This company isn’t new, but starting Tuesday, Local.com will begin offering a new service aimed at local advertisers. According to an Online Media Daily report, the company’s “Local Verified” service gives businesses the option of paying an annual fee to secure placement at the top of its localized search results.

“We’re focused on offering businesses of all sizes multiple local search options, from standard CPMs and banners, to completely free listings,” said Jennifer Black, the search engine’s vice president of marketing.

According to comScore, almost half of consumers who used a local search Web site visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, highlighting the efficacy of local search as a source to drive traffic and sales.

Paying $249 for a premium listing with Local.com provides smaller businesses with a cost-effective alternative to the primary search engine’s local ad models–allowing them to “play with the big boys” in the online ad landscape, Black said.

This is the kind of application that poses the real threat to local media companies, for advertisers don’t care about being linked to content; they just want to find customers. While media companies argue about the sanctity of their content, the internet pureplays are coming in and taking away local revenue. Why local media companies can’t see this is beyond me.

The solution is for us to enter this world — not with our brands — but as internet pureplays ourselves, only done from a local perspective. Local.com has a nice name, but they are far from local.

Here we have a fascinating interview from Reason Online (Free Minds and Free Markets) with Jonathan Rauch that’s worth a read. Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal magazine in Washington, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and the author of several books, including Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (2004), Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government (1994), and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993).

The interview is worth a read for a couple of reasons. One, the guy makes some interesting and provocative statements about the current state of journalism, and, two, for all his arguments in favor of free minds, he’s generally reflective of the prototypical Big J journalist. I find this fascinating.

reason: What do you think about the state of political reporting these days?

Rauch: It depends on what you mean by “political reporting.” If you mean people who are actually spending their lives going out and gathering political news, following politicians around, manning the stakeouts, trying to understand what’s going on in the capitols, then the situation is very good.

There’s a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers — I don’t exempt myself — who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.

reason: What about media more generally? Do you worry about consolidation of ownership?

Rauch: It’s in an intellectually healthy situation and a fiscally not-so-healthy situation, and that’s what I’m worried about. I’m not one of those who yearns for the days when we had three networks doing half-hour newscasts telling us all that they thought we should know. I’m not nostalgic for the days when we covered political conventions for two days straight live on national TV. I’m much happier in a world with multiple sources and more individual ability to pick and choose.

What I worry about is what everyone in my business worries about : Who’s going to fund the real reporting? The magazine and newspaper business was a cross-subsidy. You had the advertising, particularly classified, and you had a local market, which subsidized the gathering of news. That model is breaking down because the bundle is breaking into pieces and it’s hard to see in the long run who funds the kind of large-scale news reporting operations that the major papers have run if the advertising is all going online and if people can all get the news for free at Yahoo.

I’m guessing that 30 years from now, we’ll get to something that’s economically sustainable. I hope that’s the case, but I’m not liking the way the transition is looking. I’m not liking the fact that foreign bureaus are being closed left and right and I’m also not particularly liking the fact that it seems to be that that for a lot of young journalists the model is to get past reporting and into commentary as fast as your feet will take you.

There are a couple of things that require comment: one, the notion of “real reporting” and, two, this idea of journalistic parasites.

There’s something truly, well, special about the phrase “real reporting,” and while I understand what Rauch is talking about, it still has that institutional ring that shouts of elitism and entitlement. This idea — this paradigm of separation — is what’s being challenged by the personal media revolution, and the thought that these two can co-exist is quite problematic. One is top-down; the other is bottom-up, and while their goals may be different, they both provide material for a public that has limited time.

As I’ve written before, the best the institutional press can hope for in the new world is that of conversation starter, a role for which they are ideally suited. This is a lot different than the current definition, because it begins with the assumption that the conversation will continue.

Hence, the “parasites” to which Rauch refers are actually partners in the on-going development of the story. This may not make the pros feel and warm and fuzzy, but it’s a role they’d do well to consider.

Jeff Jarvis has a fascinating post today (The Unbearable Weight of Insfrastructure) that looks back on his few days at the NAB and concludes that the infrastucture of the news business is its Achilles’ Heel. This, too, is part of the evolving professional news hegemony, and I hope we have the brains to pay attention.

If you get rid of the presses and the trucks and the broadcast towers and the headquarters buildings and the fancy equipment and the old-time stars, if you kill the infrastructure, you are left with more resources for journalism — and savings in the face of reduced revenue in a suddenly competitive marketplace — and the bottom line is a and more efficient and sustainable business.

Infrastructure is the enemy of journalism.

Ah, but you say, what about editors and correspondents? If they’re vital, they’re not infrastructure. If they are not vital, then they are merely expenses and you must get rid of them.

Infrastructure is the enemy.

I realize that these are not the types of things that — as we used to say in evangelical circles — “sell a lot of tapes.” However, this is exactly the kind of medicine we need to take in order to find our place in the new world. What’s real and what isn’t? Who’s a parasite and who’s not?

It isn’t all or nothing, and it isn’t us versus them.

People often gasp when I tell them that advertising is content in the Media 2.0 world. But take a look at the monthly “most-viewed” section of YouTube, and you’ll find over half are ads. This is because the advertising community is catching on that originality and creativity will put their clients in front of the eyeballs of potential customers.

Gone are the days when advertising only had to be in the right place at the right time, a la the Media 1.0 world.

This has fairly significant ramifications for television, because ads are content in an on-demand world, and sometimes that content is better than the programs that the ads support on TV.

One example is the hilarious Jack Links Original Beef Jerky “Messin’ with Sasquatch” series. Here is a company without an enormous advertising budget whose ads leave people wanting more. YouTube serves them all, and the viewership numbers are pretty stout, especially for a segment that’s internet-only (for obvious reasons) called “The Water Bowl.”

I don’t know if this stuff will sell more beef jerky, but there’s a lesson here for everybody. Advertising is content in Media 2.0.

(Also viewable at Super Deluxe and other places)

There is a fascinating discussion underway via the web that has absolutely profound implications for the world of journalism. You can tune in here for the summary by Jeff Jarvis, and I won’t begin to rewrite Jeff’s excellent overview.

In a nutshell, Wired Magazine is doing a story about Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. Michael’s a lightning rod, and my guess is Wired finds this interesting. Wired wants to interview others about Arrington, including Jason Calacanis and Dave Winer, both of whom know him well. Well, Jason and Dave want the interviews done via email, a technique I personally find increasingly useful. Wired doesn’t want that, and so the whole matter is being openly discussed in the blogosphere and eventually, one hopes, in the mainstream press.

Here’s part of what Winer wrote to the Wired reporter:

“Not generally doing interviews these days. If you have a few questions, send them along, and if I have something to say, I’ll write a blog post, which of course you’re free to quote. Sorry that’s about the best I can do.”

Here’s a portion of the Calacanis reply:

I’m an email guy like dave winer.. And I own my words as well, and often print them on my blog (after stories come out).

A wired writer who won’t do an email interview–thats ironic!

Frankly, you need to adapt. Journalists have misquoted people for so long–and quoted them out of context that many people like to have their words on record.

I don’t want someone taking half a sentence or paraphrasing me… Just too much risk.

Besides I have 10,000 people come to my blog every day–i don’t need wired to talk to the tech industry.

What’s emerging in the world of news is that the empowerment of the individual now makes it possible for the interviewee to publish the entire interview him or herself, thereby providing a “check” on the spin of the interviewer. This is something new in the world of journalism, and it’s especially helpful to people who’ve been burned by reporters.

You have to sit back and think about this for a minute, because such a concept completely upsets the idea of an objective press. If, after all, objectivity is what matters, then why would anyone fear their whole interview being published? If it’s all about “just the facts, ma’am,” then why would any professional journalist care?

The problem is that’s all crap, and this idea blows the curtain away from whatever was left of the concept of objectivity in the press. It never was real. Reporters want (in fact, think they have a right) to infer meaning from the tone of interviews and have the liberty to embellish paraphrase quotes for the sake of the story.

It’s all about control, folks, not facts.

Think about your own life as a journalist. How comfortable would you be if everyone you interviewed was able to publish the raw interview in some form? You wouldn’t, because YOU’RE the one telling “the story.” It’s YOUR story, right? (Did you see/read MY story last night?) You need the ability to interject quotes as you see fit in telling “the story,” because “the story” is what you say it is.

This is why this whole business of defending the professional press in the wake of the personal media revolution is so problematic. The rules simply have changed. The deer have guns.

We’re going to have to learn to do things differently.

Oops, some offensive language has slipped into my blog. What ever will I do?

Below is a screen grab of a piece in PCWorld by John Dunn of Techworld. It really does hack me off.

Blogs now infested with offensive content? A variety of unpleasant content, including porn, offensive language, hate posting, and malware? Give me a friggin’ break!

The truth is the story doesn’t justify the headline, but we all know that the headline is what sells the story. Its about Scansafe’s Monthly Global Threat Report for March 2007, from which a few juicy quotes were lifted. Up to 80% of the web’s blogs, for example, contain some form of offensive content, according to Scansafe. Of course, to make the list, the company had to pick up just ONE word considered profanity in order to broadbrush the site as “offensive.”

My problem with this is Dunn’s headline and sub-head, which will enter the language of those who already believe blogs to be a blight on our culture.

And so it goes…

This week, Steve and I look at newspapers, David Halberstam, Dave Winer, MySpace and Forrester’s “Technographics.” Enjoy the newsletter.

“To everything is a season…a time to mourn, and a time to dance…” Ecclesiastes, Chapter three.

One year ago this morning, I awoke at 3:30 to find my beloved wife, Alicia, dead on the bathroom floor. She was so young, so vibrant, and so full of life that her death was an incredible shock. Over-the-counter cough medicine she was taking interacted with pain medication she also took, and it just shut down her breathing. Readers who’ve been with me for awhile remember that morning well.

This event profoundly changed my life in many ways, and I’ve been sharing a lot of that with you from the beginning. I’ve learned so much about tragedy and grieving and life and death over the past year, and I want to offer some of that on this, the first anniversary of her passing.

The most important lesson is that what happens to us in life isn’t nearly as important as how we react to what happens to us in life. That is the only thing about events over which we actually have control, and it is the secret to re-entering life’s continual flow in the wake of tragedy. Alicia died that morning. She crossed over to that place about which we know so little. She misses nothing. She is gone. She is at peace.

The death of a loved one, therefore, isn’t so much about them and their loss as it is about us and our loss. We may weep for lost potential and the like, but the reality is we really weep for ourselves. And that’s okay. There’s a time for mourning.

Let me begin by saying I miss her, and I think I always will. The truth is I don’t want NOT to miss her, for that — like so many other acts of self-protection — would leave me in bad shape forever. I need to stay soft-hearted, and that’s a challenge. I think this is one of the keys to grieving. We want so badly to stop hurting that we’ll do anything to end the pain, including fooling ourselves. We build shells. We blame. We make decisions that leave us in a constant state of mourning, and that is a bar to healing.

“…a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”

My counselor, Ken Druck (the guy who led grief counseling for the government after 9/11), told me, “Terry, you have to go THROUGH this. You can’t avoid it. You can’t keep it at a distance. You can’t go around it, over it, or underneath it. You must go THROUGH it.” I can tell you I didn’t want to go through it, but I let myself go and did, and the result is a person much healthier than if I’d still be denying by avoiding.

Time does heal the wounds, the shock, and the unrelenting emptiness. But here’s the thing: it requires cooperation in wanting to be healed. Unfortunately, a lot of people would rather be sick than face the truth of their loss.

Some people think that non-stop mourning is a romantic way of honoring our dead loved ones, but it’s really not. It’s just an exercise in self protection, because the pain of reality is too much. The truth is a lot of people just aren’t able to let go enough to live their lives AS THEIR LOVED ONES WOULD WANT THEM TO LIVE. As Ken taught me, the way we honor our loved ones is by living on. “She’s dead, Terry. You’re not, and she really wouldn’t want you to live your life in a form of death.”

“…a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”

Six months after her death, I went to visit her grave. I wrote a poem, which I read to her there. It’s far too personal to share its entirety, but here are a couple of lines:

Goodbye, sweetLove. Farewell and be at peace.
You know my heart, how I had rather this day never come.
And while I know we shall meet again, it cannot be the same.
For beyond the veil we are changed, different,
No need to cling the way we did here.
For death is the end of that and the beginning of that which is new.
You are there already, but I am still here.

So…I let you go now, into the mist of yesterday.
Yet the door to your room in my heart will never lock,
And if perchance your solace I need, you’ll find me there.
For your love will forever strengthen me.

Some ask how I can share this kind of deeply personal stuff, but the truth is I have no choice. While many people blessed me a year ago — both professional and otherwise — it was the words of my neighbor that helped the most. He’d gone through a similar fate a few years earlier, and I was able to glean valuable insight from him.

His first words were, “I’m sorry you have to go through this, Terry.” Those are the words of one who’d been there before, and I found that remarkably comforting. He never said, “There, there. It’ll be all right.” He told me how long it would take, that it would get better, but that life had put me in a situation that I had no choice but to accept.

“…a time to mourn, and a time to dance…”

Those of you who’ve followed my writings over the years will know that I believe in the concept of shared experiences. It’s very postmodern, and I think it’s one of the great hopes for the culture of tomorrow. Technology will enable it, and one day we’ll have access to all kinds of shared experiences. That will be a blessing to humankind.

Like it or not, the loss of a very close loved one will happen to each of us — you included — and I hope these words will be a help those who read them.

So today I remember, not Allie’s death but her life. That’s what she would want, and I know that wherever she is right now, she’s smiling, because her husband, her man, her best friend, the love of her life has found a new sense of wholeness and is dancing once again.

(A NOTE ON CLOSURE. Feel free to drop me a line, if you’d like to share your thoughts, but I’ve decided to close this post to comments. I just want leave it as is and not solicit public feedback. As she always used to say, “It is what it is.”)

Here is the latest in the ongoing series of essays, TV News in a Postmodern World. This one — To Brand or Not to Brand — deals with an issue that seems to come up wherever I go, the conflict over how to brand (if at all) the various components of a viable web strategy. It’s controversial, because our intuition and instincts suggest we should slap our brand on everything we do. However, the laws of the web are often contrary to those instincts, and so we must challenge our assumptions at every level in the creation and implementation of businesses online.

At AR&D, we recommend what we call a Simulpathâ„¢ strategy for local media companies, one that splits business concepts into those that best fit with the mass marketing models of Media 1.0 and the other that fits with the direct marketing models of Media 2.0. Our instincts about branding these various businesses must be in line with the nature of each path, and that can a be difficult concept for broadcasters.

We must always remember than we’re television stations in the real world, with competition we can see simply by changing the channel. Online, however, we’re just a URL - a single pixel on an enormous canvas that makes up the whole of the web. Marketing here can be a very different animal.

Nielsen NetRatings and comScore have both responded to the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “request” for an open audit of their methodologies and to acquire accreditation by the Media Ratings Council. Here’s the comScore press release, and here’s Nielsen NetRatings response.

Let me save you the trouble and paraphrase: comScore, “We’re already being reviewed by another group and will release our findings shortly.” NetRatings, “We’re already going above and beyond what you’re asking.”

I was pretty encouraged by all this, because I support what the IAB is trying to accomplish. But while the two companies may have expressed an interest in dialog with the IAB, I wouldn’t bet the ranch on anything cooperative soon.

The blame game is underway at full steam in the Virginia Tech massacre. This was not unexpected, of course; it’s what we do in our culture.

While we have lots of choices, I thought I’d offer two for your consideration.

The first is a brilliant piece (What the Killers Want) from the Sunday Washington Post by Lionel Shriver, the author of “We Need To Talk About Kevin.” The book is a novel about a school shooting, and Shriver is getting some of the blame. Her views are relevant, because she researched all school shootings before writing the book, and her insight is chilling.

Like me, she questions NBC’s giving the killer what he wanted, although she, too, admits that this is just the way it is in our culture:

Even more than these gruesomely gratuitous incidents themselves, I have come to dread the campus shooting’s ritual media aftermath — a secondary wave of atrocity, all conducted under the guise of grief, soul-searching concern and an ostensible determination to ensure that no demented loner ever opens fire on his classmates again. Yet the bloated photographs on front pages, the repeating loops of interviews on cable news, the postings of warped creative writing assignments on the Web, and perhaps above all the airing of Cho’s self-pitying, quasi-messianic video clips on every network all help ensure that similar incidents will indeed recur — and soon.

…the one motivation that seems to tie all these misguided characters together is a yearning for media recognition. In an era that has lost touch with the distinction between fame and infamy, so driving is the need to be noticed — for any reason — that even posthumous attention will do…

…the most obvious ounce of prevention would be to stop allowing the likes of Cho to play the media like a piano…

Shriver raises profound cultural issues, even though she, too, has been a part of the media fascination with such events through her book about Kevin. It’s a good read, whatever you think of her.

Meanwhile, the most disgusting finger-pointed comes from that bastion of purity, the American Family Association. This video, The Day They Kicked God out of the Schools, is worth watching, simply because it evidences the depth of depravity to which the religious right has sunk in its efforts to right what it views as wrongs in our culture. We can bitch and complain all we want about Islamic extremists and the threat “they” pose to freedom, but until we stand up to these profoundly deluded and hypocritical folks, our complaints are just public smoke blowing.

And to use such events as Blacksburg to raise money for their cause — at a time when the whole nation is still grieving — is beyond my ability to comprehend as a spiritual man. These organizations need events like this to justify their extremist beliefs and to push the cause forward. In media parlance, Blacksburg is a blockbuster to them, a fundraising bonanza that they can hold up to their supporters and say, “See?”

Take your pick.

Gail Shister, Philadelphia Inquirer:

CBS executives deny it, but there’s a growing feeling within the network that Katie Couric is an expensive, unfixable mistake.

So unfixable that Couric - the first woman to anchor a network nightly newscast solo - may leave CBS Evening News, probably after the 2008 presidential elections, to assume another role at the network, CBS sources say.

Or Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune:

“Someone told me recently that someone criticized the way I held my hands when I stood. I mean it’s just ridiculous. … But I’ve gotten a ton of support, too, and sometimes I think it’s important to not be too consumed by this small community of TV writers and people in the business, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of the public at large.”

The public, which swarmed to her debut last September, initially fueling unrealistic expectations about her prospects of quickly lifting CBS out of the cellar, is still eyeing her warily, if Nielsen ratings are to be believed.

“These things build slowly,” Couric said, noting she’s “kind of circumspect and sanguine about the whole thing.”

Take your pick.

I’m speaking Saturday at a gathering of the Lone Star EMMY Chapter and Texas AAJA “Achieving Excellence in New Media” conference. It’ll be held in Addison in Splash Media’s high tech control room and broadcast studio dedicated to new media (something I’m looking forward to seeing). Here’s the description of my hour long session:

Heaton describes trends in merging traditional media with the latest internet trends. Participants will learn skills to navigate the new media landscape.

If you’re in the area, check out the details at the Lone Star EMMY site. Seating is limited.

And if you’re there and you read about it here, please say hello.

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal contains a graphic I want to share to restate a theme central to the vision we’re trying to share with local media companies here at AR&D.

The article is about the slowing growth in online ad revenue for the newspaper industry and how that suggests advertisers are moving money online but NOT to the coffers of the newspaper industry. It’s an interesting read, but take a close look at the graphic called “Losing Ground.”

While local media companies continue to slug it out with each other, this illustrates that the internet pureplay companies are the real enemy in the quest for LOCAL ad dollars. TV stations will look at this and say, “Hey, everybody, we grew 5.2%!” But look at the paltry 7.1% share and contrast that with the pureplays who own almost 40% of the market and grew at a 22% clip. Directory companies (Yellow Pages) are trending downward, but they still take over 11% of the local pie.

Let me repeat what I believe is THE most important truth about local Media 2.0: the real enemy here is the internet pureplays, driven by the personal media revolution. Unless and until we can get our minds around that, we’ll never create the kinds of local online businesses necessary to compete.

One of the biggest frustrations our clients face is trying to establish reliable measurements from which they can “sell” their websites. This isn’t a recent thing, as anybody familiar with the web would know. The best source of a site’s traffic ought to be its own log files, but third-party measurement companies — such as Nielsen NetRatings and comScore — provide other statistics to ad agencies and advertisers.

And just last week, they announced an imminent end to the page view as an ad metric.

According to a report from Online Media Daily, the Interactive Advertising Bureau is now asking that these companies submit to a third-party audit of their methodologies, so that standards can be set and maintained.

Although the IAB has spent years pushing the two major Web audience measurement services, an audit by the independent Media Rating Council is more likely now because there’s a sense of urgency and greater industry support, said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB since January. The issue of bad metrics, he said, was the resounding issue that IAB members named when he assumed the job.

“The IAB and the MRC have been asking for this since 1999 and they haven’t even established a timetable,” said Rothenberg, alluding to the measurement firms. “Tensions are running high as the Internet becomes the center of all marketing.”

While the “secret sauce” of these companies isn’t completely known, we do know that part of their data comes from the various ad networks that serve ads on sites. There will always be conflict between the data provided by these companies and the log files of sites, because the ad servers have no way of determining how many ads are on pages where those ads are displayed. That means it’s impossible to reliably determine traffic.

Moreover, as we reported last week in the page view story, advertiser cookies are the cookies most removed by web users, so statistics based on them simply cannot be trusted.

This whole thing, though, is an attempt by the advertising industry to create a replacement for the mass marketing world that’s crumbling, and it’s going to be interesting to watch. Like the algorithms that run the search engines, these sorts of technologies can be gamed, and it’s hard to imagine a set of online “standards” resistant to mischief, much less reliable across-the-board.

Walker Smith offers a spot-on analysis in Media Magazine of what he calls the “white noise of modern life, a background hum people routinely ignore.” He’s talking about marketing, and it’s a healthy dose of reality in our changing media world.

Consumers are fighting intrusive marketing. Interestingly, though, growing marketing resistance is paralleled by greater marketing interest. Consumers aren’t resisting marketing because they dislike ads or shopping. In fact, they want more of each - as long as they’re driven by consumer pull, not marketing push. But that’s not how we’re trained. Intrusiveness is at the core of traditional marketing thinking.

This is why I talk about the online law of attraction and how it — not the traditional pushing of media — is the future path to profitability.

(Note: The language of this piece is awfully similar to what I wrote a year ago in my essay New Metrics and Principles. Hmm. Maybe that’s why it resonates so well.)

I remember being on a golf course many years ago with some friends, including the pro at the club. We were on the tee of one hole watching Joey, a member of our foursome, prepare for his drive. The pro turned to me and whispered, “Look at him. He looks like the real deal. Nice stance. Nice position. But watch what happens when he swings.” Oops! The guy suddenly became an uncoordinated nerd who obviously couldn’t hit a ball straight if his life depended on it.

This image came to mind this morning while scanning the headlines from TMZ.com in my RSS reader (Shut up. I read what I want to read). Here’s the report that caught my eye, because of the lead sentence:

Chris Rock is under fire from a woman who claims he’s her 13-year-old baby’s daddy, but cops say the woman behind the allegations has been full of s**t for years.

Aside from the fact that I love this line and wish I could’ve used it myself in the news business, there’s the inevitable comparison with Joey. Those who cling to the sacred canons would gasp for air upon hearing or reading such a line. After all, there is a “right” way to swing the club write the news.

But the web isn’t subject to the canons, so this kind of stuff slips through. Did the cops actually say this woman has been full of it for years? Probably, and that’s the refreshing part of it.

We’re going to have to re-write a whole bunch of laws, folks.

Anyway, it was a nice chuckle for a Sunday morning.

It’s important that we closely watch events and trends within the newspaper industry, because it is a harbinger of things to come for broadcasting, sort of a canary in the mine shaft.

Some observers argue that broadcasting’s collapse won’t necessarily follow newspapers, because, well, TV isn’t newspapers and vice-versa. This is a shallow interpretation of what’s taking place, because it isn’t newspapers OR television that’s being whacked by disruptive influences; it’s the model of mass marketing that’s the problem.

This is why I have been shouting for years that local media companies will never — repeat NEVER — recoup losses to their legacy platforms’ business model by shifting that model online. This is because traditional ad methods follow the path of scarcity, but abundance is the rule-of-thumb online.

Mass marketing requires scarcity in order to create demand. Reduce the supply, increase the demand; it’s as old as the modern culture. But online, the demand side now plays a major role in creating its own supply — and this is especially true of businesses supported by advertising, a.k.a. the media. Fragmentation, disintermediation, the ability to unbundle content from form, and the personal media revolution have all created an abundant, customer-in-charge world for media, one in which pure reach-frequency ad models won’t work.

Some argue that the Wall St. Journal proves this is incorrect, but if corporate America didn’t pay the subscriber fees instead of the subscribers themselves, the WSJ would be in the same boat as everybody else.

There are two stories in the news about newspapers that bear comment. A Reuters’ report shows that online revenue growth for newspapers is slowing, and a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about Yahoo’s alliance with a consortium of newspapers looks like a solution. Both of these articles take a generally desperate view of the revenue situation for papers, and they contain clues about the truth of what’s happening, if you have eyes to see it.

Let’s look at this consortium first. When you cut away all the details, the deal is essentially what television station websites have been a part of for a long time — creating strength for national advertising by combining to function as a network. This “pulling together” is good for the network but not so good for its individual members, primarily because no network of out-of-market users can deliver the kinds of eyeballs that local advertisers want. The balance sheet may look good for a few minutes, but it is not the salvation that the consortium seeks. It is, however, quite a deal for Yahoo, because they can accustom local users to the idea that Yahoo — not the local media company — is the place to go for local news.

I know I’ve said all that before, and a few paragraphs of this particular story suggest that this consortium is something very different. It’s not.

Publish globally, sell locally.

That’s the key to an alliance between Yahoo and a consortium of newspapers…whose local sales forces will start selling online advertising using Yahoo technology to target ads over the Web — showing shoe ads to frequent shoe shoppers, for instance.

No dollar terms were announced and details remain fuzzy, but …Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Terry Semel…(said)…it will help create an unparalleled solution for local and national advertisers.

Behind his comments lie billions of dollars in local online advertising that Yahoo and its newspaper allies have decided to sell together because neither can get that money alone, said Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president for Hearst Newspapers…

“We’ve come to the conclusion that we’ll never build (ad technology) platforms as robust as them and they have come to the conclusion that they will never develop the sort of sales resources we have,” Millstein said.

…Wes Jackson, president of the interactive division of Belo Corp., one of the leaders among the 12 chains that put together the deal, said the alliance should bring money to the newspaper side — just not enough in and of itself.

“We wouldn’t be doing this deal if there weren’t meaningful economics,” he said. “I don’t necessarily say this is a savior play for the newspaper industry. I say this is an incredibly powerful play for our newspaper Web sites.”

In a nutshell, the papers will use Yahoo’s targeting technology to put their local advertisers in front of potential customers, but because this will take place “on” Yahoo, there’s no guarantee these will be the customers they’re actually seeking. Local media needs targeting opportunities using databases of local users, not global users, and they need to get 100% of that revenue.

But look what Yahoo gains! As each day goes by, the Yahoo “audience” gets more and more accustomed to the idea that Yahoo is a one-stop shop for local news. Moreover, those advertisers to whom the local newspapers are selling also get used to the same idea.

This is certainly, at the very best, a potential, short-term revenue shot in the arm, and investors will be happy for a few quarterly reports. In the long run, however, it’s yet another up tick in the stovetop water temperature beneath the pot of frogs formerly known as the newspaper industry.

The Reuters story appears to be just another ominous sign that the industry is in trouble, but this one is a knife to the heart, because it evidences through reports released this week that the industry’s overarching online strategy is failing. Rapid online revenue growth obtained through reach/frequency ad plays has begun to slow, and this will have a domino effect in the months ahead.

U.S. newspaper companies have pinned their hopes on their Web sites and other Internet-related assets as circulation falls and advertisers shift their spending elsewhere.

The big question is when online revenue would make up for what they are losing in print.

This week’s results suggest that the transition “is going to be slower and perhaps less profitable than newspapers have anticipated,” said John Morton, a longtime newspaper analyst and president of Morton Research Inc.

Again, my money is on the belief that online revenue of the sort the industry is currently pursuing will never make up for what newspapers are losing in print.

There’s plenty of spin in the article, but I want to point out once again that the essential problem for all local media companies is their insistence in the belief that a model of scarcity online will generate the kinds of revenue needed to offset losses to legacy platforms. This is an illusion, and it’s why local media companies need to diversify and “become” entrepreneurial internet companies in order to fully survive.

We cannot rely only on our brands and our content to pull us through this transition, because it is impossible to scale content in an environment of abundance. Moreover, content is the wrong end of the information value chain online; the “right” end is the aggregation of content, which is the role Yahoo, Google, MSN, AOL and the other internet pureplays possess. The longer we wait to aggregate the local web, the more we accelerate our own demise.

Let us in broadcasting not be fooled by the notion that video is different than text online. It is, but it isn’t. And where it isn’t is what matters.

This one includes more on the collapse of page views as an ad metric, RTNDA/NAB retrospectives, MySpace News (told you so), and some thoughts about students and their resumes.

Friday, April 20, 2007

If your web advertising strategy is built around page views, you’re going to have to find another way to sell. We’ve been saying this day would come for a long time, and today, The Wall St. Journal is reporting that Nielsen NetRatings will drop the page view as a metric to measure web traffic and instead rely more on time spent on a site. ComScore, according to the report, will also begin de-emphasizing page views.

The report comes in the wake of a UK study just released by Nielsen. It was written by Alex Burnmaster, European Internet Analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings

“The page view has been the traditional measure for advertisers to compare which websites provide the most opportunities to display their ads to consumers. The large portals and social networking sites tend to dominate this way of looking at engagement.”

“However, as the technology that publishers use to deliver content to the user moves away from static, reloaded pages to be more streamlined content-e.g. online videos- the page view is becoming a less relevant gauge of where might be the best place to advertise online.”

“Consequently advertisers will have to look at other metrics, such as time spent or visits, to see where their online ad pound might be best spent.”

“Time covers all web environments and provides an accurate trend in a pre- and post- Web 2.0 world with the increasing use of new Internet technologies, such as AJAX programming, and the changing way that people consume content.”

“Advertisers will, however, need to be aware of the whole picture painted by the different metrics when looking to assess user engagement with a site - and the consequent ad opportunity.”

This was inevitable, because technology is bringing about what’s called by early adopters, the “live” web. Page views were fine for the static web, but that’s going away. Since all digital content can be separated from form, it can be presented in snippets via AJAX and other technologies. This makes for a marvelous user experience and brings about page customization. The problem is that when AJAX updates content streams, it doesn’t register as a static page view.

Moreover, video plays can’t be counted strictly through static page views either, and this is increasingly problematic for both websites and advertisers.

Nielsen’s assertion that time spent is a better metric is also going to be a problem, and I think what we’ll eventually wind up with will some sort of regular visitor count, and that advertisers will buy visitors in the same way they now buy ratings. Time spent is unreliable, because it assumes people open and close sites as they browse along the web. This is not necessarily the case anymore, because people can move content to their own browser via RSS. Also, not everybody closes out a session when they’re done, and that means it will appear people are “on site” when actually they’re not.

Time spent is another metric of the static web, and that’s the real problem.

This is can’t be good news for the big providers of websites for local media companies, especially those that are monetized strictly through page views. This includes many big broadcast companies that rely on centralized control to achieve scale for ads. I’ve seen goal statements that list a certain number of page views as the mission, and this was completely justified in the days of the static web. Not so anymore.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, because the ad community is still immersed in page views, but it will happen. That creates a significant opportunity for those who move down the non-page view path and create their own models to sell to advertisers.

This whole business of web metrics is evolving and changing rapidly, but I think if we concentrate on audience, a.k.a. visitors (unique or otherwise), we’ll be just fine. We’re also going to have to get involved in RSS advertising and follow the trends in unbundled advertising closely. Remember, advertising is content in Media 2.0.

Three years ago, I wrote that the RTNDA was “asleep inside the box” and took them to task for not paying attention to what seemed obvious (to me anyway) as important issues. Here’s some of that entry:

If the organization representing radio and television news directors won’t look at reality, how on earth can news people expect their corporate owners to do so? By ignoring the truths of a worrisome future, audience fragmentation, disruptive innovations, shrinking or closing newsrooms, newspapers providing video, clear warnings from business analysts, citizen journalism, viewer distrust, and other issues directly impacting the industry, the RTNDA is guilty of, to be kind, public masturbation, and in so doing, it does a disservice to its members that borders on malfeasance.

As you can imagine, this didn’t win me a lot of friends.

I hope I’ve mellowed a bit, but the message seems to have resonated (or perhaps life has intervened), because the opening session was a vigorous discussion of new media with a lot of great insight, a bit of outsight, and a cast of characters (self included) that wouldn’t have even been recognized at previous gatherings. This is to the credit of the organization and especially the work of Lane Beauchamp, Chip Mahaney and others, who’ve organized an event filled with kinds of things we really need to be talking about. Better late than never, and my hat’s off to Lane, Chip, Angie and the whole gang.

I’ll leave the analysis of the opening session to others, but the message was clearly one of change. Most on the panel called it “evolutionary.” I used the word “revolution,” and the inimitable Michael Rosenblum said we need to burn old media to the ground.

I was star struck being with Amanda Congden (disclosure: I’ve been in love with her for years. Sadly, she brought her boyfriend with her) and Zadi Diaz. Zadi is on her way to web stardom, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer, more pleasant person. It’s always fun to be on a stage with Michael, and Miles O’Brien was simply the best moderator I’ve ever worked with.

Miles lost his anchor job with CNN a week ago, and it will turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him. He’s now thrust into a world where the stories that matter (to people) occur — chief technology correspondent. He’s a sponge right now, but mark my words, he will lead that network (or another) into coverage of how technology is empowering the people formerly known as the audience.