Newspapers

Murdoch ponders ad-supported free Journal online

wsj.com front page - June 8, 2007
— WSJ.com, subscription-free under Murdoch?

The Wall Street Journal website has posted a partial transcript of a 90-minute interview with Rupert Murdoch, the man aiming to take over the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones.

That takeover now appears to be just a matter of time, as acknowledged in the introduction to the transcript:

Since his surprise $5 billion bid became public last month, it has touched off an intense debate over whether he will preserve the independence of the paper’s news operations.

The use of “will” rather than “would” suggests that Murdoch’s News Corp will succeed in buying Dow Jones, at least in the opinion of a Journal editor.

In the interview, Murdoch indicated he would consider removing subscriptions fees from wsj.com, a news site renowned as one of the few that makes substantial revenue by charging for access. Here’s the relevant section of the interview: 

WSJ: Tell us what you would do… Are there changes you would like to see at the Journal, improve it?

Mr. Murdoch: Not at all.

WSJ: Some people would say the front page might be boring.

Mr. Murdoch: The front page is not boring. Absolutely not.

WSJ: Then what’s the opportunity for you? Digital?

Mr. Murdoch: I think it’s in the digital area, digital and TV. And I think we’ve got to pour some money into digital. We’ve got to do a lot of things there…

There’s so much going on on the Internet. We’ve got to find new ways and new business models to get revenues. Or else the world is going to be owned by Google. I was asked at this investment thing I had to go to, what competitors I see I would have in five years time. Globally. I said I’m sure they’ll be a lot of them. I know one is Google. It’s just getting so strong, so powerful. And I know the guys, and like them. They’re friends of mine. But it is a big fact of life. They sort of just hit the mother lode of search advertising and they’re just destroying Microsoft search, hurting Yahoo’s and making others irrelevant. I don’t understand the technologies but whatever their technology is, it seems to be producing a much higher margin of profit.

What are they going to do next? I saw in the New York Times today they’re devising certain, a lot of computer applications which would directly challenge Microsoft, which they’ll give away. So it’s going to be very interesting. Four or five years ago we were all convinced Microsoft was going to take over the world. Now we’re all convinced it’s Google. But that’s another subject.

The Internet is a great leveler. All newspapers count for less these days. So … as far as I’m concerned, I want to drive News Corp, as I’ve said, into being the greatest content company, whether it’s in news, opinions, writing or whether it be film or television. I mean there are so many new pipes in how you deliver these things. And so on. We’ll just have to use them all and see what’s economical. I had a study done, and I think you’ve had many more studies done down there. What if they made the Wall Street Journal free instead of charging 80 bucks?

WSJ: You mean WSJ.com?

Mr. Murdoch: You’d have 10 times as many visitors and lets say five times as much advertising. But you’d lose the other, it works out at about a push…. So, the problem with a regular newspaper is how do they replace or hold their revenue models. It’s not all been about the Internet. Change of lifestyle, people’s time. Circulation really has been going down for 20 years before the Internet. And on top of this, in this country you have the impact of the discounters. The Targets and the Wal-Marts and what they’ve done to the department stores… So what’s happened at papers like the LA Times. Used to see pages and pages of five different department stores. Now you get a couple of pages from one …

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Canwest pulls out of Vancouver and Ottawa free papers

CanWest MediaWorks is pulling out of a partnership that publishes the free Metro newspapers in Vancouver and Ottawa.

The two other partners in the papers — Torstar and Metro International SA — will now each own approximately half of the businesses.

The two companies already jointly own the Metro editions in Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton.

From a news release:

“This new ownership structure extends the solid foundation that already exists in the Metro operations in Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton,” says Jagoda Pike, President Star Media Group and Chair of the Board of Directors of the English Canada Metro newspapers.

“With a consistent ownership structure now in place in all five English Metro markets, the Metro newspapers will be managed with a single-minded focus on the development and growth of the Metro brand across English Canada.”

CanWest owns the paid dailies in Vancouver and Ottawa, so its withdrawal from Metro will likely deny the free papers any support on content and advertising. This could be good news for readers, though, with Metro becoming a genuine competitor to the paid titles.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Toronto Star elevates local coverage, gets easier to read

New Toronto Star masthead

I’ve never understood why a newspaper called the Toronto Star would relegate Toronto news to the B section of its print edition. The Star is without peer when it comes to covering this city, and yet it wasn’t always obvious when you picked up the paper.

Well, with changes introduced today, the local news is where it ought to be — in the A section.

Another obvious change is right on the front page. The famous blue banner has been removed from the paper’s name, and applied instead to the words “Voice of the GTA” [Greater Toronto Area] which appear above an unadorned “Toronto Star” [pictured above]. It’s a lighter look, just as we’re seeing on many news websites.

The Star’s body type has been enlarged from 9.9 point to 10.25 point, with greater leading, to improve readability. Handy for those of us whose arms just aren’t long enough to read as well as we used to.

The paper is also incorporating the results of its website polls and online comments in a daily feature called Traffic Report. Great.

Late this summer, the Star will shave an inch off its page width, and a lot of dollars off its newsprint expenses. The new width will be 11.5 inches, a half inch narrower than the recently slimmed Globe & Mail.

Full credit to the Star for explaining the changes to readers — even getting publisher Jagoda Pike and Editor-in-Chief Fred Kuntz in front of the camera for an online video. It’s all nicely done, except for the fact that some material published on the thestar.com hasn’t been adapted for online reading; it’s just copied from the print edition complete with references to page numbers rather than hyperlinks.

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Ad spending up 22% at US newspaper sites

According to the latest “preliminary estimates” from the Newspaper Association of America, advertising expenditure on newspaper websites rose 22.3 per cent to US$750 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with the same quarter last year.

The increase reflects the twelfth consecutive quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004. Advertising on newspaper websites made up 7.1 per cent of total newspaper ad spending in the first quarter compared with 5.5 per cent for the same period a year ago.

“The percentage of ad spending generated by newspaper websites continues to grow as advertisers realize the value of the medium’s web audience – a group of consumers who have higher household incomes and shop online more frequently than other internet users,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “We expect advertising on newspaper websites to continue to contribute to the industry’s overall revenue stream as newspapers provide innovative content and up-to-the-minute news and information our audience demands.”

Advertising expenditures at newspapers and their websites totaled US$10.6 billion for the first quarter of 2007, a 4.8 per cent decrease from the same period a year earlier. Spending for print ads in newspapers totaled US$9.8 billion, down 6.4 per cent versus the same period a year earlier.

So, it’s the familiar story. Websites need to increase revenue (e.g. by selling more ads and/or more expensive ads) to offset the declining print advertising revenue.

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The journalist’s challenge: to demonstrate value

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 sums up the dilemma for journalists at traditional newspapers, in a response to a comment on his posting Regression to the mean of content quality:

The problem is that [the] Fourth Estate was easier for people to value when it came packaged with the sports page and the cartoons. Disaggregation on the web means that journalism needs to be valued on its own — that is the challenge presented by the disruption of the news business.

I recommend the entire post, and Scott’s excellent follow-up: Every newspaper journalist should start a blog. Amen.

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An insider’s look at the decline of Dow Jones

How did the once-mighty Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, end up in Rupert Murdoch’s takeover plans?

Here’s part of the story, from former Journal reporter Dean Starkman:

…soon after I arrived in 1996, [Publisher Peter] Kann’s board announced a $650 million plan to fix Telerate, internally called “Rolling Thunder,” which inevitably became known as “Rolling Blunder,” and which executives quoted in Fortune described variously as “schizophrenic,” “total confusion,” and worse. Customers complained that using “Dow Jones Markets” products was like buying a car you had to assemble yourself.

Starkman, who worked at the Journal from 1996 to 2004, chronicles the Dow Jones “tragedy” at CJR Daily.

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New Zealand’s best journalism honoured

Results have been announced in the 2007 Qantas Media Awards for New Zealand’s best journalism.

Congratulations to my former colleagues at nzherald.co.nz, which was named best news website.

The best sport site of the year was stuff.co.nz which also won for best news story.

Other online winners include spareroom.co.nz hosts Ana Samways and Steven Shaw, winning for best columnist-style site and also for best alternative/light entertainment site.

The best blog was Russell Brown’s Hard News, a highlight of his must-read Public Address network.

In the offline world, the Christchurch Press was named newspaper of the year and one of its staff, Peter Meecham, won the top photography award.

David Fisher of the Herald on Sunday was reporter of the year and named Qantas Fellow to Wolfson College, Cambridge.

>> Full list of winners

>> Herald journalists use awards platform to protest editorial outsourcing

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Innocent man identified as pedophile by Ottawa Citizen

On Wednesday the Ottawa Citizen ran a photo on the front page of its City section of a man whom it identified as a pedophile with four convictions.

He was, in fact, an innocent man whose misfortune was to have the same first and last names as the pedophile [although a different middle name].

Yes, mistakes happen, but this is the sort of thing that causes enormous suffering and damage to an individual – not to mention undermining the media’s credibility. I hope the Citizen takes it seriously and – at the very least – reviews its procedures.

The paper has apologized, but one wonders whether the harm, to the innocent man and to the paper, can ever be totally undone.

[hat tip Torontoist]

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Craigslist — it’s business, but not as we’ve known it

Jim Buckmaster, the Craigslist CEO who is speaking at Mesh in Toronto later this month, somehow doesn’t live up to his name.

Bucks — as in dollars — are not what the simple but successful classifieds site Craigslist is all about, as Buckmaster explains in an interview at Business Week:

It seems to make no sense to let a site be as useful as possible and pay no attention to the monetary side. But [generating more revenues] hasn’t been tempting. We enjoy working at Craigslist. Users like it, and we’re not sure what we would do with a big surplus of cash. We’d probably look at ways to give it away.

Maybe that’s why the Craigslist “favicon” — the little symbol that appears beside the site’s name when you add it to your favourites — is The peace symbol favicon for Craigslist, the peace symbol associated with hippies in the 1960s.

Craigslist ranks among the ten most popular US websites, and yet has only 24 staff. Buckmaster says that chasing more revenue would require hiring more staff and, well, it hardly seems worth the hassle.

We’re not looking to become a midsized company. We’re happy being a small company.

Most classifieds on Craigslist are free, and the site carries no paid search or display advertising.

Yet despite this apparently un-business-like approach, Craiglist is widely seen as adversely affecting the fortunes of other businesses, namely newspapers, where classified ads — what Rupert Murdoch once called “rivers of gold” — are drying up.

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