs to be a constitutional amendment indicating that corporations don’t have the same free speech rights as individuals, reports Broadcasting & Cable magazine.
Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), seconded the motion and said he planned to introduce legislation calling for a complete overhaul of the campaign finance system.
In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court threw out the prohibition on corporate use of treasury funds for political speech — specifically for broadcast and cable spots in federal elections — taking a big bite out of campaign finance reform law, B&C writes. “No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations,” said the court in an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined in part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
Adoption of a Constitutional amendment is a long process and, in fact, Kerry said it would take some time even to craft the amendment.
Once a bill is written, to actually become part of the Constitution it must pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority in each. Then it goes to the states, where it must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. Or, according to U.S. Constitution Online, two-thirds of the states could call for a Constitutional Convention, which would return any amendments it proposed to the states for ratification by three-fourths of the states.
Meanwhile, Kerry and others suggested the committee should pass various bills that have been introduced to tighten up disclosure and disclaimer rules and give shareholders more say in corporate campaign speech.
Tags: free speech, SCOTUS, Supreme Court
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February 3rd, 2010
The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer could be among the first newspapers to adopt a pay wall system called Press+ developed by entrepreneurs Steven Brill, L. Gordon Crovitz and their partners, according to The New York Times.
The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era of Lancaster, Pa., is “one of the first handful of news outlets to acknowledge in interviews that it intends, in the next few months, to start using the software system,” the NYT report says. The article mentions the Fayetteville paper and GlobalPost, a news site based in Boston, as “others interested.”
Initially the Pennsylvania paper “will charge only readers outside its immediate area and only for reading obituaries, with a little green Press+ logo next to each headline covered by the system,” the NYT says. “It will allow a reader to see a certain number of obituaries free before a box pops onto the screen demanding a flat fee to keep reading, but the paper has not yet decided what that number will be, or how much it will charge.”
“The first publishers planning to launch on the platform are currently integrating our software, in anticipation of offering paid access later this winter when our consumer-facing logo, Press+, will be presented to the public,” Brill and Crovitz say in a memo at paidcontent.org.
“The timing for these initiatives could not be better,” Brill and Crovitz continue. “Our industry is adapting, and it’s now clear that many sites, large and small, will be soon be charging their most engaged online readers for access. Studies show that readers will pay for distinctive brands and content. … In short, the question is no longer “if,” but “when” and “how.””
The Times points out that, “there are plenty of skeptics who say that charging (for online content) could be a short-lived experiment.”
Tags: Brill, Crovitz, Fayetteville Observer, paidcontent.org, Press+
Posted in Newspapers, Online | 1 Comment »