the newspaper business

Before, during, or after? Pop up opaque banner over the video or product placement? It’s here, and there will be more video ads because video is hot and getting hotter. Google is putting Family Guy on a few thousand blogs.  The video will be served thru their AdSense system and be about a minute or two long.

So back to the question.

I think advertisers are missing a huge product placement opportunity in online video. There is a concern by mainstream companies that their video ad may be placed alongside content that is not in keeping with their brand. Like showing Victoria’s Secret ads anytime on NBC, or ED pills anytime on CBS, or feminine sanitary products anytime on ABC. Mainstream advertisers are afraid of Youtube. So they need more control.

Remember, although Youtube is the killer, there are some great high quality, larger image video programs being produced and shown on Vimeo, Brightcove, Revver, Daily Motion, and more.

Contextual video is here and getting stronger. But traditional video doesn’t work online. People are in control, so they click away from the ads.

Product placement is the answer. Mainstream advertisers can reach out to mainstream video producers and make the deal. Edgy advertisers can reach out and make the deal.

But there still are people inside the box.

The big issue would be whether the product placement was disclosed or not in some way that would be obvious to viewers. Brook Hinton says product placements need to be disclosed at the start of the video or else he considers them even more tasteless than ads.

It’s NOT an issue - don’t disclose. Give the viewer some credit for some brains. At the end of the Highway Patrol tv programs, there was a line that said: Ford Motor provided automobiles for Broderick Crawford. No animals were injured in the making of this program, etc. etc.

Was this necessary then? No. Do they still do it today? I dunno. I’m not even sure they have credits on broadcast tv anymore.

To feel the urge to disclose that Mr. Crawford was compensated to drink Dr Pepper and use iPhone is kinda ridiculous, right? Viewers either 1. don’t care or 2. already knew that.

Give me a scenario that would be so outrageous, so devious,  that product placement disclosure would give you a clue.

Proof positive that most newspaper publishers and editors are stuck in the old way of delivering news. You probably read the same story on E & P online that I did. Hoosier newspapers were in the “run the presses and deliver the paper” mode.

Editors and circulation officials, who contend the rain-soaked area is in its worst natural disaster ever, say delivery problems have mounted due to roads closing and opening without warning…

One newspaper who normally doesn’t publish a Sunday edition, was forced to do web updates. I have the impression that if the newspaper had a Sunday edition, it would have been their emphasis - not keeping the online newspaper as current as possible.

Why is this? Why are newspaper editors and publisher in the mindset that delivering a print “disaster edition” is relevant or necessary. Even going up in pages and bragging about it. Like four more pages with twelve huge pictures is relevant.
Yes, it will win you awards at the state press association, maybe even a national award, maybe even a Pulitzer.  But to what end?  Getting accurate information to the public should be the end. The means should be the online newspaper.

My suggestion would be that when a wide-spread natural disaster hits, the whole print edition gets chucked immediately. Canceled.

Buy as many TV and radio spots as possible and go wall to wall with your newspaper’s URL.
If reporters are stranded, let them phone it in - with video.

 We had one staffer, a reporter who had to be rescued by boat [on Saturday] and her vehicle floated down a river,” Syse recalled. “It washed up on dry land and she came back to work on Monday.”

What a great first person story. But it wouldn’t see the light of day in the print edition because there are only just so many such stories that will fit and the precious space won’t be used on an employee of the newspaper, unless the staffer died.

There is a certain thrill of moving a newspaper to Starbucks. Think of the stories for the kiddles of the Great Flood of 2008 and how the paper “got out” from Starbuck’s.

“We could not get into our offices on Saturday,” said Editor Scarlett Syse of the 17,000-circulation Daily Journal in Franklin, Ind. “So we sent someone in to collect laptops, Rolodexes, and digital cameras and set up in a Starbucks for a few hours.”

“No one around here has ever seen flooding like this. It is the 100-year storm you always hear about,” says Tim D. Smith, circulation director for The Herald-Times of Bloomington and the Reporter-Times of Martinsville. “We have had carriers wading up to their chests to deliver to racks, they are really troopers.”

You betcha, and customers would have to wade through the same water to buy a paper right?

Chuck the print edition.
 

Keep carriers out of harm’s way. Smith went on to say only 25% of the Martinsville subscribers got their paper. They have 60 youth carriers and he asked them to wait for HOURS to get a newspaper to deliver.

In Columbus the story was the same, short staff, very late delivery (some next day.)

And for what? Just to have ink on paper? It just doesn’t make sense. It’s old school. It’s typical of newspapers.

During a wide spread disaster throw everything you have at the web edition. Put the press guys on the phone - or send them out with their personal phones (with video) in their big pickups and ask them to shoot and send.  Ask the graphics department to start surfing and researching and mapping and calling friends and family. Get ad staffers to grab their phones and laptops and start posting to a common blog. These editors that found themselves “short of staff” meant they were short of people who are on the newsroom payroll.

If they would have looked at an employee phone list, they might have found a great wealth of information from people just dying to help tell the story.

Instead, editors go into the tower, pull up drawbridge, and every 24 hours throw a message in a bottle into the water hoping somebody will find it and read it.

Will you give me a break? The publisher of the Arkansas Gazette is upset that somebody is linking to their classified ads. Just linking, not taking them, just linking to them.The fact that it’s Wal-mart has the publisher in a snit.Wal-mart has joined Oodle.com and apparently the Gazette agreed to let Oodle link to their content

Oodle uses a standard programming protocol to seek permission rights for searches and indexing of advertisements. If a Web site does not provide permission to make its content available to other sites, it will not be added to Oodle’s index.

So what is the big deal??? All the search engines link to their content! Why does it bother the publisher that Wal-mart is linking to their classified ads?

“I don’t think that is necessarily true,”Smith said. “We haven’t given anyone permission to lift information from our site and move it to their site.”

Hello? Oodle doesn’t “lift” your content, they link to it. That’s the way “this internet thing works.”
As soon as I heard about Oodle, I told our online manager to join and get in on the deal. I want the Daily News classified ads to be spread far and wide. It’s good for the customer. It will make classifieds work even better.

Last time I knew, making your ads work better for customers is a wise business choice.

In his last story for the Post,   staff writer Linton Weeks started the first paragraph of his story with these letters…GOODBYEREADERSMust have gotten the buy-out he was looking for.   

Is your newspaper producing a slick magazine?

If not, why not?

We are involved in two: From House to Home (FHTH) and Better Health and Living (BHL) both produced by PSA Magazines. Ours have limited local editorial content: but ALL local advertising.

We have produced a couple “magazines” as special sections, but they aren’t regular publications.

Advertisers love them and we think readers do too. After all, it’s a free bonus with their newspaper. We can tell our advertisers love them because we run FHTH quarterly and it’s 80 pages chock full of ads. BHL is sold out for the year since January.

So tell me again why your newspaper isn’t producing a magazine?

The first issue of USA Today’s Open Air magazine was in Friday’s newspaper.

It’s pretty, has pretty pictures, and I’m sure the writing is good. I can’t judge the writing because I didn’t read any of the stories. I scanned some of the shorter stories, but generally the magazine had stuff that I already had read: either in USA Today, or some other magazine.

Here are their feature stories:

• High-class hiking
• Spring break grows up
• Triathletes with a cause
• Reader photo
• The thrill of skeet

The feature stories were very generic. Name a high traffic tourist area and it was covered in the magazine, but only lightly covered. Some interesting personalities gave their insights to the tourist attractions, which was a different twist. The other features were the requisite “feel good” feature (triathletes) and unusual (skeet shooting.)

At sixty eight pages, about half ads, I’m sure it is highly profitable - and didn’t cannabalize from the regular newspaper.

I had to go to the website to find that it will be printed quarterly. It launched with no consumer marketing to back it up.

BTW: the ad for beef (above) is the most unintentionally gross ad I have seen. At first glance it looks like a river flowing through gorge. But it’s a very close up of a steak and the “river” is juices, with mushrooms the size of boulders. Gross.

All in all, very average for a magazine from a content and photography standpoint. From an ad standpoint, a winner.

Without Parade magazine, the world’s worst dictator would go unnoticed.

Kim Jong-il of North Korea has been designated the World’s Worst Dictator in PARADE Magazine’s 6th annual listing by Contributing Editor David Wallechinsky. Kim beat out Omar Al-Bashir of Sudan, who held the No. 1 position for three years in a row, from 2005 to 2007. Kim was No. 1 in 2003 and 2004.

Who knows if this will get printed in the Daily News, so I’m putting myself on the record here. For more click here.
Dear Editor,

Kentucky and the nation is being mislead by the use of the term broadband to include DSL.

The story, Friday, Feb. 15, headlined: USDA, FCC launch internet initiative; uses the term broadband and DSL as synonyms. The fact of the matter is that the United States lags woefully behind other developed nations in the roll out of high speed internet.

Technically, you can refer to DSL as broadband, because the FCC has no definition for the speed required to be a broadband connection. In essence the FCC says anything other than dial-up is broadband. But that would be like referring to every paved surface as an Interstate highway.
Kentucky Connect is helping perpetrate this deception because they make no distinction between the speed of the connection.

As most internet users know, speed is everything.

In Bowling Green, the best connection an individual homeowner can expect is 7 megabits per second (mbps) download speed via Insight Cable.

In France and Sweden the download rate is 18 mbps. China and Korea are 50+ mbps down. This determines the speed at which text, images, audio or video is available at a computer.

For Kentucky Connect to issue reports that do not attempt to measure and classify download speeds is giving a false impression to the public.

If Kentucky Connect wants the commonwealth to be near the top for internet access, they should be lobbying to make access to high speed internet as easily accessible and affordable as water and electricity.

They should also be fighting the FCC to set a definition of “broadband” or “high speed.”

Kentucky Connect is nothing more than a “feel good” program designed to change perceptions without improving our technological capabilities.

Avoid the gilded disaster that is the Newseum. Avoid paying the $20 they charge for admission. I want the Freedom Forum to sell off their monument valley installation and use the proceeds to actually support journalism. Like endowing a newspaper, for instance.

Nice. It’s built and opening soon, and you piss on their pantleg. Newseum has probably been in development for a decade, where were you then?

I’m fine with having a shiny building. Newspapers’ images are pretty tarnished.

Following your logic art museums would be in lofts, car museums in garages, natural history museums in caves, and science museums in labs.

Puh-leeze.

When you hire a guy with a radio background and a love for pushing the envelope when it comes to online, the results are often noticed by other newspapers and trade associations.

Last week Inland Press Association, put bgdailynews.com Daily News Now daily video summary at the top of their list for best ideas in 2007 .

Chris Houchens handles it all. He takes the list of the stories that will appear in today’s issue, writes the copy, gets the graphics, edits and presents it. Congratulations and thanks Chris.
We’re also proud that Chris was selected Marketer of the Year by the local Professional Marketing Association, and is a successful speaker on marketing.

Worst place: the press box. You can’t show any emotion. If any player blows it - even if you aren’t a fan of either team, you can’t groan, let alone yell something. It’s cool that they give you up-to-date stats throughout the game, and free food, but that’s the only advantage. Oh, and it’s warmer/cooler if needed.

Best place: on the field. The crack of the bat, or crunch of the shoulder pads, the roar of the crowd behind you, it’s all good. You might miss a play or two because you’re looking the wrong direction and can’t see the whole field, there is no instant replay TV available - except the scoreboard, but other than that? It’s all good.

Best place to celebrate: the locker room of the winning team. I was in the lockerroom after the ALCS game in 1980, when the Royals finally beat the Yankees. My most vivid memory is the huge Willy Wilson (?) walking by me with two bottles of champagne asking anyone “m****** f*****s! Who’s champion now!”