Business and Marketing News
Gannett, via its Planet Discover subsidiary, says it will start providing its newspapers and TV stations with search marketing help. The newly formed “Market Development Group” will be run by Stanley Gauss, the former Online General Manager of The Press of Atlantic City. Planet Discover Head Terry Millard says that Gauss and his team are going to provide … Read more
Former AOL President and MTV founder Bob Pittman has lately focused on investments as head of the Pilot Group (he is a pilot). In an interview with broadband consultant Will Richmond’s VideoNuze on the eve of the NATPE show in Las Vegas, Pittman says he is bullish on small market TV stations – and their online prospects. “In small … Read more
With the onslaught of online, fragmentation, and new advertiser models, newspapers and other local media could have it tough. But perhaps no one has it tougher than the free shopper publications that are distributed at grocery stores, vending boxes, libraries and coffeehouses. One of the oldest and largest shopper companies, Network Communications Inc., aims to turn … Read more
Building the perfect template for hyper-local media has been the endgame for a number of companies – BackFence, American Town Networks, Pegasus News, and Citysquares, to name a few. HyperLocal Media has been working at it as well, focusing on the synergies of a print/offline model to effectively sell advertising to the community. Since I profiled the company last June, it has … Read more
Digital media is more cannibalistic than complementary, and seriously eating into the demand for traditional news sources such as newspapers, TV and news magazines, according to the third annual survey of news users done by Outsell, Inc. The survey findings, based on almost 3,000 consumers and fully detailed in Outsell’s “News Users 2009” report, written by … Read more
Allbritton Communications will merge its two Washington D.C. area TV station sites—WJLA.com and News8.net –and build a new, 50 person local DC site behind former Washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady, who developed the concept. The site will be run adjacent to Politico, Allbritton’s successful, all politics vertical. In an interview with PaidContent.org, Brady said he hopes to replicate Politico’s “Web first” … Read more
All accounts from last week’s JD Power’s Automotive Roundtable in Las Vegas suggest that Ford Group VP Jim Farley laid out a really compelling picture of how a major manufacturer looks at its opportunities in digital, and especially, social media. Alex Snyder, in Dealer Refresh, quotes Farley as saying that TV gets 50 percent of its budget; Digital … Read more
NPR will work with a pilot group of a dozen NPR stations to create hire local news and create multimedia local news that will work online and on radio, thanks to new grants from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting ($2 million) and $1 million from the Knight Foundation. The stations will vie to provide a new … Read more
The San Diego News Network announced ambitious plans to expand its template for local news, sports, events, lifestyle and entertainment, to 40 North American cities in the next 30 months. The company, renamed The U.S. Local News Network, already has sites in San Diego and the southwest portion of adjacent Riverside County. It is set to launch in Orange … Read more
The New York Times reports that ESPN, after a successful launch of its local sports website concept in Chicago, is adding three more markets: New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. The Dallas site launches this fall, while New York and LA will start in early 2010. Fifteen staffers are being added for the three sites, which will … Read more