Part of the calculus for Fox is that News Corp. wants Apple’s help with other digital projects, including the iPad version of The Wall Street Journal and a digital news offering known inside News Corp. as the “Daily Planet,” the name of the fictional paper in Superman comics.
Meanwhile at newspapers, much effort and much dialogue continues to focus on getting readers to pay for content and battling aggregators — energy that might better be spent figuring out how not to lose the sizeable remaining audience for newspaper content, not by “protecting print” but by keeping the current print readers in the fold as they, too, gradually migrate to reading news online.
If you are a newspaper publisher interested in diversifying away from print while building a valuable, defensible and sustainable digital revenue stream, then it’s time to think about the online directory and web-marketing business. How-to tips are coming up. First, here’s why I think the print YP business is ripe for the plucking:
“At a defining moment for journalism, this is a crucial step towards making the business of news an economically exciting proposition,” Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, said in the statement.
The company did not make a direct reference to when or how it planned to charge for access to The Sun, the largest circulation daily in Britain, but Mrs. Brooks said further changes to the Internet model would be forthcoming.
“This is just the start,” she said. “The Times and The Sunday Times are the first of our four titles in the U.K. to move to this new approach. We will continue to develop our digital products and to invest and innovate for our customers.”
"In other words, they look like a bunch of rich people. Which, in order to sell ads and keep advertisers from defecting to other elite outlets like The Wall Street Journal, is what the Times needs its audience to be."
Using data to grow
Google wants to help publishers use web technology to grow, Mr. Varian said. "I think papers could better exploit the data they have. They need better contextual targeting and ad-effectiveness measurement."Mr. Varian said Google advises some publishers from the Google News roster on ad targeting and engagement. But not all of the newspaper world sees the search giant as a friend; last spring, News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch accused the company of trampling copyrights by displaying snippets of new stories and selling advertising against them, taking money out of publishers' pockets. And last week, digital marketing firm Outsell released a report claiming that 44% of Google News users don't click through to the original sites.
Founder @ Dearing Group LLC.
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