Thursday Morning News Roundup

Here is a roundup of this week’s notable happenings from around the local media world:

—Job search engine Simply Hired raised $13.5 million in a third round of funding from Foundation Capital and Fox Interactive Media. It will use the funds for marketing, product development and international expansion.

—Yahoo! announced first-quarter earnings that included a 34 percent increase in revenues to US$1.57 billion. Revenues from branded and search advertising rose 35 percent to US$1.38 billion. Overall earnings for the quarter dropped 22 percent, meeting Wall Street earnings forecasts.

—John Battelle has this interview with Jim Lanzone, senior vice president and general manager of Ask.com, in which he talks about improving search relevance, among other things. An interesting read.

—comScore reports March search engine market share figures here.

—The New Orleans Times-Picayune this week became the first Pulitzer Prize winner to be awarded the honor for online news content. Its breaking coverage of Hurricane Katrina was posted online for the first three days after the storm, which prevented printing and distribution of the paper.

—SEW points to a WSJ article (reg. req.) about big-name advertisers shifting ad budgets online. We also analyze this trend in the recently released White Paper "Newspapers 2.0: The Competitive Dynamics and Challenges Facing Newspapers in the Online Economy."

—Deutsche Bank and MediaPost, meanwhile, report that overall online ad spending increased 9.3 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2006.

—This Times Online article gives a good overview of the online migration happening across the local media space. And this Pew study supports previous Kelsey Group research that suggests strong Internet use around major live events.

—Lastly, here is Red Herring’s weekly Internet news briefs, including interesting data on what letters are used most often in Web domains.