CBS plans to build deeper local online content by commissioning specific local topics for articles from thousands of writers at Examiner.com. Both parties were mum about whether revenue sharing is involved but did note that writers will receive a payment plan different from the one they get on Examiner.com.

Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital, which is Examiner’s parent company, told BIA/Kelsey the economics of the deal will make it profitable for both companies. Examiner has been approached by many media companies to lend its editorial resources. While such loaners of editorial resources aren’t likely to become a dominant revenue stream, “you may see us do a few more of these,” he says. CBS, for its part, is free to also work with other content aggregators and developers.

CBS brings to the table a network of 15+ city sites, such as CBS Denver, CBS Los Angeles, etc. Some sites have had customized Examiner.com content since Dec. 5. “It is a great showcase, and brings great reach for content. It also provides strong credibility via the CBS brand,” says Brody.

While Examiner’s content for CBS will have some branding elements on it, the intent is not to bring people to Examiner.com, Brody emphasizes. It is CBS’ audience. CBS Local Media President Ezra Kucharz adds that the deal with Examiner is “a great way to augment our great content in local markets.”

The post CBS Goes Deeper With Local Content Via Examiner.com Deal appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Whenever one writes about the future of newspapers and other news organizations, a voice in the back of his or her head says: “They’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.” Fifteen years into the digital revolution, that’s the dilemma confronting the news industry as it once again revisits possible solutions. Thankfully, no one is giving up.

Paywalls. Video. Search. Hyperlocal. Mobile. All these things are extensively discussed in “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a new Columbia Journalism School report from Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave and Lucas Graves. The news-centric report doesn’t deal very much with our favorite subject — the transformation of the local marketplace, and the newspapers’ potential role in it. But there is plenty on the plate here.

While there are no ready answers — if we knew the answers, we would have provided them a long time ago — there are strong overviews on each subject. The real focus here is reconnecting to the real “fans” and “regulars” who may engage with a news product 50 times more than the “occasionals” and “fly-bys” who make up the bulk of unique visitors. “When people talk about the size of an audience, that’s a sham,” the report quotes Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan.

One goal stressed in the report is building a direct relationship with fans to help push contextual advertising. “By producing relevant journalism, deploying data intelligently and relying on social media — not just search engines — to drive traffic, (publishers) can gather a more devoted and involved readership, one that advertisers will also prefer,” note the authors.

Examiner.com, for instance, does very well when it encourages writes to match their output to social media, search…and advertising. Pet writers did very well last year matching coverage of dog adoption and pet shelters, pushing CPMs from $3-$5 to $11 for P&G’s Iams pet food, a key Examiner sponsor.

In theory, other passion subjects do well too. High school sports especially stands out. The Dallas Morning News’ High School Game Time registers 14 pages a month compared with entertainment (2.5 pages), news (2.78 pages), weather (4.83 pages) and sports (7.71 pages). It also grosses $700,000 a year of new ad dollars, in partnership with local cable coverage. This year, it is launching a $1.99 iPhone app, which represents new circulation revenues, along with heavy user paywalls, such as the one recently enacted by The New York Times.

That’s important. Like others, I’ve actually come to conclusion that the news organizations that have the market power to erect such paywalls are the ones that ultimately survive. For The Times, which has boosted per copy costs to $2 a day, circulation dollars have inched up to $683.4 million a year, just behind display advertising, which has fallen from $1.27 billion to $780.4 million. Next year, it doesn’t seem out of the question that circulation will surpass display.

The post Review: ‘The Story So Far — What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

I take great delight in the Carlsbad Patch updates on my smartphone every morning. And the Fwix local app on my iPad. But why do I feel they are my “guilty pleasures”? Because there is a rap out there that hyperlocal doesn’t scale and these are toys.

Is it still the case?

Patch now has a local presence in 600 communities, with editorial and sales “pods” of 12 each. Some are being run by longtime newspaper industry leaders (such as former SignOn San Diego leader Chris Jennewein and ex-NAA New Media Federation staffer Beth Lawton).

Last Sunday, LA Times media columnist James Rainey wrote that Patch is revitalizing local journalism and asserted that may have become THE place for journalists to go (aside from wages of $35k-$50k, or half the salary that big city journalists might have gotten from the big metro, if they were hiring).

That’s fine by Patch President Warren Webster. At ILM:10, Webster didn’t dispute my characterization of Patch as an experiment that wants to quickly get a national footprint to attract national, regional and local advertisers; create a business directory that goes beyond the Yellow Pages; and scale editorial and sales resources.

On a macro level, local ad revenues typically split 50/50 between targeted national and local. For Webster (and cohorts Jon Brod of AOL Ventures, and AOL Chief Tim Armstrong), the bet is that Patch is poised to do both. They’ve publicly said they were spending $50 million to ramp it up in 2010.

Sites such as Main Street Connect and Hello Metro are going down much the same path — although they likely aren’t as focused on winning national dollars as yet. Main Street Connect in the NY metro area has raised $4 million for its effort, and recently signed up Carl Lavin from The Philadelphia Inquirer (and more recently, Forbes) to run its own editorial pods. Many single city efforts have also launched, such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in the Washington metro area.

Sales aren’t guaranteed for any of these. It remains tough to get through to SMBs — note the partial retreat of The New York Times, which offloaded The Local, its hyperlocal effort.

But for the sites that green-light hyperlocal, the hypothesis is they’ll get to local advertisers with local sales forces, and advertisers will follow an audience — especially the affluent, suburban audience targeted in many of these sites. Which brings us to the biggest question for 2011. It isn’t about sales quotas. That’s premature. It’s the audience question.

The audience question is a big “if.” Some of the sites hope to differentiate themselves with audiences via higher quality, more targeted local content or better mapping. But they face super-fragmentation, with at least five or six sources of “good enough” local info, as well as possibly declining user interest in local news in an age of urban sprawl. It is an issue made even more complex by aggregators, where they all feature each other’s content.

Sites that are focused more on geographic aggregation for media partners, such as Topix, Outside.in. Fwix, DataSphere and Everyblock. Local event and news site such as AmericanTowns.com, Center’d and DiscoverOurTown are also part of the mix.

Some of the aggregators are also supported by unique user-generated content and pro/amateur content farms, such as Examiner.com, Associated Content, Demand Media, Helium, MerchantCircle Studios and others.

Examiner.com, by itself, may actually have many times the traffic of a Patch, as CEO Rick Blair notes. Yahoo’s $100 million acquisition of Associated Content this year may have similar implications.

So as we end 2010, and think about 2011, do we think that hyperlocal is going to begin to cut it? One assumes there will inevitably be a shakeout and shutdowns in the coming year. And there will also be smarter ways to economize via user-generated content and aggregation. The all-purpose use of the “hyperlocal” term will also fall by the wayside.

But if more of us find our guilty pleasures from checking out the hyperlocal news on our smartphones and our iPads, and sneaking peeks on our PCs during the day — there is simply no reason to think it will generally fail.

The post Hyperlocal in 2011: A Break in the Clouds? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Local and vertical content is eagerly sought by national players, from The New York Times to Yahoo, MSN/Bing to AOL. Now, Thompson Reuters is leading the local, vertical charge for wire services.

In an aggressive push to lure traditional U.S. media away from the Associated Press, the information industry giant is moving into aggregation with Reuters America, striking content-sharing deals with local and vertical providers that it hopes will differentiate it from AP. Its first subscriber is The Tribune Co., which will halve its financial commitment to AP and incorporate Reuters America’s content into its Media on Demand content modules for Tribune papers.

Among the companies that will support Reuters America are Examiner.com, SB Nation and The Wrap. Examiner said that Reuters will begin distributing the local and topical content contributed by 65,000+ “Examiners” (with more than 6,000 being added each month). The local content aggregator reports that more than 22 million people see its content across 230 U.S. cities. In return for supplying locally targeted content, Examiner.com can publish Reuters’ work on its own vertical Examiner sites. The deal is similar to Demand Media’s agreement with USA Today and Hearst Newspapers.

SB Nation and The Wrap are adding sports and entertainment content, respectively. At ILM:10 last week, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff noted that the company now features upwards of 300 online sports communities built around teams, leagues and regions.

The big picture here? Reuters America clearly sees profitable potential in building aggregation around verticals. “Profit pools have gathered in vertical markets,” notes CEO Devin Wenig, in a memo announcing the initiative.

The post Coming to America: Reuters Partners With Examiner, SB Nation for Aggregation appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

MerchantCircle is joining the ranks of companies creating local and vertical content, including Demand Media, Associated Content, Examiner.com, AOL’s Seed and Patch, Perfect Market, Helium, Brafton Media and others. MerchantCircle’s new Local Content Studio is being led by Andy Halliday, who many of us remember as former head of e-commerce at Excite@Home and who has since been engaged in several entrepreneurial efforts.

The basic idea for MerchantCircle’s Local Content Studio, and the others, is to create optimized content that can be used to economically and efficiently spur local traffic to its directories and profiles, while driving ad impressions. Presumably, MerchantCircle will have an edge over rivals via 1.3 million SMBs that have claimed profiles on the service, covering 95 percent of U.S. communities.

The SMBs may be seeking to build attention for themselves (i.e., real estate agents), and/or earn awards or make a little cash — $1 or $2 per article. The cash can eventually add up: Some SMBs, in early testing, are already being sent checks for $300 and up.

The Studio, in fact, may be seen as an extension of MerchantCircle’s Answers division, launched last September, in which members are encouraged to provide their expertise on a wide range of subjects (where to fix, how to fix, etc.). Both efforts are part of a broader effort to broaden MerchantCircle’s identity and engagement with consumers and businesses beyond the core directory.

At the heart of the Studio is an online authoring and publishing system which can support thousands of simultaneous content development projects. The projects can be claimed by local merchant members or other writers remotely, submitted, reviewed for approval or corrections, and published to local and topical “Expert Pages.”

MerchantCircle VP Darren Waddell says the creation of the Studio does not alter the company’s extensive and successful relationship with Demand Media, which includes syndication of MC’s Answers, domain registration for MC members, and expert articles and other content to MC profiles for $9.95 per month, among other activities.

MerchantCircle’s efforts to launch more local content is not occurring in a vacuum. We have watched with interest as Yahoo has been developing local news and information via the hiring of writers in New York and San Francisco, and recruitment of writer/editors in San Jose, Chicago and Denver, per reporting in paidContent. Their written and edited material will likely be paired with material from Associated Content, which Yahoo purchased this spring. It represents a very different take from Patch.com, which is hiring journalists for hyperlocal reporting in up to 500 communities.

The post MerchantCircle Launches Local Content Studio appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Everyone is fighting for a better, more cost-efficient way of producing content for Web sites. But is the so-called “content mill” search optimized approach of a Demand Media, Associated Content or Examiner.com the only way to achieve this?

Whether you agree or disagree with the characterization of these companies (we largely disagree), alternatives are out there. One alternative is presented by Helium, a 29-person, Boston-based firm that brings in text articles from 160,000 writers and editors, filters it via peer review to let the best voices rise to the top, and allows media partners to generally choose from multiple entries for the best fit.

Helium was founded in October 2006 and has received $16 million in Series A funding. Most interesting to us, it is also 20 percent owned by mega publisher RR Donnelly. Indeed, RRD, with 1,200 sales reps, is its principal reseller to local media clients including TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, Yellow Pages and Web pure plays.

Using Helium, media partners can personalize the content for their own purposes.

One TV company we recently talked with said it liked Helium’s approach more than the others because it had confidence in the quality of the articles since they are refereed, and the company is able to let local reporters add their own touch to pieces that run on its Web sites. It isn’t so much about using outside content as “letting the company’s talent do more,” it said.

This company would be among Helium’s pay-by-the-article customers. The cost can range anywhere from $30 to $50 for general interest content, to up to $1,000 for a high-end medical specialty piece. There are also monthly plans. The company’s content is also distributed on its own ad-supported Web site, which receives 9 million page views per month, growing 5 percent to 7 percent per month.

President and CEO Mark Ranalli tells us that writers are paid on an algorithm based on a portion of ad revenues. The payment scheme is similar to that of Demand Media, Examiner.com or Associated Content. “Many, many writers receive from $5,000 to $10,000 a year,” he says — enough to be a good source of supplemental income. But that also does not differentiate the company. The difference, he contends, is that the content may be “reviewed better than professionally written material.”

“We are not oblivious to what the search engines are doing,” says Ranalli. “You want to be on Google at the end of the day.” And the other content creators may have been perfectly optimized for Google. But instead of producing articles specifically to top the search engine, Helium is bent on producing the best article. “That’s perfectly aligned with Google,” which really just wants to highlight the best content, he says.

The post Helium Provides 'Refereed' Content for Local Media appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Everyone is fighting for a better, more cost-efficient way of producing content for Web sites. But is the so-called “content mill” search optimized approach of a Demand Media, Associated Content or Examiner.com the only way to achieve this?

Whether you agree or disagree with the characterization of these companies (we largely disagree), alternatives are out there. One alternative is presented by Helium, a 29-person, Boston-based firm that brings in text articles from 160,000 writers and editors, filters it via peer review to let the best voices rise to the top, and allows media partners to generally choose from multiple entries for the best fit.

Helium was founded in October 2006 and has received $16 million in Series A funding. Most interesting to us, it is also 20 percent owned by mega publisher RR Donnelly. Indeed, RRD, with 1,200 sales reps, is its principal reseller to local media clients including TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, Yellow Pages and Web pure plays.

Using Helium, media partners can personalize the content for their own purposes.

One TV company we recently talked with said it liked Helium’s approach more than the others because it had confidence in the quality of the articles since they are refereed, and the company is able to let local reporters add their own touch to pieces that run on its Web sites. It isn’t so much about using outside content as “letting the company’s talent do more,” it said.

This company would be among Helium’s pay-by-the-article customers. The cost can range anywhere from $30 to $50 for general interest content, to up to $1,000 for a high-end medical specialty piece. There are also monthly plans. The company’s content is also distributed on its own ad-supported Web site, which receives 9 million page views per month, growing 5 percent to 7 percent per month.

President and CEO Mark Ranalli tells us that writers are paid on an algorithm based on a portion of ad revenues. The payment scheme is similar to that of Demand Media, Examiner.com or Associated Content. “Many, many writers receive from $5,000 to $10,000 a year,” he says — enough to be a good source of supplemental income. But that also does not differentiate the company. The difference, he contends, is that the content may be “reviewed better than professionally written material.”

“We are not oblivious to what the search engines are doing,” says Ranalli. “You want to be on Google at the end of the day.” And the other content creators may have been perfectly optimized for Google. But instead of producing articles specifically to top the search engine, Helium is bent on producing the best article. “That’s perfectly aligned with Google,” which really just wants to highlight the best content, he says.

The post Helium Provides ‘Refereed’ Content for Local Media appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

“A lot of the conversation in blogs now occurs on Twitter and Facebook,” says cofounder Sebastian Provencher. Using social micro blog sites — the “statusphere” — is “so much easier than blogging,” he says. Provencher adds that the new move is not a 180-degree change. The company has been taking half steps toward a Needium-like product since its launch, for instance, adding real-time search.

Needium will specifically offer consumers an outlet to search for explicit things like services and restaurants, or implicit things (“what’s fun in Boston?”). It also gives merchants the ability to respond with offers after their names are “surfaced.”

Ten to 20 categories are initially being launched, ranging from obvious travel-related categories to smaller ones, such as jewelers. A consumer might ask where to fix a broken watch, says Provencher.

Praized, a seven-person outfit based in Montreal, says it will continue to support its original blogs-based “social media stack”for enterprise clients such as YPG and Examiner.com. In addition to supporting licensees, it will also eventually develop a destination site of its own.

The post Praized Media Rolls Out ‘Needium’ for Social-Based Leads appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Content creators that seek to optimize millions of pieces of content for contextual vertical advertising were on full display at Marketplaces 2010 today in San Diego.

Luke Beatty, founder and president of Associated Content, noted that his company was “the first crowd-sourced media platform” and now attracts 16 million unique visitors. Research done for the company shows that users were 125 percent more likely to discuss information that they found on Associated Content with others.

They also were 10 percent percent more likely to carry out additional research; 80 percent more likely to purchase a product or service from advertisers; 53 percent more likely to have people turn to them for advice or opinions; 43 percent more likely to have influence over friends and family; and 25 percent more likely to be trendsetters.

Beatty also noted that 17 percent of AC’s content is local oriented. “It is all about fragmented content,” he said. Short-tail news content doesn’t monetize on Web content. Long tail rules. Local is better being created by the social Web.

Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair said his company is even more focused on local. Blair spelled out a sponsorship model that allows advertisers to sponsor specific writers, or “examiners.” Rates range from $29 to $399. Advertising also accompanies 100,000 to 125,000 e-mails sent out to people who subscribe to specific examiners.

Perfect Market CSO Rob Barrett noted that his new company, which recently partnered with Tribune Co., has made it easier to monetize vertical content, which is earning $9 RPM, as opposed to 85 cents RPM earned from article pages gotten via search. Hard news stories don’t typically monetize very well.

We see which keywords have what CPM, he says. The Toyota recall has been a very effective keyword, for instance.

The post Marketplaces 2010: Content Creators See Enhanced Ad Value appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Demand Media, Associated Content and Examiner.com are each building up an arsenal of highly searchable “long tail” content. Now add Perfect Market to their ranks, a new company that seeks to provide the same “long tail” search optimized earnings capabilities to archival content from newspapers and other media.

The site just added a $6 million round lead by The Tribune Co. That adds to $15.6 million previously raised from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Partners and IdeaLab — each of which is also participating in the new round. The site originated with IdeaLab.

The company also announced an executive team that includes President and CEO Julie Schoenfeld; Chief Revenue Officer Tim Ruder, a longtime exec at Washington Post.com; and Chief Strategy Officer Rob Barrett, who was previously executive VP for Tribune Interactive and head of LATimes.com.

UPDATED: CSO Rob Barrett will be joining Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair and Associated Content President Luke Beatty on our “aggregators” panel at Marketplaces 2010

The post Tribune Invests in Perfect Market, a Long Tail Content Site appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.