(Thanks to a sharp-eyed reader–who has good reason to be sharp-eyed about this stuff–for noting that the freeze only affects management and not the rank and file.)

It’s not clear if News Corp. (NWS) will end up investing in the joint venture, which is designed to control distribution of “print” content to readers like Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and Apple’s (AAPL) rumored tablet, or if the company will simply agree to tailor its stuff–most notably, The Wall Street Journal–to the joint venture’s standards.

In either case, News Corp. has yet to officially sign on, sources tell me. An announcement formally acknowledging the JV itself is supposed to be a couple of weeks away, though I have been hearing this for at least six weeks.

No comment from News Corp. or Time Inc., the Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit that has been assembling the JV. Other expected partners include Hearst, Condé Nast and, perhaps, Meredith. (Disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

In some ways, News Corp. is an obvious partner for the coalition, which I like to call “Hulu for magazines.” Murdoch has been an outspoken critic of Amazon’s distribution and pricing policies; he argues that by controlling the subscription of digital newspaper and magazines delivered through its e-reader, Amazon deprives publishers of a valuable asset.

Murdoch also wants more money for the stuff it does sell: In an earnings call last week, he said that while the bookseller was now paying his company up to $6.50 a month for each $15 monthly subscription to The Wall Street Journal, that split wasn’t good enough.

The JV is supposed to solve those problems for publishers by letting them control sales, customer billing and pricing. But it is also primarily designed with magazine publishers in mind, and News Corp. isn’t in that business.

Meanwhile, New Corp.’s Dow Jones unit is proprietary about the system it has already built to handle subscriptions to the Journal’s print and online editions and its BlackBerry and iPhone apps.

While it’s possible that the JV could use the Dow Jones subscription/commerce platform as the technological base of the JV, Dow Jones could be prickly if asked to play well with others. “Newspapers and magazines, don’t mix well, for reasons that aren’t obvious to the outside world,” says a News Corp. executive briefed on some of the company’s conversations.

In any event, balancing different partners’ interests is only one of the hurdles facing the JV. Some others, from the story I published last month:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

The publisher said newspaper revenue dropped 20 percent in the third quarter, and print ads dropped by 28 percent; both of these numbers are worse than Q2, which saw revenue drop by 14 percent and print ads by 20 percent.

No relief from Web ads, either: Internet revenue dropped 18 percent, a decline from the nine percent drop in Q2. And online display ads, which had been more or less flat for the last few quarters, fell off a cliff, dropping 14 percent.

Don’t be duped by headlines reporting a drop in the newspaper division’s losses, by the way. That’s due to one-time accounting charges the previous year. If you look at operating revenue and expenses via a less formal, but more practical, lens, the results are very unpleasant: Losses increased by 55 percent (see summary below; click to enlarge).

Want more bad news? Okay: The company’s magazine group says revenue dropped 33 percent, driven by a staggering 48 percent drop in ad sales at Newsweek.

If you’re at, say, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and want to whistle past the graveyard, you can try blaming the drop on the title’s unsuccessful overhaul. But I find it hard to believe that Newsweek’s woes don’t reflect a larger magazine malaise. We’ll see next week.

The good news, as always: The big difference between the Post and many other publishers is that its parent company doesn’t depend on print media. The company’ core education business, which is what has sustained it for many years, continues to do well.

Tough times have forced many papers to rethink their circulation strategies. An obvious conclusion: Much of the money publishers were spending to print and deliver dead trees has gone to waste. New strategy: Print fewer copies, and charge more for the ones you do sell.

That’s a tactic, not a strategy, but in the near-term it might work.

In its last quarter, for instance, the New York Times (NYT),  saw its daily circulation drop by more than seven percent, but saw circulation revenue jump 6.7 percent, due to price increases. Last spring a single copy of the Times at a newsstand jumped from $1.50 to $2.00, and a Sunday Times now costs a staggering $6. But people are buying them.

Meanwhile, News Corp. (NWS), which owns The Wall Street Journal as well as this Web site, has been steadily increasing the WSJ price. And circulation revenue is up at the McClatchy (MNI) and Media General (MEG) chains.

Again, the industry can’t shrink its way to recovery. There are fewer people paying for news–on or offline–than there have been in decades, and there’s no way to paint this as a positive. But the people who still subscribe to papers value them, and it would be foolish not to capitalize on that. Editor & Publisher:

There are several reasons as to why circulation keeps dropping, aside from former readers who have kicked the print edition to the curb. Publishers have been purposely pulling back on certain types of circulation, including hotel, employee and third-party sponsored copies. No longer are they distributing newspapers to the outer reaches of the core market. The cost of delivery and the cost of materials have forced publishers to scale back.

Another shift has occurred: volume has taken a back seat to dollars.

Several major newspapers across the country have aggressively hiked prices of single-copy and home-delivered papers in search of circulation revenue and a renewed focus on loyal readers. Circulation is guaranteed to go down as prices go up, but publishers have opted to wring more revenue from readers as advertisers keep their coffers closed.

Squires has spent the past few months convincing other publishers to join a new joint venture aimed at a market that doesn’t really exist yet–magazine-like publications to be delivered via e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s rumored tablet.

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).

Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Many of the venture’s big details have yet to be hammered down. At one point, for instance, Time Inc. had explored the idea of including newspapers in the new company’s offering, sources say. The JV may also want to include a noncontent partner as an investor, as Hulu did with Providence Equity and as Vevo, the “Hulu for music” JV that Universal Music is creating with Google’s (GOOG) YouTube, plans to do. That approach is supposed to appease antitrust regulators’ worries about a group of content companies banding together.

But the rough outlines of Squires’s plan are attractive enough to publishers, who are hopeful that mobile devices like the Kindle will create a new market for them. And if that market does show up, they want to make sure they’re the ones in charge of sales and distribution. That’s been a huge problem for the music industry, whose digital sales are essentially controlled by Apple. And it has already cropped up as a point of contention with Amazon, which currently handles sales for all content delivered via its Kindle reader.

Other selling points for the JV: The ability to set standards for mobile content and the ability to integrate advertising into the publications. One thing the company isn’t supposed to do: Create an e-reader itself.

The takeaway, via a Time Inc. presentation that has circulated among publishers: “our destiny with readers, advertisers and distributors … [is] in our hands.”

Of course, there are plenty of hurdles facing the joint venture, starting with the fact that media joint ventures have a checkered record at best (though Hearst and Condé, for instance, have already partnered on Comag, a wholesale distribution company). But there are bigger problems for Squires and company. For instance:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll  have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

But publishers feel they’ve got nothing to lose by trying. “We know that traditional magazines are going away, and that magazines on the Web don’t work,” says a publishing executive working on the plan. “But this gives us a chance to serve the reader who will pay for content, and provide advertising that really works. Can you think of a better idea?”

It doesn’t. Except when it does.

Contrary to News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch’s comments earlier in the week, Dow Jones will not be charging customers who subscribe to both its Web and print versions a weekly fee to read the paper on its iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

But if you’re only subscribing to one version? That’ll be a buck a week, starting Oct. 24. The Journal will also start charging mobile-only users $2 a week, which is essentially the same price as a Web-only subscription.

That second charge makes some sense to me. The Journal has always said that it would start charging for the apps it makes for Apple’s (AAPL) and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) handsets. Right now these apps are gratis, which means you can either pay the Journal to read it in print or on the Web, or read it on your iPhone and pay zilch. That had to change at some point.

But while I have to be a tiny bit delicate here–Dow Jones owns this Web site, and I still have some aversion to insulting my employers in public–I don’t see how dunking paying customers a second time makes sense.

I do understand some of the impulse. Publishers of all stripes seem to think that while charging for content on the Web is tough, people are happy to pay for something delivered wirelessly. I think that many publishers are going to be very disappointed when they try this out in practice, but that’s another story.

And I also know that News Corp. has steadily been pushing Dow Jones to raise its subscription prices for the WSJ since it acquired the company, and this strategy sort of dovetails with that.

But seems to me that if I am paying for information, I will expect to consume it wherever I am, at the same price. And you’re starting to hear some publishers say the same thing–see Variety’s comments about subscription plans today in PaidContent.

I don’t actually pay for my WSJ subscription; my employers, who, I should stress, are truly excellent people, have hooked me up–so maybe I’ve got this wrong. Or maybe it’s merely a marketing issue: If you jack up my WSJ subscription and tell me you’re throwing in access to the mobile app for free, I might be okay with it.

But tell me you’re charging me an additional fee to read it on the go and it will stick in my craw. Let’s see if the paper’s paying subscribers feel the same way.

That projection comes from a survey of Web users that Internet analyst Imran Khan commissioned last month. Khan’s survey found that 37 percent of respondents were familiar with the Kindle. And of that group, five percent said they already owned one of the devices, and another 15 percent said they expect to buy one within the next year. Extrapolating those results for the U.S. population, Khan figures that Kindle ownership will hit 10 million in the next 12 months. (Click chart to enlarge)

OK. But what if Amazon (AMZN) dropped its proprietary ebook format, a supposed weakness that competitors Sony (SNE) and Plastic Logic are trying to take advantage of by agreeing to use an open, common standard? Won’t matter that much, say Khan’s respondents: Only 15 percent of people who say they don’t plan to buy a Kindle cite format issues as a concern. I’m surprised the number is that high.

On a related note: Whatever happened to Amazon’s plan to work with the New York Times (NYT) and the Washington Post (WPO) to bundle newspaper subscriptions with its jumbo-sized Kindle DX reader?

When Amazon unveiled the DX in May, it briefly mentioned plans to sell the $489 machine at a discount to people who bought subscriptions to the Times, Post or Boston Globe, but didn’t say much more than that. Details were supposed to be released “this summer.”

Now we’re midway through August and we haven’t heard a peep about the program. What gives? I asked Amazon, the Times and the Post, and none of them had anything to say–save for a comment from a Post rep who said that the subscription-plus-discount offer would be “a small experiment.”

Good news, Boston Globe fans: Your paper is going to remain extant. Probably.

Bad news, Boston Globe editorial workers: You’re getting a 23 percent pay cut.

That’s the fallout after the Globe’s Newspaper Guild rejected management’s previous offer, which would have involved an 8.4 percent pay cut, which was made at the behest of the New York Times (NYT), which owns the Globe.

The Times had previously said that it needed to cut the Globe’s costs by $20 million or it would fold the paper, because it was on track to lose $85 million this year. The new cuts, announced today, will get the paper to its cost-cutting goal, so everything’s cool. For now.

Here’s Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis’ statement, via…the Boston Globe:

“Because we have achieved the $20 million in savings we needed, we do not foresee closure at this time and are focused on executing the Globe’s turnaround plan.”

We all know tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be printed on paper, but delivered via the Internet. The question for today’s publishers is whether consumers are going read them on smart phones like Apple’s iPhone or the Kindle from Amazon (AMZN).

But that shouldn’t be a question at all, argues Martin Langveld at Nieman Lab: Smart phones are winning this one running away.

And, I agree.

Langveld’s piece is worth reading, but I can sum it up here: If you’re a hardcore book or magazine person,  perhaps you’ll carry a Kindle or similar device around. But everyone has a phone on them already, and they’re already using them to read stuff online. The New York Times (NYT) says it’s generating 60 million mobile page views a month, up 100 percent in the last year.

And while Langveld’s post doesn’t get into this, I’ve yet to figure out the appeal of reading newspapers on a Kindle, or any of the other e-readers I’ve fondled to date. Yes, the screen is bigger, but it to me the experience is an unhappy compromise between print and the Web.

(I do understand why publishers are so eager to get consumers to read their papers on e-readers–they think that if they can reproduce a newspaper-like experience, they can reproduce newspaper economics, where they get money for both subscriptions and advertising. But future technology won’t revive extinct business models.)

Kindle-like readers will get better over over time. Screens will get lighter and more flexible, and add color and video capabilities, and navigation will get less clumsy.

But that could be many years from now–while more and more people become used to reading anything and everything from their handsets–$99 iPhone from Apple (AAPL), anyone? If you’re still in the newspaper business, and think you will be in a year or two, you’d better figure out to get your stuff on my phone, right now.

[Image credit: Paolo Camera]

CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated that position, which he’s already made a couple times this year, in an interview with the Financial Times. Though Schmidt did allow that Google (GOOG) had at least mulled the idea at one point, which will be old news to MediaMemo readers:

FT: Would you ever consider buying a newspaper; they’re cheap right now?

ES: We’ve actually looked at this and we’re trying to avoid crossing the line between the infrastructure and technology that Google provides and the content that our partners provide. There is a line and we’re trying to stay on our side it.

Hey, why does that sound familiar? Ah, that’s right.

I’m told that while Google execs have brought up the notion of snapping up distressed newspapers using its huge cash hoard within the past year, those talks have never gotten serious. It’s hard to see how they could: Google has emphatically stayed out of the content business so far, and it’s unclear why it would change direction now–and invest in a shrinking industry at the same time.

Schmidt and the FT also recovered other material that’s been out for a bit, including the search giant’s talks with the Washington Post (WPO), and presumably, the New York Times (NYT), about some kind of collaboration. In this case, Schmidt refers vaguely to “online news versions that somehow address the immediate needs of people and for which advertising works better.”

And while he was at it, Schmidt didn’t hold out hope for rekindling a  Yahoo/Google search deal. Which is good, since Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) look like they’re close to getting something done: “…never say never in business. Carol [Bartz, Yahoo chief executive], of course, is a very, very able and strong CEO and my sense is that she’s very focused on getting Yahoo back to its former glory, which is a great project.”

A few weeks ago I sat down with Josh Marshall, the journalist/entrepreneur behind Talking Points Memo, and had a great chat about news, new media and the business of running a self-funded Web site. But my notes and video have sat on my hard drive since then, for no other reason than I never got around to publishing them.

Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for the kick in the pants I needed: Over the weekend, the New York Times (NYT) columnist has given Marshall a huge, if unintended, endorsement by borrowing his work and then getting caught.

After an initial attempt by Dowd to explain away the similarity between her work and his, the Times is now running a correction on Dowd’s Sunday column, noting that she “failed to attribute a paragraph” to Marshall.

You’ll read plenty more about this on the Web over the next few days, if you’re inclined. But it would be a shame if that’s the only thing you know about Marshall’s site, which is an interesting hybrid of politically focused reporting, commentary, and aggregation/blogging.

And I do mean a mix: If you just glimpse quickly at his site, you might think it’s the same grouping of links and headlines that you can find anywhere else on the Web. But Marshall was a real reporter prior to starting the site and his 12-person staff does real reporting. Its best work, to date, was uncovering the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorneys scandal in 2007, which led to prestigious Polk Award in 2008.

Just as interesting: It’s a profitable business that has never taken outside investment and until recently, has made almost all of its money by relying on ad networks. The most effective ad network, says Marshall: Google’s AdSense. See! Google (GOOG) really does support content!

More recently, Marshall has hired Yahoo (YHOO) vet Diane Rinaldo to serve as the company’s first real ad rep, trying to translate the site’s one million (give or take) monthly unique readers into more significant revenue. That’s alleged to be a real challenge since advertisers are supposedly loath to touch political content. But then again, start-up blogs aren’t supposed to do real journalism–or act as unattributed contributors to the country’s most prestigious newspaper.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090518/meet-maureen-dowds-favorite-writer-talking-points-memos-josh-marshall/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/#comments Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:26:03 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6232 This is what passes for good news in the newspaper business these days: Someone bought some shares of one of the industry’s biggest companies.

That revelation is supposedly what goosed shares in Gannett (GCI) 34 percent today. The problem with that theory: The same news–that Ariel Investments LLC had more than doubled its stake in the company, from 4.5 to 12.5 percent–had already caused Gannett shares to jump 39 percent last Thursday when the news was first disclosed.

The more obvious and less savory reason for Gannett’s share swings today, as noted by Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen:  a short squeeze. About 30 percent of the company’s shares are shorted, and now that GCI shares are down in the $5 range–less than a year ago, they traded above $31–you’re likely to see this kind of volatility on any given day.

In any case, the excitement appears to be over: As I type this, GCI shares are back down to the $4 level, just a bit above where they opened this morning.

If you’re looking for actual news about Gannett’s performance, you can tune in on Thursday, when the company releases its quarterly report card. Or you can read this prediction from The Wall Street Journal, which wins the concision award–spoiler alert!–with this headline: “Gannett Earnings Set To Show Depth Of Industry’s Decline.”

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090413/gannetts-good-news-comes-and-goes-very-quickly/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090406/ap-shakes-fist-at-google-tells-internet-to-get-off-its-damn-lawn/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090406/ap-shakes-fist-at-google-tells-internet-to-get-off-its-damn-lawn/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:01:48 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6018

The Associated Press is fed up with… the Internet, apparently. And it’s going to do… something about it.

At the news-gathering co-op’s annual meeting today, AP chairman Dean Singleton let rip a sort of hellfire-and-brimstone speech in which he announced the AP’s vague plans to stop unnamed scoundrels from making money from their work.

The relevant bit:

“[The AP's board has] unanimously decided to take all actions necessary to protect the content of the Associated Press and the AP Digital Cooperative from misappropriation on the Internet.

The board also unanimously agreed to work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and who reward the cooperative for its vast newsgathering efforts–and to seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t.

We believe all of your newspapers will join our battle to protect our content and receive appropriate compensation for it.

AP and its member newspapers and broadcast associate members are the source of most of the news content being created in the world today. We must be paid fully and fairly.”

If this sounds like the AP is riffing off the famous speech from “Network,” that’s not an accident. In fact, Dean Singleton does indeed quote the movie’s Howard Beale in his remarks: “We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories. We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more.”

In theory, Singleton and the AP are talking about a wide range of sites that profit by repurposing someone else’s content, from down-and-dirty “scraping sites” to the much more refined (and useful) Huffington Post, to… I don’t know.

But now it’s become much clearer why News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch singled out Google (GOOG) in remarks he made at a cable industry convention last week: The news guys have decided that the search engine has now become public enemy No. 1. That makes a sort of sense: If you’re going to go after someone, pick the guy with the deepest pockets.

And look. Unlike some of my bloggy colleagues, I don’t think that the people who pay to produce content are insane to complain about getting ripped off by aggregators of all stripes.

The thing is, even if the news guys somehow stopped people from using Google to find information they need, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the essential problems plaguing their business. Such as:

• An overabundance of undifferentiated, commodity information.
• The wholesale evaporation of classified advertising and local retail advertising.
• Investors who paid too much for newspapers and other media assets during the last 10 years, using too much debt.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to hearing more about the AP’s plans, vaguely referred to in this press release as developing “a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used…” and including “the development of new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news.”

You mean, they’re going to build their own search engine? That can’t be right. But if I hear back from the AP folks, I’ll try to get them to explain.

UPDATE: Thanks to Jim Kennedy VP/director of strategic planning for the AP, for teasing some of this out for me. Here’s what the AP is thinking:

• Kennedy confirmed that some of the AP’s ire is indeed aimed at Google, and that the drum-beating has a purpose. The search engine has a deal with the AP that expires at the end of this year, and the AP is setting the table for upcoming negotiations. Their main contention: Google is already using AP content in ways that aren’t covered by the existing agreement, and the AP wants to be compensated for them. Expect to hear lots more about this in future months.
• The AP’s “stick” approach is aimed at Web aggregators: It plans on “fingerprinting” its content so it can track where its stuff is showing up and how it’s being used. If it’s being misused, it has an array of options that start with a takedown notice and end with legal remedies.
• The AP’s carrot approach is aimed at Web surfers: It will become an aggregator of its own content. Specifically, it plans on building search engine-friendly Web pages built around specific topics — say, “Fargo floods” or “Michelle Obama” — composed of links that direct readers to AP stories. The idea is to get the pages to show up high in a Google search, alongside, or higher than, similar pages from Web aggregators who are doing the same thing — like Wikipedia, Huffington Post, BusinessWeek, Mahalo, and on and on and on. Kennedy says it has built prototypes of the aggregator pages and plans on rolling them out in the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, note to the AP folks: You are aware at Howard Beale gets shot to death at the end of the movie, right?

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090406/ap-shakes-fist-at-google-tells-internet-to-get-off-its-damn-lawn/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/#comments Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:58:27 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5763

Two thoughts on the Huffington Post’s newly announced $1.75 million “Huffington Post Investigative Fund”:

• It took a while, but Arianna Huffington has finally agreed to start paying her writers. Not the army of bloggers who contribute to the site, mind you. But the fund’s money is earmarked for “10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers,” she tells the AP. I predict that they’ll also have to hire an admin to deal with the deluge of pitches and resumes.
• The fund won’t solve the gaping hole opening up in American journalism: The disappearing beat writers who used to cover important but unsexy topics day in and day out, like health care, education or municipal government. But it does provide a nice parallel for the role of “investigative journalism” at most newspapers over the past couple decades: specialized, high-profile projects that didn’t have a commercial payoff and were underwritten by the papers’ other sections.

And one other thought: It’s easy enough to be cynical about this venture, but a lot of it sounds appealing, at least in theory. I’m particularly interested in the notion that the fund’s output “will be free for any media outlet to publish simultaneously.” Look forward to seeing the results.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090330/huffington-post-pays-for-content-after-all-via-175-million-investigative-fund/feed/ 0 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/ http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/#comments Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:40:44 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=5183

Everyone who wondered why Randy Falco and Ron Grant were still running AOL gets an answer: Time Warner (TWX) was lining up their replacement.

Google (GOOG) sales chief Tim Armstrong becomes chairman and CEO of the troubled Web property, effective immediately.

The move is getting immediate cheers from current and former AOL employees I’ve talked to. The snap consensus is that anyone would have been better than Falco, a longtime NBC executive, and Grant, who was Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes’s chief lieutenant before being elevated to his role as President and COO of AOL.

But they’re particularly happy to see a sales guy running the organization: AOL once had a much admired sales operation. But in recent years, the group has been roiled, as a series of sales chiefs came and went. (From Kara Swisher, here are more details on the shakeup, and an interview with Armstrong. And here’s some early betting on Armstrong’s replacement at Google — former Doubleclick CEO David Rosenblatt has a lot of fans).

The current AOL sales chief, former Yahoo (YHOO) sales boss Greg Coleman, was installed just last month. He’s been deep into a reorg of his own.

It was desperately needed after AOL’s miserable performance in 2008, which concluded with a quarter that saw ad revenue drop 18 percent. But those plans may be up in the air now.

In any case, here is the full press release from Time Warner about the firing of Falco and Grant, after the jump:

NEW YORK, March 12, 2009–Tim Armstrong, Google Senior Vice President, has been named Chairman and CEO of AOL, LLC, Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:TWX) Chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes announced today. Current AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco and President and COO Ron Grant plan to leave the company after a transition period.

In making the announcement Mr. Bewkes said: “Tim is the right executive to move AOL into the next phase of its evolution. At Google, Armstrong helped build one of the most successful media teams in the history of the Internet–helping to make Google the most popular online search advertising platform in the world for direct and brand marketers. He’s an advertising pioneer with a stellar reputation and proven track record. We are privileged to have him preside over AOL as its audience and programming businesses continue to grow and its advertising platform expands globally. He’ll also be helpful in helping Time Warner determine the optimal structure for AOL.”

Tim Armstrong said: “I’m very excited about the opportunities presented in leading AOL. AOL has a wide-ranging set of assets and audience. The company is well positioned to enhance those assets into a larger share of the Internet audience and advertiser communities. AOL and Google have been partners for years and I look forward to collaborating with Jeff Bewkes and his team as we explore the right structure and future for AOL.”

Mr. Bewkes added: “Randy led AOL in its transition from a subscription business to an audience business. Under Randy and Ron, AOL’s programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories. They also assembled Platform-A, the number one display ad network in the U.S. with a reach of more than 90%. They also aggressively cut costs as they restructured the Audience business portion of the company into three distinct operating units: People Networks, MediaGlow, and Platform-A. As Randy and Ron move on, they leave AOL with our gratitude and appreciation for remaking the company and bringing it to a new and promising level.”

Tim Armstrong was a member of Google’s Operating Committee and served as the president of the Americas Operations. Under the Americas Operations, Armstrong’s team managed publishers and advertisers’ relationships and platforms with some of the world’s most widely recognized media and agency brands.  Armstrong started at Google in the year 2000 and opened the first office outside of the Mountain View, CA headquarters.

Mr. Armstrong joined Google from Snowball.com, where he was vice president of sales and strategic partnerships. Prior to his role at Snowball.com, he served as director of integrated sales & marketing at Starwave’s and Disney’s ABC/ESPN Internet Ventures, working across the companies’ Internet, TV, radio, and print properties. He started his career by co-founding and running a newspaper based in Boston, MA, before joining IDG to launch their first consumer Internet magazine, I-Way.

Mr. Armstrong sits on the boards of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Advertising Council, and the Advertising Research Foundation, and is a trustee at Connecticut College and Lawrence Academy. He is a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s MediaNYC 2020 committee.  He is a graduate of Connecticut College, with a double major in economics and sociology.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090312/aol-gets-a-new-ceo-google-sales-boss-tim-armstrong/feed/ 4