It has been a month now. At the beginning of the year, as everyone who is reading this certainly knows, The Wall Street Journal reduced the width of the paper to save $18 million. My visceral reaction was negative, but…
Here is a new article from Stuff in New Zealand reporting that 10 bidders are expected to make a run at Yellow Pages Group New Zealand, among them Sensis (via parent company Telstra) and a rash of media and private…
Newspapers can't expect to beat Yellow Pages or Google in broad local advertiser categories, but they can focus on niche areas and invest in human editors and SEO to bring out their real strengths in the local marketplace, according to…
I've seen several announcements in recent days and weeks in the online Yellow Pages space that are worthy of your attention. First, the European directory publishers PagesJaunes Groupe and Seat Pagine Gialle have both launched beta online classified services, offering…
Newspaper sites have done a lot of window dressing with "hyper-local" by adding neighborhood blogs and whatnot. But now some papers are challenging themselves to embrace hyper-local in all things, as they seek to tame Google and Yahoo! in search,…
The highlight of Day 2 of the NAA show was a local search panel. The length of sessions (90 minutes) results in a lower number of sessions than I'm used to attending, but the quality has in most cases made…
Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn't fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: "but Sidewalk was really…
Fox Interactive Media, the home of MySpace, Fox Sports, Fox News and other sites, definitely has local on its agenda and is rolling out several new features to bring users more in touch with their communities, says Dan Strauss, VP…
There have been lots of newspaper news and announcements in and around the NAA show so far, and I imagine much more to come. Here is a sampling: LostRemote reports that The San Francisco Chronicle is experimenting with podcasts…
I'm at the Newspaper Association of America's annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas this week, where there have been lots of interesting sessions that I'll break down in individual blog posts later. Most of the sessions were breakouts involving five…
Yell.com, which calls itself the United Kingdom's local search engine, is working with Oodle.co.uk, a search engine for local classified advertisements, which will enable people who access Yell.com to post their own free advertisements on the site. While Yell is…
From Nokia's 4Q earnings call transcript (courtesy of 123Jump.com): "Nokia, the maker of mobile phones, reported profit growth of 19% to EUR 1.27 billion from EUR 1.07 billion a year earlier, exceeding analysts' forecasts. The company shipped 106 million handsets,…
AP reported that Copiepresse, a copyright protection group that represents 17 French and German-language Belgian newspapers, asked Yahoo! to remove links that point to the newspapers' content. At issue is whether a cached page (a copy of content that is…
Nielsen/NetRatings has announced U.S. search share rankings for December 2006. Google Search tops the list with an estimated 3 billion search queries, representing 51 percent of all search queries conducted last month.
There is a marketing guy who is trying to build his business by telling people that the best way to get more golden eggs is to kill the goose that laid them. Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog recommends that lawyers do…
When Freedom Communications recruited Michael Mathieu, the monetization leader from United Online (Classmates.com, NetZero, etc.), it was opting for change with a capital "C." Freedom, of course, is the longtime libertarian owner of 70 properties, including The Orange County Register,…
Gary Arlen, the longtime media pundit (and my former business partner), says in a new article for TV Technology that he is expecting newspapers to use the Web to shove their way into the television industry and "become significant online…
The Los Angeles Times Online will roll out two new e-commerce-oriented verticals in the midst of a ripping internal report that says its online strategy is nowhere near where it needs to be for the paper to have a future,…
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday (sub required) about a dilemma that is starting to face many newspapers amidst falling revenues and readership; the need to divert finite editorial resources on local rather than global coverage. The article examines The…
Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today, the Los Angeles Times will bring its print and online newsrooms closer together in order to have better around-the-clock coverage. This could improve Internet content…
