Yahoo announced Monday that it has signed a deal with ABC News to feature the network’s original content on its Yahoo News website. Under the agreement, ABC News journalists such as Christiane Amanpour, Katie Couric, and Barbara Walters will produce video directly for the web, to be used on the Yahoo News site as well as ABC sites…

…While the two organizations will maintain editorial control of their own respective Web sites, they will co-produce coverage of major news and integrate their bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, Reuters reports. Their combined traffic will exceed that of their closest rival, CNN.com, by 25 million visitors.

Originally posted at the Future Journalism Project.

As AdAge points out, Groupon’s 2010 revenue of $760 million is one-quarter of the entire US newspaper’s online revenue. No wonder news folk want in.

While it is not yet nearly enough to stop the steady bleed in print ad dollars, media companies are seeing their own Groupon-style deals bring in new revenue. Better yet, the revenue is often from entirely new customers. The San Diego Union-Tribune is now making more money in deals than in interactive advertising. That’s more revenue than LivingSocial in San Diego, said Mike Hodges, Union-Tribune’s VP-interactive. “We’re not up to the Groupon standards but we’re starting to cut into their market share as well,” he added.

The New York Times launched its first daily deal, called TimesLimited, last week. Hearst will launch about 70 deals properties in the next month. And McClatchy, which first partnered with Groupon to provide deals to its web readership, will be rolling out its own in April.

Newspapers were caught flatfooted when Craigslist disrupted their lucrative classifieds business. While a little behind in the local coupon game they do have one significant advantage as they enter it: deep relationships within local markets where they publish.

Time will tell if they know how to leverage it or if it will be another opportunity that passes them by.

Originally posted on The Future Journalism Project.

A wholly unscientific view of the New York Time’s paywall that will launch later this month.

Information comes from Felix Salmons’ commentary in Wired, and an earlier news article from Bloomberg.  

First things first: we’re a bit gobsmacked that it cost $40-50 million to implement this solution. Yes, there are a lot of moving parts, and yes, they’ve spent over a year planning this move… but $40-50 million?

Second, total digital advertising revenue runs north of $300 million. This is relies on the New York Times’ 33 million unique monthly visitors. The meter the Times has established is to prevent those uniques from dropping but like all implementations before it, it most likely will.

So the goal here is to increase subscription revenue faster than advertising revenue decreases. 

Third, Here’s where Salmons’ number crunching gets interesting (emphasis ours):

[H]ow much revenue will the paywall bring in? A very large number of the paper’s most loyal readers are already print subscribers, and get access to the website at no extra cost. So the new revenues from the paywall will only come from people who read the website a lot but who don’t subscribe in print.

How many of those people are there? Emily Bell reckons that the number of people who’ll even hit the paywall in the first place is only about 5% of the NYT’s 33 million or so unique visitors. That’s 1.6 million people — compare the 1.3 million people who already subscribe to the paper on Sundays. The former is not a perfect superset of the latter, of course, but there’s a big overlap; let’s say that realistically the NYT is going after a universe of no more than 800,000 people that it’s going to ask to subscribe. And let’s be generous and say that 15% of them do so, paying an average of $200 per year apiece. That’s extra revenues of $24 million per year.

$24 million is a minuscule amount for the New York Times company as a whole; it’s dwarfed not only by total revenues but even by those total digital advertising revenues of more than $300 million a year.

The race begins March 28.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Today’s wonky Friday post comes courtesy of an interview Peter did with John Battelle, Executive Chairman of Federated Media.

Before FM, Battelle was a co-founder of Wired, and is currently “band manager” for Boing Boing.

What’s interesting here is his belief that publishers need to start creating their own ad networks rather than rely on third party solutions. By leveraging deep vertical knowledge within their publications, publishers will be able to start charging premiums for their ad fulfillment rather than the nickels and dimes they receive now.

FM is doing this. If you scroll to about 8:50 in this interview, you’ll hear Battelle discuss a new Semantic Ad platform called Conversation Targeting. The company is creating this to take advantage of the conversations occurring within the vast independent network of blogs they’ve pulled together (read: Boing Boing, Foodbuzz, Apple Insider, Fashionista, etc.), and are attempting to link and sync marketers with them.

Listen above or head over to ScribeMedia.org where I summarize how the platform actually works, and what it means for publishers and marketers.

Run Time: 16:35

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Q: Can I still access NYTimes.com articles through Facebook, Twitter, Google or my blog?

A: Yes. We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you’ve already read your 20 free articles.

When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in Google search results, you’ll enjoy up to five free articles per day.

Go that? The NYT is trying to create more of a semi-permeable membrane than a strict, walled garden.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

In our other life we went to California for the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership conference.

Or at least Peter did.

And while there he interviewed IDG CEO Bob Carrigan about the continued digital evolution traditional publishers are going through.

While IDG’s publications are deeply vertical (think: Mac World, PC World, Computer World, etc.), Carrigan thinks B to C publishers have much to learn about from B to B publishers about customer engagement.

He also believes publishers are leaving a lot of money on the table by outsourcing their ad delivery networks and should create their own based on in-house expertise on the vertical markets they serve.

Simply, and somewhat paraphrased: If you really want to control your own destiny you should start your own ad network and exchange.

Run Time: 15 minutes.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

In February, NYU’s Rodney Benson & Matthew Powers published Public Media and Political Independence: Lessons for the Future of Journalism from Around the World (PDF). Above are public media per capita spending numbers from the study that compare 14 countries.

What you’re seeing is a high of $134 for Norway and a low of $4 for the United States.

In the introduction to the report, the two write:

In report after report, America’s public and noncommercial media sector has been held up as a core component to the future of hard-hitting, accountability journalism. All of the major reports released in 2009 and 2010 agreed that there is a vital role for public and noncommercial media to play, and that the federal government must work to strengthen and expand funding for it.1 Together, these reports sparked inquiries at both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

However, too often the moderate proposals for federal funding and public media run into a wave of protest and knee-jerk reactions against any and all government action. In fact, government has always and will always influence how our media system functions, from the early newspaper postal subsidies to handing out broadcast licenses and subsidizing broadband deployment. The question is not if government should be involved, but how, and that is a question that demands an in-depth conversation, not a shouting match.

And while the recent NPR flair-up had not occurred as of the report’s release, political pressure is nothing new when it comes to America’s public media.

And as the recent efforts by politicians to punish NPR for its firing of Juan Williams suggest, public media in America possess little autonomy from direct political pressure. How can public media be adequately funded and adequately protected from partisan political meddling? These decisions do not need to be made in a vacuum. The lessons of other democratic nations, many of whose public media systems have been around long before American public broadcasting, are instructive.

Two good articles exploring the report come from Miller-McCune and Nieman Labs. Journo geeks can download the report from FreePress.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

“If the future is the Internet and everything on the Internet is free, who will pay for the cheese sandwiches on which authors are known to exist.”

Margaret Atwood is delightful. 

Run Time: 33 minutes.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

There is a reason why media companies are still referred to as “the press.” For a long, long time the printing machine was the core technology that provided a comfortable competitive edge. The ability to produce a million copies overnight and distribute them before breakfast offered a solid foundation for making money.

No more.

Enter the “trust market”. Trust, not information, is the scarce resource in today’s world. Trust is something that is hard to earn and easy to lose. And it is a core element of journalism, few other professions are so dependent on trust.

But it is not just a requirement, it is also an enormous underserved market. Media companies will learn that it is trust, not SEO, branding, or content farming that’s the road to success. And that road points right to data journalism.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.