http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-i-recommended-to-publishers-in.html#comments

And as in the case of the lad from DoubleVerify, I’m loathe to stray too far into the technicalities of it all; I’m sure that there are a lot of very clever people doing a lot of very clever things behind the scenes.

Likewise I can get the idea – if the Visa registration process is, indeed, the simple analogy that Alan would approve of.

I guess it’s not a million miles away from a Tesco Clubcard scenario, either.

That once signed up, some ever-improving piece of ‘kit’ within the tills of Tescos (Beccles) keeps a beady eye on my spending habits; it notices when I switch from one washing machine powder ‘brand’ to another – and then duly sends me the Clubcard vouchers that fits with my spending habits…

By the same token, I presume that ViewPass will keep a beady eye on my reading habits; the pieces of content that I throw into my surfing ‘trolley’ on a daily basis and then send me the kind of advertising it thinks ‘fits’ with my reading interests.

The fact that it already has my age, gender and income status from the registration process will give the system a first information platform to work from; as it starts to de-cypher my reading habits, so it can then refine and re-tune the advertising that it despatches in my direction.

And if it’s very clever – and I would strongly suspect it is – going forward it can then aggregate me other pieces of content that it also thinks will suit my taste… ‘I saw you read this piece on the Denver Rockies, but have you read this…?’

‘No, I’d missed it… Jeez, thanks…’

And there’s the two-way bargain. You’re bombarding me with ever more accurately targetted advertising; in return, you’re saving me time and effort by bringing ever more targetted content to my door.

‘Good morning Rick, today I’ve brought you three articles for your perusal… and an advert for a 12-month subscription to ESPN…’

And that’s all fine. It was the same analogy that a Mike Phillips took from the article…

‘I buy some of the household groceries at Kroger. My wife buys the rest — also at Kroger. When she checks out, she gets coupons on the back of her receipt that correlate to her buying behavior.

‘I get different coupons because I buy different stuff. We’re both happy, and so are the marketers at Kroger. Ultimately, your tool would let digital news organizations transcend mass advertising and make money facilitating direct marketing…

I suspect that the challenge for Alan won’t be so much in the development of the kit; rather its unified and uniform adoption across a bunch of traditionally disparate, corporate individuals all of whom have ’silo’ as their default setting; ViewPass, of course, is potentially an elegant network.

Squeezing one into the other is the big challenge – in a sense, akin to persuading Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Asda, Lidl, et al to all sign up for the same ‘Clubcard’… a ‘uniform mechanism’, in Alan’s description.

At least he enjoys one, early advantage; that he is an ‘outsider’; he’s not one of the existing ‘Families’ trying to impose their ‘uniform’ answer on the cousins from Detroit, Vegas, Miami, etc…

But the same fear applies as to that of OfCom’s plans for ‘Local News Consortia’ here in the UK; that it will be like ‘herding cats’ getting them to agree to anything as cohesive and as, frankly, sensible as either a ViewPass ad solution or, together, pooling their resources to fill regional news slots on Channel Three on a uniform and unified basis.

It took little more than a month after that ‘Local Media Summit’ at the House of Commons before the BBC, OfCom and ITV were having a hissy fit at eachother; and with both Andy Burnham and Tom Watson out of the picture as the Brown Government implodes, you have to wonder what sort of momentum and genuine, political will is left within the pages of Digital Britain.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=285

But the other point of interest to ViewPass comes via the comments; that whilst Alan valiantly tries to bang the heads together of the ‘newspaper supermarket chains’ behind closed doors in some out-of-town Chicago hotel, so for the Mops and Pops corner shops and delis, there needs to be a different way of thinking.

As ever with the web, one size won’t fit all. The answers will have to come in all shapes and sizes.

You can’t, in short, impose the same answer on the Denver Post as you can on www.InsideTheRockies.com; just as you can’t find the same solution to the needs of both TrinityMirror Plc and www.london-se1.co.uk And yet all four are web publishers of merit and worth.

It was point that ‘Bob’ raised in the comments… ‘I wonder if it wouldn’t amount to creating two classes of web news operations – the elites such as Rupert, Dean, Gannett and their ilk, and the mom-and-pops, the community, small and medium chains…’

It touched on the same point that a Niel Robertson made with regard to Digg’s new venture into advertising… http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/told-you-digg-for-ads-coming/

Only the argument might be that you swap the words ’small advertisers’ for ’small publishers’ who, likewise, may have neither the time nor the inclination to sign up for a Kroger-like Clubcard; that they might not be a big enough ‘blip’ on anyone’s radar.

‘One of the challenges here is that to some extent the “price you out” model is a bit like Google quality score. While it has its advantages its extremely hard for a lot of small advertisers to keep up with.

‘AB testing means you have to try things and see what works. If you can get Digg QS’ed out you’ll be spending a lot of time managing things. Not always good for small advertisers who are time constrained…’

That all said, at least Alan’s having a go… trying to make a difference by offering a decent solution that ought, on paper, to be worth serious merit and attention from those it is designed to help and, ideally, save.

Quite what sort of attention span any of them have these days – be it this side of the Pond or the other – is the $64 million question.

Doing anything in ‘uniform’ , you fear, may well prove beyond them.

So, we’ve been amiss in keeping OWAB ticking over.

Fortunately, however, this popped up recently from Alan Mutter; who along with the illustrious Mark Potts is one of our top boys across the Pond. Always worth a read.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/12/newspaper-share-value-fell-64b-in-08.html#comments

For, of course, all you do then is slip in a British newspaper stock of your choice and see how they compare to their pals Stateside. About the same in some notable cases.

[Subsequent: For those of a less-than-charitable disposition, you could - I suspect - continue on a similar vein and have some fun if you play around with the words 'Johnston', 'Lee', 'Scotsman' and 'Pulitzer' in this... http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/01/lee-auditors-issue-going-concern.html#comments]

Both might lie somewhere in the midst of Mr Rushbridger’s musings on the state of the 2009 Media Nation and his oblique reference to a tricky time faced by one or two of our nearest and dearest over the next 12 months.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/dec/24/alan-rusbridger-guardian-newspapers

… or more particularly… “the local press…

‘”We have to face up to the prospect that for the first time since the Enlightenment you are going to have major cities in the UK and western democracies without any source of verifiable news,” he said.

‘News groups, he added, faced an uncertain future as a large downturn in print advertising was harming the industry along with its economic model changing drastically.

‘”The news organisations that are in big trouble are the ones in big debt or the ones in conventional shareholder ownership,” he said.’

… as GMG hurried along wth its plans for a potential 2009 launch of www.guardian-cities.co.uk/sheffield, www.guardian-cities.co.uk/leeds

Just in case those ones in big debt or in conventional shareholder ownership – or, indeed, both – should indeed leave their cities in need of new age of enlightenment Guardian-style.

Given Emily Bell’s vision of a forthcoming Apocalypse Now, it is clear that few in the Guardian’s shiny new HQ see much by way of an improvememt in 2009 – certainly not for their country cousins.

And it is, with the best will in the world when your Mrs sits at a provincial newspaper subs desk, hard to see where the saving grace is.

What, for me, is certain is that only the linked will survive.

That for anyone intending to see out 2009 and beyond perched upon their ivory tower, they need to have a long, hard look at themselves – work out what they do best, and then link to the rest.

And, it may be an old hobby horse, but what the provincial newspaper industry does best is write.

It will continue to both kid – and kill – itself if it truly believes that in the space of a year it can morph both its people and its papers into this multi-platform, multi-skilled thing; equally, that it has both the time and, above all else, the finance to do this…

It’s been FA Cup weekend in East Anglia. And I have every respect for Derek Davies; he’s a pugnacious, provincial football reporter on the East Anglian Daily Times who pulls few punches; he knows his patch, he knows his club, he knows how to write.

But, even he might admit that – right now – he’s no Jeff Stelling. Why should he be? But now he needs to be; he’s the star of GreenUn TV.

http://www.greenun24.co.uk/content/greenun/sport/football/championship/ipswich-town/story.aspx?brand=EADOnline&category=IpswichTownFC&tBrand=GreenunOnline&tCategory=xDefault&itemid=IPED02%20Jan%202009%2011%3A27%3A44%3A490

Alternatively, you could ‘link’ out to www.itvlocal.com/anglia and pick up a feed of an interview with Town goalkeeper Richard Wright…. or an extended interview with Sir Bobby Robson on Ipswich’s great and glorious FA Cup past.

Or you could persist with GreenUn TV.

So, ’swap’ Derek’s words for ITVLocal’s video and who’s the winner? The punter.

Because they’re getting the best of what you both have to offer – in one place. And, actually, if we’re all being fast reduced to working in a barter economy, then both ITV and the EADT website are the winners – cos you’re improving eachother’s content at no extra cost.

ITVLocal/Anglia get words they don’t do; EADT get TV they can’t do as well…

In fact, you’re probably making a saving in the time and effort it takes Derek and his ‘cameraman’ to get themselves scripted and sorted. He can be wrting more, well-sourced, well-crafted words – which you then barter for more TV…

For me, that’s the kind of thinking that needs to happen; those are the kind of conversations that need to occur. You get off your high horse and link.

You smash down those silos that surround you. ASAP.

So, if you’re Trinity and are ‘owners’ of the Tyne and Tees Valleys, you hot-foot it to Johnston and look to add the Wear Valley to your ‘patch’ as well; you thrash out some kind of co-operative content and advertising deal that enables the pooled resources of the Newcastle Evening Chron, the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette and the Sunderland Echo to be morphed into some kind of super North-East news ‘hub’… to which you both lay claim.

Want an example of these desperate times calling for such desperate measures, look to the States… Californinian papers desperately linking out, sharing content, pooling resources.

That’s what was so, so wrong about that BBCLocal video decision. There was a hand that could have fed you.

And you bit it off.

You decided that we [the audience] would be better off with GreenUN TV. That would suffice; there was no need to give them anything more…

And that was wrong. Fundamentally wrong.

We want the Web to give us more. And more.

And when it’s given us more, we want it to empower us to find what’s better. And then what’s best.

That’s the reality. Now try to deal with it….

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/12/questions-about-decherds-140-raise.html#comments

http://www.startribune.com/business/29984314.html

If that’s a foretaste of what might be to come over here, then – as Sly Bailey warned this week – it’s going to be a long, hard winter for all concerned.

The one line that stands out, for me, is the one regarding: ‘What next?’

‘Lindquist & Venum bankruptcy attorney George Singer said the Star Tribune’s senior investors are unlikely to take over the paper or order that its assets be sold, though they could, since the newspaper is now essentially at the mercy of its lenders.

‘“Sometimes lenders say, ‘What’s your plan here to get us paid?’ They may want the company to sell to a stronger organization, or get another financing option,” he said.

‘The Star Tribune’s owner, Avista Capital Partners, a New York private equity firm, paid $530 million for the Star Tribune in 2007…

Now perhaps Avista Capital Partners have a cunning plan up their sleeves; so cunning that even the most cunningiest of cunning foxes couldn’t foresee what they planned to do next…

… either that or perhaps, private equity’s love of a deal simply got the better of them; that this was just another (sub-)prime example of risk mismanagement on an epic and global scale.

In normal times, of course, what happens next is there in that quote…. “They may want the company to sell to a stronger organization, or get another financing option…”

But then these are far from normal times. Is selling the StarTrib to a ’stronger organization’ actually an option? Who fits that particular bill right now? Particularly when it comes to the newspaper industry.

Hence you then turn to option two, ‘get another financing option…”

Same question. With whom? Who out there is going to look at a re-financing operation for a newspaper group? In this climate. When the re-financiers themselves have just been re-financed…

Not going to happen.

TrinityMirror might not be stacked with the StarTrib’s debt obligations, but it’s probably got more obligations to its pensioners than the StarTrib ever has. Little wonder, therefore, to find Ms Bailey predicting bleak times ahead.

Still, fair play to the StarTrib. Nothing like telling your own readers how it is.

�

And as I read through his latest thoughts on the truly alarming state of the US newspaper industry, there was one little line that stood out. By quite some way. Particularly given the context.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/

Scroll down and the point in question is in his thoughts on bankruptcy; in particular where next for Philly Media…

Clearly I know next to nothing about US bankruptcy laws and, in particular, what a ‘Chapter 11′ ruling might actually mean. It is, however, something that shareholders in the Royal Bank of Scotland might like to find out… given that they might, apparently, be in danger of catching a hefty part of a $380 million cold.

‘Bankruptcy protection would give Philly Media’s creditors an incentive to renegotiate the $380 million loan the company’s weak profits no longer can service. Because the company was unable to make its scheduled debt payment over the summer, penalties nearly doubled the interest rate on its loan to 9.5%, according to Standard and Poor’s, the bond-rating service.�

‘A renegotiated deal with Philly’s lender, the Royal Bank of Scotland, might trim the interest rate, lengthen the maturity or get the bank to write off a certain portion of the borrowing. Bond traders already have discounted the debt of companies like Philly Media, Tribune, Star Tribune and others to 50 cents on the dollar – or less. So, a reduction in principle may not be as far-fetched as it sounds…

Rumours of all not being well at Philly Media had been doing the rounds for a while. Without my American financial phrase-book to hand, it would appear that Sepetmber 10 was a big date in the diary.

http://www.phillymag.com/news/2008/08/01/financial-worries-deepen-at-philadelphia-media-holdings/

Here’s how Alan reported the ‘home town win’ back in May, 2006… again, it needs a smarter financial analyst than me to unpick how the deal was actually constructed although I presume it is fair to surmise that the Royal Bank of Scotland were one of the ’syndicate of banks’ who bought into Brian P Tierney’s vision for the future of publishing in Philadelphia…

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html

Wachovia Bank would appear to be another of the anxious lenders, or at least according to this Bloomberg report of Philly Media’s troubles – and, in particular, the suggestion that Tierney was getting slightly twitchy in January. Things clearly haven’t improved much since then…

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aDK7ZtLbDeec

Nor, you suspect, will the mood among RBS exceutives have improved of late. The fate of their share of that $380 million won’t exactly be their biggest concern in these credit-crunched times. It’s small beer. A veritable drop in the sub-prime ocean. But it still won’t be a popular topic of conversation.

After all, surely people could – if not, should – have foreseen which way the US newspaper market was head in the summer of 2006? Or was Tierney simply that great a salesman?

He’s clearly a big character on the streets of Philly; the star of a Hollywood movie, according to the American Journalism Review – http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4149

‘If Hollywood is searching for a compelling newspaper script – and there hasn’t been a decent newspaper movie since Michael Keaton and Glenn Close came to blows in “The Paper” in 1994 – it could hardly do better than Tierney taking over the Inquirer…’

‘Chapter 11′ would certainly make for compelling viewing. On both sides of the Atlantic.

There is one final line that is worth repeating – it comes from the official McClatchey press release of May, 2006, that announced its disposal of the Inquirer, the Daily News and philly.com to Tierney & Co. For $562 million. $515 million in cash, according to the AJR.

http://www.mcclatchy.com/176/story/1605.html

“This agreement represents a classic win-win deal — good for McClatchy, good for the buyers and good for Philadelphia,” said Gary Pruitt, Chief Executive Officer of McClatchy. “We are delighted to receive a full, fair price consistent with our projections, and further gratified about the buyer’s commitment to the community, to good journalism and to the heritage of both these fine newspapers. We couldn’t be more pleased with this result.”

Little more than two years later, whether shareholders in the Royal Bank of Scotland are quite so convinced that it’s ‘a classic win-win’ must be something of a moot point…

Time.

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/04/drive-by-surfers-peril-news-sites.html

I mentioned time at JEECamp the other month as one of those straws that I cling to; the fact that our average visit time for the month of January on www.myfootballwriter.com/norwichcity was 436 seconds. And as they, on average, visited the site three-and-a-half times that same month, by hook or by crook we managed to grab their attention for, what, 25 minutes a month.

About the same length of time as one episode of EastEnders.

Or rather Coronation Street. EastEnders doesn’t build advertising around it.

Anyway, to quote Mr Mutter… “In the first three months of this year, the average amount of time visitors spent on newspaper sites fell by 2.9% to 44 minutes and 18 seconds per month, or less than 1½ minutes per day…

This, he contends, is a problem.

“If drive-by surfers continue to generate a growing proportion of newspaper traffic, will advertisers put a high enough value on these relatively fickle visitors to pay the premium rates necessary to continue funding these elaborate, content-rich websites?

“I wouldn’t count on it…”

Nor would I. Because over the last couple of years I’ve long since discovered that you can pull all manner of tricks when it comes to hits, page visitors, unique visitors, etc, etc…

The one where it is hard to pull the wool over any advertiser’s eyes is time. How long are the eye-balls glued to that page…

And this should, in theory, give us all hope. Because with the tables now fully turned on us, the multiplication of choice facing our one-time reader means that we have to work that much harder to command their attention…

The average ‘drive-by surfer’ recognise a re-hashed quote from 50 paces; one glance and he’s gone. ‘Nah, read it… Seen it before….’

And that’s why stuffing newspaper websites with aggregated and re-aggregated copy won’t work; the eye-balls will linger over what’s new, what’s fresh and what they haven’t see before.

And, hopefully, what’s well written.

Because what are people looking for? They’re looking for a good read, in Clay Shirky’s famous words.

What they are not looking for is a re-read, a re-hash and a re-nose. They haven’t got time for that. Give it to me fresh and first; that’s where the value is; that’s where the eye-balls will linger longest.

Give it to me fresh, first and in a form that proves a good read, time and time again, then people will return time and time again. Keep me informed; keep me entertained; keep me happy. Or else I’m outta here…

That’s the challenge that the multiplication of media presents us all with – getting them not only to drive-by, but to park up. To surf, to see and to stay.

And in the midst of that challenge, quality will count.