Week in Review

Short reads on a Saturday morning:

• Reed Construction Data has thrown more charges at arch rival McGraw-Hill.  Earlier this year Reed closed most of its regional construction magazines.

• Google made three rather significant announcements during the past week or so that may have an effect on publishers in the New Media space.

• The sad news of the week was that Editor & Publisher was closing, of course. But the other part of the announcement was that eight of the ten brands that made up the Nielsen group have found a home with e5 Global Media LLC, a new company formed by private equity firm Pluribus Capital Management and financial services company Guggenheim Partners. The Hollywood Reporter's take on their new home was upbeat.

• The New York Times fourth quarter forecast is not exactly good news: Times print advertising is expected to decline 25%, though Internet advertising is expected to grow. I guess the good news is that this is an improvement on the over 31% decline the Times suffered in the third quarter.  The TMS Media report on third quarter media performance is here.

• In a week of downers, I guess the way to end this round-up is to point out the WSJ story on new forecasts for advertising growth in 2010.  ZenithOptimedia is now expecting a blowout year (snark alert) with growth of .9% versus their previous forecast of growth of .5%. Let's start to chill the Champagne.

What does it mean to be "profitable" today?

A TNM Editor & Publisher autopsy:

The announcement yesterday by Nielsen of the sale of The Hollywood Reporter and other books, and the closing of Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews are stark reminders of how brutal this business can be.

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Nielsen shutters Editor & Publisher (with updates)

As someone who spent their youth in the newspaper industry, this one hurts: 'Editor & Publisher' to Cease Publication After 125 Years.

According to E&P's editor, Greg Mitchell, employees will be around through the end of the year and will be updating the web site. But the print publication is closed immediately.  For my thoughts on this, follow me below the fold (with updates).

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UStream brings video streaming to the iPhone

Trade publishers often ask more than is humanly possible from their editors -- editing more than one magazine; writing, editing and blogging; photography and design; podcasts and video podcasts -- now publishers can ask their editors to be broadcasters, as well. Good grief, is there still time to add this to the 2010 budget?

Here is one way to do it: give your editor a new iPhone and have then download the Ustream mobile app from the iTunes app store (iTunes link). They will be all set to begin broadcasting their publication's new online TV show.

The whole process took me five minutes from start to finish.


For now, at least, you have to watch the "broadcasts" on a Ustream.tv station you create when you sign up for the service. You can also upload the videos to your YouTube page, or download the video as a Flash file for display on your web site. Each video is also given a direct URL for easy viewing.

Is all this practical? I don't know. You can, after all, use a video camera or phone for capturing video at a trade show or other event, encode as Flash or QuickTime, and host on your site now. Why do live video through a phone?  Maybe it's silly . . . but wait, someone will put this to good use and when I find a great example I'll write another post about it.

Ad declines continue in 3rd quarter; Internet advertising up a bit

TNS Media Intelligence released its number for the third quarter, and while the picture remains gloomy, Internet display advertising at least grew.

You can find the report here, but the highlights (or lowlights) are below the fold:

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Google has made three announcements in the past three working days that could have an impact on publishers

On Friday Google announced it is expanding personalized search results based on an individual's search history. While the change is somewhat of a commonsense evolution of the search engine, some fear the consequences could lead to less diversity in search results.

The first impact would be that SEO would harder to achieve. The second impact might be that the results are skewed towards larger companies. In a PC World post by Tony Bradley, Andreas Pouros, chief operating officer at Greenlight, said that "small businesses that aren't as well known as the bigger brands won't be clicked on as much and won't then get the opportunity to appear in results in future searches." I'm not sure this isn't already happening anyway.

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