Posts Tagged ‘news’

Fast Company:

Outside the local train station, the Maplewood Civic Association maintains a bulletin board plastered with news of jazz festivals and yoga classes for this small, affluent New Jersey town. One day last winter, an unassuming new flyer appeared, nestled between ones hawking a fish tank and a drum set, titled, “Introducing the Local.” The flyer describes the Local as “a community Web site by you and for these communities, mentored by The New York Times.”

Why is a media titan like The New York Times Co. — already stretched thin by the challenges of a faltering business model — dabbling in community news, traditionally the bottom of the journalistic food chain? Call it the Google Effect. The search giant’s model, described by author John Battelle as “a billion dollars, one nickel at a time,” is a perfect description of how media companies hope to take tiny sources of local revenue and roll them up into big money.

Hyperlocal sites — covering cities, towns, or just a neighborhood — can deliver precision-targeted advertising to local and global businesses. As the once-exponential growth rate for most Internet advertising in the United States grinds to a halt, the online local-advertising market is projected to grow 5.4% in 2009 to $13.3 billion, according to media research firm Borrell Associates.

As it happens, one of the architects of Google’s success, former head of advertising Tim Armstrong, founded a community-news site called Patch that intends to collect those nickels. Armstrong, in his new role as the CEO of AOL, acquired Patch in one of his first moves. And where, of all places, has Patch set up shop? Maplewood.

Continue Reading: “Tap The $100 Billion Potential Of Hyperlocal News?”

Photo by BaristaNet.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

photo credit: Matt Callow

Bill Wyman:

The problem of the daily press in the U.S. is exclusively this: the collapse of its business model. That model used to be, plainly put, making money—a lot of money, oceans of money—delivering advertising on newsprint into peoples’ homes. Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did.

Remember “shoppers,” the poorly designed throwaway publications filled with tacky little ads? Daily newspapers are high-end shoppers. They spent a lot of money on original content to class up the operation and give people a reason to ask for the ads to be delivered. Long before the web displayed the power and leverage of critical mass, newspapers benefited from it; once you got the franchise in your particular locale, you tried not to stir up trouble, because it just distracted you from time better spent cashing checks.

Some people liked the news, sure; most thought they were paying for it. And some papers spent more money on news than they had to. But the papers weren’t selling the news. They were selling ads and charging a lot of money for them because of one thing only: They held an informal monopoly on a societal convention whereby they deposited those ads—around which they wrapped some reporting, some of it serious, some of it fluff—on subscribers’ driveways.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

 
For many of you logging in today you have noticed that new captcha boxes appear for post, comments, and account creation. In addition the site’s default Administrator account has also been reduced to a subscriber with no acces to any portion of the site as anything above subscriber.
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