bizzXceleration: Performance, Value and Profit

News Industry Trends

Pew study: Internet takes over papers as news source Here I am using my two unread newspapers as a thick place mat for my Christmas Eve Chinese lunch, and what should cross my desk: a new Pew study showing that the Internet has surpassed newspapers as Americans' main source for national and international news. How appropriate--albeit a little sad for this ol' school journalist who still romanticizes about the days when you could truly stop the presses. Some 40 percent of those surveyed by Pew Research for the People & the Press say they get most of their international and national news from the Internet, up from 24 percent in September 2007. Internet coverage of the presidential campaign--much of it buoyed by social networks--was likely the reason for that recent growth. GRAPHIC: News Sources, GRAPHICS: Top Stories, Print news is fading, but the content lives on

The rebirth of the news business Since 1994 the share of Americans saying they had listened to a radio news broadcast the previous day has fallen from 47% to 35%. The share reading a newspaper has dropped from 58% to 34%. Meanwhile cable and internet audiences have grown. In 2008, for the first time, more people said they got their national and international news from the internet than from newspapers (see chart 1). It is not only a matter of people switching from one medium to another. Nearly everybody who obtains news from the internet also commonly watches it on television or reads a newspaper. Only 5% of Americans regularly get their news from the internet alone. Technology has enabled well-informed people to become even better informed but has not broadened the audience for news. The Pew Centre’s most alarming finding, for anybody who works in the trade, is that the share of 18- to 24-year-olds who got no news at all the previous day has risen from 25% to 34% in the past ten years. Those who do seek news obtain it in a different way. Rather than plodding through a morning paper and an evening broadcast, they increasingly seek the kind of information they want, when they want. Few pay. Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, says many have come to view online news as “an all-you-can-eat buffet for which you pay a cable company the only charge.” The main victim of this trend is not so much the newspaper (although it is certainly declining) as the conventional news package. Open almost any leading metropolitan newspaper, or look at its website, and you will find the same things. There will be a mixture of local, national, international, business and sports news. There will be weather forecasts. There will be display and classified advertisements. There will be leaders, letters from readers, and probably a crossword. This package, which was emulated first by broadcasters and then by internet pioneers such as AOL.com and MSN.com, works rather like an old-fashioned department store. It provides a fair selection of useful information of dependable quality in a single place. And the fate of the news package is similar to that of the department store. Some customers have been lured away by discount chains; others have been drawn to boutiques. The rise of the aggregators reveals an uncomfortable fact about the news business. The standard system of reporting, in which a journalist files a story that is broadcast or printed once and then put on a single proprietary website, is inefficient. The marginal cost of distributing the story more widely is close to nil, but the marginal benefit can be considerable. Interest in a story about Iraq in, say, the Los Angeles Times extends far beyond that city. Before the aggregators appeared, a reader in Seville or even San Francisco probably would not have known it existed.

• The news industry's uncertain future

Newspapers at the Crossroads Doubts about the future of newspapers are thick in the air. All around the country, big city dailies are caught in a great downdraft of technological change, losing many of their readers and much of their help-wanted and classified advertising to the World Wide Web. Unable to bring costs in line sufficiently quickly, most are losing money. Some have crashed. Meanwhile, The New York Times, foremost of the national dailies, is selling its headquarters in Times Square (and leasing it back); borrowing $250 million from a Mexican oligarch (and granting him an option to increase his holdings to as much as 18 percent of the company’s non-voting shares); and selling its minority position in the Boston Red Sox. Yet the other leading national newspapers are not in deep trouble.  The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, USA Today are shrinking somewhat, but they are not in financial distress. Why the Times?

Cases in Point: Globe, NYT, Portfolio, Newsweek

Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is safe When it bought the Boston Globe for a record $1.1 billion in 1993, the New York Times Co. added one of the nation's most acclaimed and profitable newspapers to its empire. But analysts say the 137-year-old Globe has been a money-loser in recent years, and the Times, now $1.1 billion in debt, is threatening to shut down Boston's pre-eminent paper unless it gets $20 million in union concessions. Faced with the global recession and declining revenues, the newspaper business is reeling — one major paper has already folded this year and several others are seeking bankruptcy protection. But the threat to the Globe, announced Friday on the Globe's Web site, has shocked some industry insiders, who say it shows no one is safe. "It is a huge warning shot across the bow of the newspaper industry. If this can happen to the storied Boston Globe, pretty much nothing is safe," said Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz. Of the major dailies that have gone down, none has the cachet of the Globe, he said. The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual," said Ken Doctor, a media analyst with the research firm Outsell. "This is uncharted territory." The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion — the highest price ever for a single American newspaper — getting one of the country's most respected papers. The Globe has won 20 Pulitzer Prizes and has been lauded for some of its work, including its coverage of Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.

The Newspaper That Fired It’s Readers A newspaper’s authority derives ultimately from its prosperity.  So it was more bad news last week that among the 25 largest US newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal managed to eke out a small gain in circulation during the six months of the financial crisis. The general gloom, however, may be somewhat overstated. A hot-potato game has characterized the industry over the last twenty years, the astute and the distressed unloading on the innocent and reckless. As a result, many important newspapers – in Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Boston – are in the hands of owners ill-equipped to manage them. Another round of potato-passing, this one finally at the bottom of the market, may improve matters somewhat. Take the story of The Boston Globe, which The New York Times has loudly threatened to close if it doesn’t receive further concessions from its unions. Every unprofitable newspaper is unhappy in its own way. The story of the Globe may be the unhappiest story of them all. I know something about this. I wrote for that paper for many years. The Times’ Globe was preoccupied with particular demographics, mostly young adults, including the transient student population who had never paid much attention to the Taylors’ Globe. At one point, the editor of the newly defunct higher-ed magazine Lingua Franca was hired to put out an “Ideas” section, replacing the paper’s familiar old “Focus” department. The once-serious Sunday magazine was reinvented yet-again as a consumer guide.

• Geffen sets sights on NY Times

Condé Bust So, what went wrong at Portfolio? I mean: What went wrong aside from the worst magazine advertising climate in a few generations? Four things. First, while Portfolio was supposed to be a thoroughly modern magazine, complete with jazzy Web site, there was something retro about it. Portfolio was modeled after Vanity Fair, which resurged to prominence under Tina Brown in the 1980s. And Portfolio's launch indeed felt more 1987 than 2007. Second, Portfolio was too Condé Nast for its own good. Portfolio didn't have the attitude of a hungry startup, which it was. Instead, it rolled like an established Condé Nast property, such as stablemates The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired, Condé Nast Traveler, et al. Portfolio was plagued by the same chronic over-assigning of articles, the same overstaffing, the same vicious internal politics, and the same long lead times that define Condé Nast's monthlies. Instead of flying coach like our scrappy sister site The Big Money, Portfolio went first-class: the most expensive writers, photographers, and paper, as well as car services, first-class travel, and expense accounts. Third, Portfolio's attitude toward the Web was somewhat retro. In 2007, a person launching a magazine for the long haul had to recognize that over the next five to eight years, the Internet would be a huge part of the business and that within 10 years it might provide the lion's share of revenues. That's simply where the eyeballs and ad dollars are going. Portfolio had a stable of bloggers, many of them quite good, including Felix Salmon. But the magazine was clearly the show. It regarded the Web the way many magazines did in the 1990s—and some still do today—as a stepchild, a consolation prize. Finally, while Portfolio mimicked the free-spending habits of its neighbors at 4 Times Square, it didn't tap into another resource that should have been at its disposal: Condé Nast's resident editorial talent. Before Portfolio existed, one could have assembled an excellent business magazine from coverage by other Condé Nast properties.

Backward Runs 'Newsweek' Having recently been dumped by Time, I naturally had great hopes for this week's much-anticipated makeover of Newsweek. Both surviving newsmags (US News is said to exist still in some form, but no one I know has seen it lately) are in an Internet panic like that affecting newspapers. Newsweek has always been a bit faster on its feet. But judging from its first issue, the new Newsweek is not going to be the instrument of my revenge, alas. In his editor's letter--one of many traditional newsmagazine features that have survived the scythe of change--Jon Meacham says, "We are not pretending to be your guide through the chaos of the Information Age," which concedes a lot of ground from the get-go. Why not at least pretend? Why else would people pick it up, let alone subscribe? The newsmags face a choice. Actually, they've faced it since long before the Internet. Should they try to provide a complete picture of what happened last week? Or should they stop worrying about that and hope to find appeal in trends, service pieces, fine writing, muckraking exposes, provocative argument, and other traditional non-news magazine fare? Whenever they have an existential crisis--and this is not the first--they always make the wrong choice. Meacham--a very smart and thoughtful guy, which in my experience is not necessarily true of all newsmagazine editors (all two, that is)--actually says that his model is "the great monthlies of old" like Harper's and Esquire. He says the building blocks of the new Newsweek will be "two kinds of stories": the "reported narrative" and "the argued essay." So what's wrong with that? Well, to start, those grand old monthlies at their primes had a smaller paying readership than Newsweek has at its supposed nadir. So duplicating their greatness could be a pyrrhic victory. Furthermore, while it's not impossible to get readers by peddling sheer enjoyment, it's a lot easier to peddle necessity, or at least usefulness: You need this magazine to sort out the world for you and to make sure you haven't missed anything. In short, you need it to be your guide through the chaos, as Meacham so eloquently describes what he intends to avoid.

Innovation Struggles

Paper Money Each time a newspaper company closes or files for bankruptcy—as Sun-Times Media, the owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 other newspapers, did this week—analysts are quick to hammer another nail in the coffin of the printed word. Roughly coinciding as they do with the advent of the Kindle 2, the failures give ammunition to voices who say newspapers are obsolete. Now that both of the Second City's major newspapers are operating under the umbrella of Chapter 11, and with papers in Denver and Seattle shutting down, it's tough to argue with those who say the industry has useless management, a fundamentally unviable business model, and not much of a future. While newspapers have serious problems, the recent failures of several newspaper companies (here's a list of list of four others that have gone BK in recent months) shouldn't necessarily lead to visions of the apocalypse. Virtually every newspaper in the country has experienced a sharp drop in advertising and is suffering losses. But not every newspaper company in the country has gone bankrupt as a result. And the failures may say more about a style of capitalism than an industry. Each company was undone in large measure by really stupid (and in one case criminal) activities by managers. Let's review. Sun-Times Media is the name given to the company formerly run by convicted felon Conrad Black. Black and his colleague, Publisher David Radler, who confessed to his crimes, improperly took tens of millions of dollars in fees from the company and caused it endless legal heartache. Jeremy L. Halbreich, the interim CEO of the company, blamed the bankruptcy filing on "this deteriorating economic climate, coupled with a significant, pending IRS tax liability dating back to previous management." The actions of the top executives in other bankrupt newspaper companies were criminal only if you consider gross financial stupidity and recklessness to be jailing offenses. Who loads up newspapers—cyclical companies whose revenues are in secular decline thanks to the disappearance of classified advertisements and the rise of the Internet—with tons of debt at precisely the wrong time? Financial geniuses, that's who. Two of the other large newspaper companies that went bust in recent months have similar back stories. A bunch of private-equity types bought the company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News in June 2006, borrowing about $450 million of the $562 million purchase price. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late February but not before paying top executives $650,000 in bonuses in December. Among those getting a bonus: Brian Tierney, the former public relations executive who was one of the architects of the deal. The Minneapolis Star Tribune, which filed for Chapter 11 in January, was another private-equity train wreck. About two years ago, Avista Capital Partners bought the paper for $530 million, loading well over $400 million of debt onto the company. In other words, the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation. A similar dynamic is playing out in other industries. Several mattress companies have filed for bankruptcy or are near it. It's not simply because sales are down due to the economy or because mattresses, which rely on an inferior technology, are being displaced by futuristic futons. Rather, as the Wall Street Journal reported (subscription required), the companies are going bust because private-equity types loaded them up with absurd levels of debt at the wrong time.

Making Old Media New Again It's make-or-break time for many newspapers. As the remaining city newspapers rethink themselves, editors and publishers might consult a road map for how newspapers can live alongside new media that was drawn up more than 50 years ago by Bernard Kilgore Kilgore had remarkable judgment early about the journalistic issue of our day: how readers use old media, new media and both. When Kilgore became managing editor of the Journal in 1941, he inherited a business model that technology had undermined. Founded in 1889 to provide market news and stock prices to individual investors, the Journal lost half its circulation as this basic information became widely available. Kilgore observed that then new media such as radio meant market news was available in real time. Some cities had a dozen newspapers that had gained the Journal's once-valuable ability to report share prices. The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, "It doesn't have to have happened yesterday to be news," and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page "What's News -- " column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant. Kilgore led the Journal's circulation to one million by the 1960s from 33,000 in the 1940s by adapting the newspaper to a role reflecting how people used different media for news. His rallying cry was, "The easiest thing in the world for a reader to do is to stop reading." But his observations on what readers want from city newspapers may be even more true in today's online world. Readers increasingly know yesterday what happened yesterday through Web sites, television and news alerts. "Kilgore's first critical finding," Mr. Tofel wrote, was "that readers seek insight into tomorrow even more than an account of yesterday." This "may only now be getting through to many editors and publishers." Indeed, at a time when print readership is declining, The Economist, with its weekly focus on interpretation, is gaining circulation. The Journal continues to focus on what readers need, growing the number of individuals paying for the newspaper and the Web site. If readers would prefer more-compact city newspapers, a less-is-more approach could help cut newsprint, printing, distribution and other costs that don't add to the journalism. Newspaper editors could craft a new, forward-looking role for print, alongside the what's-happening-right-now focus of digital news.

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them. As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason. Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors. When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away. The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

A newspaper business model that's working It's widely reported – and has become generally accepted – that the newspaper model is either dying or already dead, when, in fact, thousands of newspapers across the country are doing quite well. Thousands of newspapers deliver for their readers and advertisers every day. Thousands of newspapers are positioned to embrace – not be destroyed by – emerging technology. But we don't get to read much about those newspapers. Sure it's news when giant corporations crash and burn and lives are disrupted. Stories that report on incompetent leaders who, ironically, receive outlandish compensation are widely read. Documenting the downfall of powerful entities, whether they are governments or businesses, is a legitimate pursuit. But, as any respectable journalist knows, when you tell only half the story, the story is incomplete – or just plain wrong. In this instance, the half that receives little to no attention from big media involves the men and women in the newspaper industry who write the stories, sell the ads, print and deliver the papers and update the websites every day, without fail, for media companies that are far from dead. The National Newspaper Association (NNA) last month reported on a study that showed community newspapers were far less affected by the challenging economy than the industry in general (or the economy in general, for that matter). The Suburban Newspapers of America and NNA's reporting group showed 2008 fourth-quarter advertising revenue of $428.7 million, only a 6.6 percent decline from the same quarter in 2007. The Glennco Consulting Group estimate was much worse, however, for the overall newspaper industry. There it showed decline in fourth-quarter advertising expenditures of 21 percent, according to the NNA. So while advertisers cut their spending by 21 percent across the industry, the impact to community newspapers was less than 7 percent. In addition, 26 percent of the SNA/NNA reporting group launched new products in 2008. Indeed, many community newspaper companies are growing. The fact is that gains among progressive community newspaper companies are offsetting a large part of the massive losses being suffered by the staid, big newspaper companies. This success is no great mystery – it's the American way. Ingenuity, creativity, and the entrepreneurial spirit always have been rewarded. The newspaper companies that have altered circulation methods and policies, have focused their content and developed news delivery methods to fit today's audience and advertisers are thriving. They found new streams of revenue and ways to reduce costs that didn't eviscerate their core products. In other words, they ran their businesses the way businesses ought to be run. For instance, huge regional daily newspapers would do better to stop requiring people to subscribe and instead deliver the paper to everybody in their target demographic (the market that key advertisers want to reach). If big newspapers would charge the advertisers, not the readers, they could still turn things around. That would be a bold way to evolve. It is highly doubtful they'll do that. We did.

Strategic Alternatives & Initiatives

Web startup to offer foreign news as papers cut So Sennott left The Boston Globe to start his own news organization, GlobalPost.com. It launches Monday with 65 journalists, including veterans of major news organizations such as CNN, The Washington Post, Time magazine and The Associated Press. The free Web site, supported by ads, will offer regular dispatches for an American audience to supplement coverage from the AP, Reuters and other news organizations still covering the world. GlobalPost also will sell stories to papers to run in print or online. At launch, Boston-based GlobalPost will span nearly 50 countries, including Brazil, Indonesia and other regions that Sennott believes are undercovered in American media. Reporters also will be concentrated in key emerging markets like China and India. Journalists will generally be paid $1,000 a month as part-time freelancers, meaning they'll likely continue working for other outlets as well. In fact, Sennott has discouraged applicants from leaving full-time jobs. GlobalPost is providing its recruits with digital video cameras and some travel expenses, but they will work from home, eliminating office costs. In high-cost regions like Iraq and Afghanistan, the company looked for freelancers who already have contracts with larger organizations footing the bill.

Let’s Invent an iTunes for News But lost in the hubbub was the fact that Steve Jobs and Apple had been able to charge for content in the first place. Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Mr. Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business. Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up. For a long time, newspapers assumed that as their print advertising declined, it would be intersected by a surging line of online advertising revenue. But that revenue is no longer growing at many newspaper sites, so if the lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement. As a report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research stated last year, “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the ad load of display advertising down the side of the page, or by the revenue share from having a Google search box in the corner of the page, or even by a 15-second teaser from Geico prior to a news clip, is idiotic on its face.” With newspapers entering bankruptcy even as their audience grows, the threat is not just to the companies that own them, but also to the news itself. Michael Hirschorn, writing in the January-February issue of The Atlantic, used some fatuous math to foretell the end of The New York Times and then added that it wouldn’t be that big of a deal, that tweets, blogs and stripped-down news aggregators could fill the gap in reporting out the terrible events in Mumbai or New Orleans.

Professors could rescue newspapers The American newspaper is dead. Long live the American newspaper! OK, so reports of the demise of daily journalism are a bit premature. But you can't open up the newspapers today without reading bad news about the papers. Declining circulation and advertising revenues have forced newsrooms to trim their staffs, which means less real reporting. A few city papers have closed – the most recent victim was Denver's 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News – while others fill their pages with fluff pieces or wire-service stories. Put simply, it's getting too expensive to gather news. So here's a novel idea: Let's get university professors to do it. For real. And, best of all, free of charge.

Frayed Thread in a Free Society The biggest challenge facing America's struggling newspaper industry may not be the high cost of newsprint or lost ad revenue, but ignorance stoked by drive-by punditry. There is surely room for media criticism, and a few bad actors in recent years have badly frayed public trust. And, yes, some newspapers are more liberal than their readership and do a lousy job of concealing it. But the greater truth is that newspaper reporters, editors and institutions are responsible for the boots-on-the-ground grub work that produces the news stories and performs the government watchdog role so crucial to a democratic republic. A younger generation, meanwhile, has little understanding or appreciation of the relationship between a free press and a free society. Pew found that just 27 percent of Americans born since 1977 read a newspaper the previous day. Constant criticism of the "elite media" is comical to most reporters, whose paychecks wouldn't cover Limbaugh's annual dry cleaning bill. The truly elite media are the people most Americans have never heard of -- the daily-grind reporters who turn out for city council and school board meetings. Or the investigative teams who chase leads for months to expose abuse or corruption. These are the champions of the industry, not the food-fighters on TV or the grenade throwers on radio. Or the bloggers (with a few exceptions), who may be excellent critics and fact-checkers, but who rely on newspapers to provide their material. As others have noted, the Internet can't quickly enough fill the void created by lost newspapers. In time, some markets simply won't have a town crier -- and then who will go to all those meetings where news is made? What will people not know? In such a vacuum, gossip rules the mob.

At First, Funny Videos. Now, a Reference Tool. FACED with writing a school report on an Australian animal, Tyler Kennedy began where many students begin these days: by searching the Internet. But Tyler didn’t use Google or Yahoo. He searched for information about the platypus on YouTube. “I found some videos that gave me pretty good information about how it mates, how it survives, what it eats,” Tyler said. Similarly, when Tyler gets stuck on one of his favorite games on the Wii, he searches YouTube for tips on how to move forward. And when he wants to explore the ins and outs of collecting Bakugan Battle Brawlers cards, which are linked to a Japanese anime television series, he goes to YouTube again. While he favors YouTube for searches, he said he also turns to Google from time to time. “When they don’t have really good results on YouTube, then I use Google,” said Tyler, who is 9 and lives in Alameda. Calif. Tyler’s way of experiencing the Web — primarily through video — may not be mainstream, at least not yet. But his use of YouTube as his favorite search engine underscores a shift that is much broader than the quirky habits of children. The explosion of all types of video content on YouTube and other sites is quickly transforming online video from a medium strictly for entertainment and news into one that is also a reference tool. As a result, video search, on YouTube and across other sites, is rapidly morphing into a new entry point into the Web, one that could rival mainstream search for many types of queries.

Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay? K. C. ESTENSON, the new general manager of CNN.com, has a thought or two about most news sites on the Web: they’re predictable and homogeneous. Seen one, seen ’em all. Even his own site, he says, could use more of a “unique signature.”  While traffic to the home page of CNN.com is higher than ever, “my hunch is that people go to it more out of habit than they do out of love,” he says. Love, in fact, is exactly what Mr. Estenson is pursuing. Online ardor will get a test on Tuesday, with the inauguration of Barack Obama. Because millions of Americans will be at their desks for the noon-hour swearing-in, the event is expected to set new records for live Web video watching — a moment that CNN.com is well positioned to exploit. As newspaper revenue collapses and television revenue stagnates, every media company is rushing to reformat news for the digital generation. To that end, they are placing expensive bets in the hope of answering two pointed questions: How will news organizations continue to sustain themselves? And what will the digital newsroom of the future look like? To a greater degree than most other media companies, CNN, the cable news channel of record, has figured it out. Using page views as a metric, Nielsen ranked CNN.com as the No. 1 current events and global news Web site last year, with a monthly average of 1.7 billion — half a billion views more than its nearest competitor, MSNBC.com. Analysts say the Web site represents the fastest-growing part of CNN’s revenue, reflecting the sharp increase in online consumption. For decades, “What channel is CNN?” was a recurrent query when a jury reached a verdict, when the towers burned, and when war broke out. Now, people also ask: “Where do I log on?” In fact, the emergency landing of an airliner last week in the Hudson River generated one of the biggest traffic spikes ever for news Web sites. This transition, of course, has been happening for years, and it continues today, a headline at a time. Last year, for the first time, more Americans said they received most of their national.

Time Inc's Ann Moore seeks a new model  THERE are few things that unnerve Ann Moore, the chief executive of Time Inc, America’s largest magazine company, as much as young Americans’ “shock” when they hear that her firm will have to start charging them. “Real reporting takes time and money and effort,” she says. “Somebody does have to pay for the Baghdad bureau.” A recession is a difficult time to convince readers that they need to start paying for information, however, particularly because Time Inc, a division of Time Warner, a media giant, has long made its articles available free online. But a new model is needed, and Ms Moore is trying all sorts of things in her effort to find one. On March 18th her company launched Mine, for example, a new concept that allows readers to go online and select articles from eight titles, for delivery in print or online as a free, personalised magazine. If this proves popular, the company may start charging for it. This nifty scheme highlights Time Inc’s eagerness to attract readers to its magazines—but its ambivalence about adding a price tag. As the boss of a company which oversees 120 magazine titles including Time, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune, Ms Moore faces the difficult task of keeping magazines relevant as household budgets shrink, the appeal of free content online grows, and advertisers reduce their spending. At some of her magazines, such as Time, advertising revenues are down by around 30% compared with this time last year, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Ms Moore has had to tear up her company’s five-year plan and draft a new two-year one instead, focusing on two things: internal reorganisation and innovation.