Cash Cows for Online News?

Profit generation is one of the most challenging aspects of the digital news revolution. Digital media expert Rishad Tobaccowala offers some fundraising suggestions, from the conventional to the offbeat (at least for news outlets), in the May/June issue of the Columbia Journalism Review (link courtesy of IJNet.org).

Among Tobaccowala's ideas:

* Charging for select archived material (many online papers do this already)

* Selling merchandise

* Targeting Web advertising towards individual readers

Read more of Tobaccowala's suggestions (and add some of your own!) here.

Read the full story

McCormick Tribune Fellows Highlighted in NAA report

MT Fellows Edwina Blackwell Clark and Sharon Prill figure big in a recent Newspaper Association of America report on trends in audience development. The NAA report “Growing Audience: Building Audience, Building Brands,” explores trends and staffing of 'audience development' initiatives, which it says have replaced 'interactive' as the current buzzword of the newspaper industry.

Blackwell Clark began her career as a reporter and now oversees 350 people as senior vice president of audience at Cox Publishing in Dayton. She says that focus has gone from studying current readers to studying those who aren't reading newspapers in order to learn more about them. Since taking on her current position in the summer of 2006, she is - remarkably - well on her way to reaching her goal of launching a dozen new products.

Prill, senior vice president of interactive media and audience development at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is part of the executive team that evaluates new initiatives across the organization. She recently discovered that 90 percent of JSOnline.com’s web traffic and click-throughs were actually driven through the user-generated parts of the site. As a result, the sites now place even more emphaiss on user-generated content.

The full report is posted online at http://www.naa.org/docs/Audience/building%20audience%20final%2011%201%2007.pdf.

Read the full story

Can You Say ‘Got Milk’ in Spanish?

And more to the point, are you a Learner, Straddler or Navigator? The Sept. 23 New York Times Magazine had a fascinating piece on the ad agency Gallegos Group, the growth of the Latino ad market and some of the issues creatives consider when designing award-winning campaigns targeting Hispanic Americans. The article outlines the explosive growth of this market - U.S. Hispanics spend $928 billion annually - and how references that work for a mainstream audience may flop for Latinos. It also explores how cultural references range greatly within vastly diverse Latino communities. Click here to see the story.

Read the full story

Bad Ad News

It's more of the same for beleagured newspaper executives: The speed of the downturn in newspaper ad revenue has accelerated since the beginning of 2007, according to a Wall Street Journal article on July 18. You can read more here:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118471859134569679-7SEc8U7GAYLdAU_0upCRHWAU2cU_20070816.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

Citing a Newspaper Association of America (NAA) report, the article notes that total print and online ad revenue was down 4.8 percent from the first quarter a year earlier. Unfortunately for publishers, online ad gains haven't made up for the loss in revenue from the nose dive in print advertising.

Read the full story