Final Rocky Mountain News Edition Published

There were two papers in Denver: the Rocky Mountain News (owned by Scripps) and the Denver Post (Media News Group). Now there is one, the latter. 

The Rocky Mountain News published its final edition — it’s not going online only — yesterday:

The Rocky Mountain News publishes its last paper tomorrow.

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Rocky-owner Scripps, broke the news to the staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper’s future.

“People are in grief,” Editor John Temple said a noon news conference.

But he was intent on making sure the Rocky’s final edition, which would include a 52-page wraparound section, was as special as the paper itself.

“This is our last shot at this,” Temple said at a second afternoon gathering at the newsroom. “This morning (someone) said it’s like playing music at your own funeral. It’s an opportunity to make really sweet sounds or blow it. I’d like to go out really proud.”

Boehne told staffers that the Rocky was the victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

“Denver can’t support two newspapers any longer,” Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news. “It’s certainly not good news for you, and it’s certainly not good news for Denver.”

Get ready for a time when there’s not simply one paper per city but perhaps one paper per region.

GMail’s ‘Friendster Moment’?

Friendster, the once undisputed king of social networking, suffered months of slow operations and technical challenges creating massive frustration and paving the way for MySpace to take over. Friendster has rebounded to some degree outside the US, but it’s done as a mainstream social media platform in the West.

Google’s recent challenges with GMail may be creating a Friendster-like moment or problem for the service. Its recent slow operation and semi-unreliability could start to threaten continued use of what is one of Google’s clear success stories.

Undoubtedly the company is mindful of the danger of inattention to the problems. But I’ve got to say as a user that it’s pretty frustrating.

There’s also danger to the overall Google brand if GMail continues to falter.

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Gmail is having more problems, reported by the BBC.

Next Steps for Newspapers

It’s great to see all the public discussion about newspapers and how they can/should survive. Currently there’s a discussion and debate going about the quality of online news/journalism vs. traditional newspapers.

As much as I’ve advocated that newspapers start to charge for their content it’s going to be challenging to do so in the context of existing online products. They’ll basically need to create new products or new delivery mechanisms to do that. For example:

• Flexible screens that offer digital versions of the paper that look like the print product (to some degree)
• Mobile versions of the paper. The iPhone offers in interesting laboratory. Many free apps have a paid version that’s richer or ad free.

I believe that in these new contexts people would be willing to pay subscription fees. If for example you got a cool new device (like a Kindle but cheaper and more like paper) you would probably pay for that device and to receive news content on it (text + video):

The ad targeting could also be dynamic and interactive (like mobile phones and the Internet). I think the newspaper industry collectively has to get behind these new technologies and tools and expedite their delivery to market.

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NY Times Bits blogger Saul Hansell expresses some apparent confusion or surprise regarding how Apple has been able to get people to “pay for content on the iPhone that’s free online.” It’s not that hard to figure out.

As he points out a very usable, one-click commerce model has been instrumental in the process. However, this is a new medium and there’s an immediacy and convenience there that justify the costs in people’s minds. But as he also points out, there’s price sensitivity. Apps that cross certain price thresholds languish.

But a paid iPhone newspaper app that offers a stellar experience would likely be worth some amount to users.

Update: Newsday’s parent Cablevision plans to charge for Newsday online. We’ll see what the audience/reader response is. That will offer a pretty clear indication whether the strategy will be more broadly pursued by other major publishers or is DOA.

Digital Out of Home and Place-Based Media

Months ago I had a very interesting conversation with digital out of home ad network Danoo. Danoo is similar to RippleTV but has certain strategic differences. I’ve delayed writing about the company because I wanted to get to one or more of their locations and see the screens in action. It’s clear to me now that it’s not going to happen given my schedule. 

Danoo calls itself “local, place-based media.” 

iMedia today has an interesting overview of several digital out-of-home networks, though not Danoo or Captivate or Ripple. All of these networks are doing the “chicken and egg” thing, meaning: they’re trying to build distribution and scale and survive until they do with limited ad revenues. Once they have scale they can attract advertisers. (Some like PRN are very well established.) Those like Danoo or Ripple going after “local” SMBs face the same, numerous acquisition challenges that all seeking to attract their ad dollars face. 

These digital, place-based ad platforms are compelling in many ways — Danoo emphasizes local entertainment content as well as being an ad platform. However they make sense as part of a broader buy as opposed to a stand alone vehicle. The key in my mind (beyond building out scale in particular markets) is to tie into existing sales channels. 

For their part all the local sales channels (newspapers, YPs, etc.) should be considering putting graphical or video advertising on these networks on behalf of their customers. This is the “multi-platform” direction that all these companies are going anyway:

• Print
• Online
• Mobile
• Digital out of home
• Direct mail

Anyway I’m fascinated by these place-based digital networks. They’re also interesting because mobile users (or those on laptops with WiFi) can interact with them through SMS or by going to URLs mentioned in ads. When I spoke to Ali Diab, one of the co-founders of Ripple, now at AdMob, he told me that some of the SMS-related prompts (text to receive a coupon, etc.) that Ripple tried on behalf of advertisers worked very successfully. 

This mobile-local screen combination is very powerful for all kinds of obvious reasons. But these networks will also work for brands, movies and stores that are “national” yet sell things locally.

The Women at Yahoo!

Prior to the appointment of Carol Bartz as the new Yahoo! CEO I was thinking about the fact that Yahoo! had more visible women in leadership roles than its chief rivals: Google, Microsoft, IAC, AOL, News Corp. Facebook has former Google exec. Sheryl Sandberg in the COO role now. 

But with the appointment of Bartz and Hilary Schneider in charge of North America, new CMO Elisa Steele, SVP  Joanne Bradford, Yahoo! is filled with women at the top. The new CFO could also turn out to be a woman. Wait and see. 

So what does this mean? Maybe nothing. But it may also be significant.

These women are very smart and their (presumably) greater facility with and understanding of relationships (employee, customer, etc.) may turn out to be significant if only behind the scenes. Witness Bartz’s new attention to customer service/advocacy. That may have nothing to do with her being a woman but I’m not so sure. 

There’s also the user-audience. From a commerce perspective, women (and moms in particular) are the most important audience online. I don’t imagine that Yahoo! will alienate boys and men. But it may be able (whether consciously or not) to appeal to women even more than it does today. 

These thoughts are rough and vague I realize. But I was just struck by all the women running Yahoo! and how it might turn out to make Yahoo! different and successful in ways that the company hadn’t even anticipated in its “gender-blind” recruitment and promotion of executives.

Another Negative Local Media Forecast

BIA/Kelsey released a new comprehensive local advertising forecast, seeking to compete with the VSS’s and other financial forecasters of the world. Here are the high-level bits from the release:

BIA/Kelsey forecasts U.S. local advertising revenues to decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Only the local interactive segment will show growth throughout the forecast period. All other local media will experience marginal to rapid declines in the next 18 to 36 months. A small number of traditional media will rebound with a revived economy beginning in 2011, though most traditional media will continue to decline, albeit at a slower pace.

BIA and The Kelsey Group project the interactive share of local ad spending will more than double from 9 percent in 2008 to 22.2 percent in 2013. According to the forecast, the interactive segment (encompassing mobile, Internet Yellow Pages, local search, online verticals and classifieds, voice search, e-mail marketing and other interactive revenues generated by traditional media players) will grow from $14 billion in 2008 to $32.1 billion in 2013 (at a CAGR of 18%), while the traditional segment (encompassing newspapers, direct mail, television, radio, print Yellow Pages, out of home (non-digital), cable television and magazines) will decrease from $141.3 billion in 2008 to $112.4 billion in 2013 (CAGR of -4.5%).

A few observations:

• It would appear that BIA (Kelsey’s buyer) has begun the process of seeking to assert its brand over Kelsey in the interactive space. The problem is that BIA currently has no credibility in the online segment and will need to maintain the Kelsey brand for awhile accordingly. 
• Forecasts are publicly released for multiple reasons, chief among which is publicity for the firm involved. That makes it “necessary” to make some sort of big statement (either positive or negative) to get attention. Almost all forecasts released are subject to this criticism. 
• Often people don’t spend enough time really being careful about forecasts. I’ve been sloppy about forecasts I’ve been involved with in the past myself. An example of that was the PPCall forecast that was wildly optimistic about the market and its development trajectory. We said at the time that the forecast assumed Google and Yahoo adoption of PPCall (which never happened) but I should have put even more qualifiers around it. 
• It’s almost impossible for a forecast this broad (BIA) to be accurate for any specific segment. The best that something this comprehensive can aim for is general directional accuracy — interactive will grow by roughly X and traditional will decline by roughly Y. 
• Directionally this is of course accurate — traditional media will continue to see declines and they can’t replace ad revenues with online growth because of different pricing and economics in the online market. 

The trouble with doing any sort of forecasting at the moment is that economy is such an independent variable — really independent. We have no idea when a recovery will occur: 2010 or 2015. 

Many of the pubs that have run with this forecast are saying things like “local markets shrinking.” That kind of thing misleads because we’re still talking about billions and billions of dollars. Even though the BIA forecast above says interactive is the only part of the forecast to grow that is buried in the stories highlighting the gloom. 

Part of the misunderstanding about “local” that still pervades the online marketing world is that people look at it as a media “silo” within a broader Internet market: verticals, IYP, what % of search? etc. Rather than a media type or collection of silos, “local” should be seen as a dynamic consumer process. Yes, there are advertisers who advertise primarily locally (e.g., SMBs, retailers). But the bigger story that I always try and emphasize is how the Internet is a research/consideration tool that influences offline purchasing. That behavior overwhelms all e-commerce; from a commercial standpoint it’s the biggest thing happening online. 

There’s also the story of how traditional media and WOM influence online activity and search in particular. The Internet is in the “middle” between the real world media and peer to peer discussions on the one side and the cash register on the other, which is also in the real world. Mobile is a compelling and evolving element in this broader process. 

So whether “local” is $141 billion or $112 billion, it doesn’t really matter — although it matters to the radio sales guy who might lose his job — it’s still a giant market. What matters is whether marketers understand how consumers use media and whether they are mapping their media spending to that consumer behavior, which involves both traditional and online (and now mobile). 

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Here’s an earlier MediaPost roundup of other negative local ad forecasts released earlier.

Longer Keyword Strings Include GeoMods?

Hitwise put out a report earlier in the week that showed keyword search strings getting longer:

I asked Hitwise whether the company had any visibility into whether these queries included an increase in the use of geographic modifiers or not. They said that would be difficult to determine. 

Back in late 2006 when the first round of WebVisible-Nielsen’s local search data came out, I wrote this:

Now back to WebVisible’s research, which appears to support the idea that a large percentage of searches with a local intent don’t appear as such because they lack geographic modifiers. Here’s what the research determined about respondents’ local search query formulation:

• 51% used a general service term to search (“dentist”)
• 49% used a general service term and regional term (“dentist in Cleveland”)
• 23% used a specific business name (“Dr. Bob’s Dental”)
• 19% used a specific service term to search (“root canal”)

(Respondents had the option of answering more than one)

Interestingly, younger respondents (18-24) were more likely to use a geographic modifier than older users in the sample. But overall 51% of the actual, local search behavior didn’t carry a geo-modifier – that’s striking. 

As the data above show and other anecdotal evidence suggests, lots of queries that are ultimately “local” or that have “local intent” are not necessarily going to feature geo-modifiers. We also may see a decline in the use of geo-modifiers over time because location detection is getting better — whether in the browser or on the mobile handset.

GMail Problems

I’ve generally been happy with GMail. I had a bunch of email addresses and started to use it exclusively a couple of years ago. But lately (forgetting about downtime) it has become slow and more frustrating to use:

• Longer to upload
• Longer to send
• Longer to open/download new messages

I get the “still working” or “sending” message a lot these days. Is it me or are others experiencing similar things?

Recent Posts at LMS

Here are a few of the posts this week from LMS:

• WhitePages.com Offers Improved Caller ID for Android
• David Ko the New Head of Yahoo! Mobile
• Google Analytics iPhone Traffic View Will Help Accelerate Mobile Ads
• AdMob Lands $1.6M Jaguar, Land Rover Mobile Campaigns
• Opera Mobile Web Report for January 2009
• ChaCha Reports Continued High Growth
• AOL Launches “My Places” on MapQuest for Mobile
• IAB Canada Releases Mobile Ad Revenue Data
• Yahoo! Mobile a Big Step Forward

SMB Survey: Negative (Even Bitter) Outlook

MerchantCircle, whose members/customers are representative of many of the smaller US markets (as opposed to major metros) just posted results of an online survey on the Stimulus Package.

The responses reflect that these SMBs are suffering economically but are also quite pessimistic that they will see any benefit from the recently passed law. Here are some of the findings:

• 92% of the 10K respondents had fewer than 10 employees and 81% had fewer than 5. That’s pretty representative of the overall distribution of the market
• 78% said their biz was their primary source of income
• 45% said their business was “unhealty” or in “danger of closing”
• 73% had experienced a moderate or severe decline in sales

These respondents appear generally more conservative (or cynical, it would appear) than the population as a whole. They show higher disapproval ratings of the President and don’t expect the Stimulus to benefit them or work:

• 52% disapprove of the Stimulus Package
• 65% said that the new package didn’t do enough for SMBs.

Slightly more data are on the MC blog.

What would also be interesting (I’m sure MC has some of this data) is to see if these folks have different attitudes toward marketing these days (traditional vs. online). Are they seeing marketing as helpful or a waste of time in this economy?

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Related: FACT CHECK: GOP adrift on small business claim

Summary of SMX Local Sessions

I moderated the two local sessions at SMX West this year. Both were slightly different and I thought very strong, with lots of great concrete information and how-tos. As moderator I of course remember nothing after I step down from the podium

Fortunately, David Mihm summarizes the content and takeaways from the two panels (mostly the first one largely about SEO issues) in a column today at Search Engine Land. 

Worth a read if this is your segment.

More UGC Images in Maps

Google has integrated Panoramio images into Google Maps’ StreetView. It’s a nice addition and nicely executed. (Google owns Panoramio.)

Thumbnails in the upper right indicate where user photos are available. Clicking the image offers new views of the same location and the ability to click through a range of user-contributed images:

I have a more complete write up on SEL, including discussion of Microsoft’s integration of the supremely cool Photosynth and Live Maps. And here’s more from the Google LatLong blog.

NYT Offers SMB Display Ads from AdReady

Thanks to TrustedPlaces’ Sokratis Papafloratos for pointing this out to me: self-service display advertising on the NY Times‘ site aimed at SMBs:

Click through and you discover it’s powered by AdReady:

ReachLocal recently introduced display advertising as part of its service offerings. And there are other companies equally targeting the segment.

The challenge with a program like the NY Times is getting SMBs’ attention and getting them to go through the self-service process. Some of them, however, will surely do it and experiment with it.

New DexKnows Formally Debuts

A few months ago I got a preview of the much-improved DexKnows.com. I wrote those initial impressions up here.

My feeling at the time was that the site had made some significant leaps forward and was much “smarter”on the back end,  but there was (of course) still room for improvement. Today, parent RH Donnelley announced the formal launch of the new DexKnows:

DexKnows.com does not follow a typical listing structure that requires consumers to drill down several levels to find what they want. Instead, they can simply type in what they’re looking for – whether in specific or general terms – and DexKnows.com returns relevant results.

DexKnows.com allows consumers to:

• Search by specific neighborhoods or landmarks. The site’s “hyperlocal” search capability enables users to pinpoint their search area.
• Search by descriptive phrase. Consumers simply need to type “clean house” or “fix sink” to yield relevant results that present them with a myriad of options to meet their needs.
• View results that accurately reflect both business location and local service areas. Sometimes, consumers may seek the physical location of a local business, for example, to find a dry cleaner in close proximity to their homes. Other times, consumers want to see which local businesses support their area, such as what plumbers provide repair services in their neighborhoods. The new site provides consumers with more relevant options to choose from.

I’d be curious to hear whether you/users believe these changes are as self-evident as the announcement believes they are. What are your impressions? How does this product compare with Yellowpages.com, Yellowbook and Superpages? What about Yelp or Google Maps?

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RHD will announce Q4 and FY results on March 12. 

Hearst Again with ‘Sell or Close’

Just a month or so ago Hearst threatened to “sell or close” the Seattle PI. Now it’s doing the same with a larger market paper the SF Chronicle. Here’s the Chronicle’s own article about the subject:

In a posted statement, Hearst said if the savings cannot be accomplished “quickly” the company will seek a buyer, and if none comes forward, it will close the Chronicle. The Chronicle lost more than $50 million in 2008 and is on a pace to lose more than that this year, Hearst said.

Frank J. Vega, chairman and publisher of the Chronicle, said, “It’s just a fact of life that we need to live within our means as a newspaper – and we have not for years.”

The paper’s website could operate as a stand-alone local destination and be quite successful if it made some improvements. However gone would be much of the local “journalism” that I celebrated yesterday.

The statement above about “living within our means” is a simplistic one. While there’s truth there there are range of external forces at play. Still the newspapers were very slow to respond to the changing environment around them.

Now it’s time to ask people to pay for online content or let the “free markets” take their toll. And right now the free markets are in free fall.

ETail Opens Up to Local

Krillion announced that it’s chairing a track on multi-channel marketing at eTail 2009. While online retailing events have always discussed multi-channel marketing, this, in a way, represents the mainstreaming of the local shopping — an acknowledgment that the dominant consumer paradigm is “research onlne and by offline.”

Ecommerce, though significant, when seen in the context of the totality of US retail is essentially a fly on the posterior of an elephant. That elephant is Internet-influenced offline buying. As Nielsen discovered last year in one of its consumer surveys:

“If you were only able to use one source of information to support your next consumer electronics purchase, which would you choose?”

• Internet – 58%
• Visit to local stores – 25%
• Reviews in newspapers/magazines – 8%
• Friends and family – 8%
• Other – 1%

Despite this, less than 4% of US retail happens online.

MapQuest Launches ‘My Places’ for Mobile

The fact that MapQuest is now in a real fight with Google Maps is a good thing. MapQuest is rapidly adding features and trying to reassert itself as the leader in online mapping. Its brand was long relied upon to maintain that leadership but now innovation has returned to MapQuest.

In that spirit this morning the company launched “My Places” (My MapQuest) for its mobile offering: MapQuest4Mobile. I’ve written up the announcement and a short interview with Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MapQuest over at LMS.

A Great Story about Local Journalism

At a time when virtually all of the news coming out of the newspaper industry is very bleak — the owners of the local Philadelphia papers are the latest to file for bankruptcy — here’s an inspiring story of local journalism and why it still matters:

When Chauncey Bailey, the editor of The Oakland Post, in California, was gunned down in broad daylight on a city street 18 months ago, it was not the end of his journalism. In some ways, it was a new beginning.

After his death, a group of reporters — some retired, some out of work — with support from foundations and the University of California, Berkeley, banded together to continue his investigation into a local business called Your Black Muslim Bakery and to look at any role the bakery may have played in Mr. Bailey’s murder and at the role of the police in its investigation.

The group, named The Chauncey Bailey Project, has had a deep impact on the city’s public life, revealing a jailhouse videotape that suggested a wider conspiracy in the murder and which the police seemingly ignored, and helping force the resignation of the Oakland police chief, Wayne Tucker.

Wire services can’t/won’t do this local investigative work. Bloggers won’t do it; they don’t have the time, financial incentives or support or attention span. TV journalists could do this type of work but are “culturally” disinclined to put in the effort these folks put in. NPR might do in-depth reporting but not on a local level.

This story illustrates why local journalism matters to communities and why journalism is a civic institution that must be preserved in some form to enable governments to function more transparently and legitimately.

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Related: WSJ says it’s time for newspapers to ask readers for fees; “Information wants to be expensive.”

Indentifying Potential SMB Advertisers

Palore’s Hanan Lifshitz writes an interesting column at SEL in which he says that the best sales prospects for publishers seeking to attract SMB ad dollars are those local businesses that are either already advertising elsewhere or those who’ve claimed online profiles but aren’t yet advertising online.

These folks have taken affirmative action to correct and “own” their information online, at a minimum, or are already experimenting to varying degrees with online advertising and are open to further opportunities:

It is clear from the two charts above that most advertisers on traditional online directories also engage in other, either free or paid, activities to increase their online visibility. In other words, if you’re an advertiser on sites such as IYPs, odds are you’re also advertising and promoting your online presence somewhere else on the Web. By the way, this also applies to businesses that advertise primarily on local and vertical sites.

What is even more interesting is that of over 500,000 businesses we examined, we found that the vast majority of SMBs do nothing in terms of online advertising or visibility. SMBs are hard to get in the game, but once in, they try out different things.

To identify patterns, Palore examined half a million businesses on leading directory sites in three US tier 2 markets: Atlanta, Dallas and San Antonio.

For those without a “feet on the street” sales force, what the analysis implies is a simple service that manages SMB information across multiple sites and offers a low cost or free “entry level” product that helps businesses claim and update their listings on a number of top local destination sites and in the commercial databases. This would then offer an “upsell” opportunity for an online ad product.

This is along the lines of what GetListed and a couple others are seeking to do in different ways.

AOL + Oodle = AOL Classifieds

Oodle as become the vendor/partner of choice it would appear for third parties seeking to add or beef up classifieds — a missed opportunity for eBay/Kijij. Today AOL launched a new classifieds site: Classifieds.AOL.com. There’s also a Canadian specific site at Classifieds.AOL.ca.

It’s all free of course. Here are interesting bits from the release:

Developed in partnership with Oodle, which operates the largest network of classifieds services in the U.S., buyers can easily find the best deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.

This new site becomes part of what the company is calling the “AOL Local Network,” which claims 54 million uniques. The lion’s share of that traffic is MapQuest.

For its part Oodle has 250 partners, including Facebook, Wal-Mart, MySpace, Comcast and now AOL, among others. These sites all are distribution outlets for Oodle listings, as well as new sources of content for the network.

And without Craigslist:

(I had initially used the “.com” URL for Craigslist so Compete under-represented its traffic. Now I’ve corrected. Thanks for the catch Jeremy.)

AOL, which doesn’t get enough credit these days for much of what it does, is developing interesting properties with third party content (e.g., When.com with Zvents). It’s also doing very interesting things with some of it other sites, such as MapQuest and Bebo.

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Update: Vast CEO Kevin Laws emailed me and said that the charts above are inaccurate. He says that most of Vast’s business is white label and shows up as traffic to the partner site. He also reminded me that Vast powers AOL autos.