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One reason why metropolitan newspapers have been reporting rotten classified advertising numbers over the past year could be because more and more people are accessing such advertising via the free Craigslist.
According to new figures from Hitwise, Craigslist traffic in the US increased by fully 93% over the past year.
Hitwise credits the growth to more and more people actually searching for Craigslist as a search word. Just last week the word was the fourth most frequently requested search word beaten only by searches for “myspace”, “ebay”, and “myspace.com”, according to Hitwise.
Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands off the northwestern French coast that is very English, has just approved a plan to close its official gazette that it pays to have published in the local newspaper and instead it plans to publish such news itself, starting its own publication. That means the local newspaper, the Guernsey Press, will lose some £67,000 (€88,000, $134,000) in revenue and it says it may means job cuts.
With local governments globally looking for ways to save money, many are taking a look at what they are paying for official advertising in their local papers and asking if they can do it for less themselves, perhaps just digitally?
In Long Beach, California, the local council is angry at the restructuring of the Press-Telegram with the newspaper basically merged into the Daily Breeze in nearby Torrance. The Long Beach city council says it feels it has lost its local paper and is now looking at withholding city paid ads from the newspaper. That caused Press Telegram executive editor Rich Archbold to ask the council not to do that,-- if the newspaper loses the council’s advertising then that will just mean less money to spend on local coverage.
It’s an issue that is moving onto the front burner for many government entities, as if publishers didn’t already have enough on their plate.
US Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps called on FCC Chairman Kevin Martin to look into how a politically charged segment on a network news program wasn’t aired by a local network affiliate.
Local Hunstville, Alabama television station WHNT ‘went dark’ during the initial airing of the CBS News ’60 Minutes’ investigative report on allegations that former Alabama governor Don Siegelman may have been ‘selectively prosecuted’ by the Bush administration. The station later broadcast the segment in its entirety.
At first a station spokesperson blamed the network then they blamed a transmitter failure.
"Was this an attempt to suppress information on the public airwaves, or was it really just a technical problem?" asked Copps.
Local wags pointed fingers at the stations’ owner Oak Hill Partners, particularly shareholder Robert Bass because he’s from Texas. The less than astute must have concluded that Bob Bass must be a supporter of George W. Bush. Wrong! Bob Bass is a registered Democrat.
Anyway, said an Oak Hill Capital spokesperson, Bob Bass had never been to the station and has no active role in its management. That chore is contracted out to Local TV LLC.
American bloggers quickly dug up political donations to Republican candidates and the Republican Party from Local TV LLC CEO Bobby Lawrence. What they missed was former Local TV CEO Randy Michaels, now Executive VP at the Tribume Company, who is credited with creating right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. Local TV LLC is managing the Tribune Company's television stations.
If this had happened in Bulgaria Reporters Without Borders and the OSCE would be issuing statements. FCC Chairman Martin (a Republican) has, according to Reuters, sent a letter to the station asking for an explanation.(JMH)
Our feature today concentrated on the appallingly low prices of publicly traded newspaper companies on the New York Stock Exchange, but have you taken a look at what’s been happening to high-flyer Google on the Nasdaq?
Its share closed Tuesday at $447.70, down some 40% from its high of $724.80 that it hit on December 10 – just two months ago.
And the advice from some Wall Street analysts is that they think the shares will continue down for a while because selling by Google insiders is picking up – never a good sign – and that the economic downturn is going to hit hard at Google’s advertising model.
It was only back on October 31, 2007, that Google shares broke through the $700 barrier and the question then being asked by the finance people was how many short months it would take before they broke through $800. Goes to show how quickly sentiment can change.
Reed Employment, a major UK recruitment company, says its recent research shows that fully 89% of recent university graduates only search for jobs online. Only 3% said they regularly check newspaper job sections.
Stephen Harrison, operations manager at Reed Graduates, said graduates were more receptive to receiving information online than in print. “To attract top graduates, businesses will need to rethink the ways in which they recruit ensuring that online recruitment and perhaps even social networking are included.”
Just what newspaper publishers needed to hear!
You have to figure that those who buy the Wall Street Journal don’t do it to read about their favorite sports team, but starting Friday they’re going to have a sports page anyway. The page will look ahead to major weekend sporting events and the plans are that eventually the WSJ will have a daily sports page.
Now, ask Journal readers whether they would buy the newspaper just for the sports and the answer will invariably be no, but in actual fact the sports news page isn’t going to hurt any.
Reuters discovered years ago that the sports news it provided to its financial news clients were avidly read. Ask the traders – or more importantly, their bosses – whether sports was why banks bought the Reuters service and of course the answer came back no, but Reuters learned from its own usage stats that the sports stories and results were very widely read.
It’s a nice-to-have and while it’s doubtful it will be the cause of adding new WSJ subscribers, it will help solidify keeping those now on board.
It has come down to this -- reporters at the San Jose Mercury News in California have been told that on Friday don’t plan on leaving home for work until 10 a.m. If you haven’t received a phone call before 10 a.m. saying, “You’re fired” then your job is safe and come on in.
Can you imagine what life will be like in those households that morning -- the pressure, the tension, especially when the phone rings and it’s the wrong number!
Is that really the way a business should treating its employees and their families? Has the newspaper business climate really come to this? Apparently so.
The much anticipated launch of BBC Arabic will come next week. Part of BBC World Service it commences next Tuesday (March 11) on cable and satellite with radio, television and online content. (Read BBC WS release here)
It’s BBC WS’s first major venture into the Middle East since a joint venture with the Saudi government went sour more than a decade ago.
Meanwhile, VOA has introduced a daily morning program in Amharic, adding to the existing Horn of Africa Service. Amharic is the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic and the official language in Ethiopia. It is also spoken in Israel and Eritrea. (Read VOA release here) (JMH)
Citadel Broadcasting is the fourth largest American radio company. Not long ago it bought the ABC chain of stations from Walt Disney bringing its total to over 200. Friday Citadel CEO Farid Suleman reported really bad 4th quarter results.
Granted, the American advertising scene is wicked. Everybody’s hurt, even Google. But Farid (I can call him Farid because we worked together at Infinity under MEL!) stood tall. “We’ve got to walk the walk,” he said… whatever that means.
Immediately Citadel stations started firing more journalists and DJs. Long time New York show host John Gambling was fired. The local Chicago news staff was gutted. Gambling’s firing is particularly painful for New York City radio fans since he, his father and grandfather entertained New York City audiences for a span of more than 80 years. In Chicago news director Jennifer Keiper and award winning reporter Bill Cameron were “walked.”
Citadel stock has cratered from $10 a share to $1.2 in four years. Farid’s take-home last year was $17 million. (JMH)
The announcement that Getty Images has sold itself for $34 a share to the Hellman & Friedman private equity group in a deal worth $2.4 billion (£1.2 billion) raises the question of what happens with Getty’s relationship with Agence France Presse (AFP) once the deal is done? Is a private equity firm really interested in the news pictures business or just in Getty’s fabulous picture libraries?
First word from the private equity group indicates it wants to focus on the archive business, growing its Internet and digital channels.
Getty partners AFP in the distribution and production of photos in Britain, France and the United States. Getty Images has exclusive rights to market AFP images in North America and the United Kingdom, and AFP markets Getty Images' photography covering North America to its daily newspaper subscribers in the rest of the world.
Getty’s shares fell by some 40% in the last year mainly because of low priced library archive competition on the Internet. A low price Getty license could be around $49, but online competitors sell licenses for as low as $1, and then there are the millions of people who have put pictures up on the Internet for free.
Getty’s various archives comprise some 70 million pictures, going back to the mid 19th century, and some 30,000 hours of video.
When Sir Martin Sorrell makes advertising forecasts then people around the world listen for as head of the WPP advertising and media group if he doesn’t know what he is talking about then who does? And his prediction is that 2008 won’t be as bad as many people might fear, but watch out for 2009.
His thinking is that this is a US Presidential year and there are the Olympic Games so the advertising money will flow, but once the Games are over the Chinese will cool it a bit let alone others, and once the new President is elected then if there is bad economic medicine to take then he/she will want to deal with it up-front and that means the economic pain will come quickly to get it over.
WPP warned in its annual results presentation “It seems inevitable that the ‘real’ world will at some point in time be affected by the private equity, sub-prime, insurance monoline, and housing crises that we have seen. This seems more likely to be in 2009, when a slowdown (not a recession) in the US will be hard to avoid, particularly as a new President tries to deal with heavy government spending and twin deficits, and ‘kitchen sinks’ his or her budgets.”
Now those words must surely be rather frightening to those media companies that have already been reporting terrible January advertising numbers. And 2009 is supposed to get worse?
Digitization was the topic when German broadcaster associations VPRT and APR met with Minister of State for Culture and Media Bernd Neumann. Representatives expressed concerns about competition from State financing of public broadcasting and emerging on-line media.
“We have an extremely diverse radio landscape in Germany,” said Neumann, offering support.
Minister Neumann suggested a cut-off of analogue FM transmission by 2015 should not be approached “rashly.”
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