Thu 19 Jun 2008
Google CEO: ‘Moral imperative’ to help newspapers
Posted by Marlow Harris under Advertising, News & Media, Real Estate
[4] Comments
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said that the Internet search leader hopes its recently acquired advertising service DoubleClick will aid newspapers as they struggle to corral more online revenue.
“It’s a huge moral imperative to help here,” Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session at an event hosted in San Francisco by Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.
Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick’s system for serving up online display ads could generate “significant” revenue online for newspapers.
There’s been much concern and controversy concerning the drop in relevance of newspaper real estate ads.
Seattle’s a two newspaper town but due to a Joint Operating Agreement, only the Seattle Times publishes a Sunday newspaper.
Real estate ads reign supreme on Sunday, but the section’s a mess with random ads scattered over a dozen or so pages. It’s impossible to find the property in the price range and neighborhood you want without reading every single page and filtering out the unsuitable properties.
The best solution I’ve seen so far is the “booklet” published by such papers as the Santa Barbara News-Press. It’s published by a company called Classified Concepts, and they make an incredible interface by selling classified Open House ads around an area map. Visually and graphically, a buyer can see the house location in an easy-to-carry magazine format.
Though I respect the Fourth Estate and the honorable separation of the editorial and advertising departments, I am tired of journalists publishing press releases verbatim from real estate vendors.
The unthinking and unquestioning publication of press releases from alternative online real estate companies is ironic to say the least. Our local bricks-and-mortar real estate firms spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in newspaper advertising. Online firms, who NEVER advertise, get so much ink that you’d think the editors and reporters were on the payroll.
Reporting news is good. Endlesslessly pushing and promoting online companies that will NEVER BUY ADVERTISING is bad journalism and poor judgement.
Press Release Journalism?
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June 20th, 2008 at 6:56 am
It is amazing how short sighted the media can be. It wasn’t that long ago that newspapers and T.V. news programs were pushing the hype of “for sale by owner” websites and companies that offered limited service models as being the end of the real estate industry as we knew it. They were promoting the downfall of the industry that provides a large portion of their advertising revenue and then wondered why they were getting fewer and fewer ads sold.
Newspapers in particular seem to lost the concept that they provide a service to two types of clients (reader and advertisers) and that they need to provide the type of service that these groups need. Making it hard to sort through ads is detrimental to retention of both groups.
June 20th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Hodge (#1) laid out part of the problem newspapers are having these days. The bigger problem is they are losing readers and subscribers to the internet and also due to their own poor service and content. Without an adequate, audited subscriber base, advertisers aren’t going to buy into a bunch of vague promises about building their businesses, increased sales, etc.
Of course, subscribers and real estate advertisers are leaving the dailies as they learn more about the internet. For Realtors, newsprint, in general, is a poor investment. The most motivated buyers aren’t wasting much time there trying to find a house worth visiting. Why bother with that kind of eye strain and searching when a net browser is so much more focused and visually satisfying?
Nearly all big U.S. papers are owned by one of the few big media houses who bought up struggling dailies to make more money. Now, with the price of oil, they have to pay more to get their contract truckers to deliver bundles of papers to dozens of drop-off stations around their metro areas. In Portland, Oregon, for example, The Oregonian has had two recent subscription price increases to offset the haulers’ fuel costs.
On the other hand, subscribers are getting poorer service, e.g., perhaps no morning papers with coffee, because the independent news carriers have to do more driving to deliver to scattered subscribers–to whom the paper has promised a 5:30 a.m. delivery. Carriers have not received any increase in per-paper rates for several years and, now, they have to pay $4.30 a gallon for gasoline, compared to $2.00 in 2006. So, these night workers are becoming more difficult to find and retain: They quickly do the math, figuring this is no way to even work part-time–they average around $4.25-$4.50 and hour after expenses/before taxes. One morning, they just don’t show up for work. The phones rings off the hook, supervisors and managers drop off missed deliveries mid-morning to empty houses and disgruntled customers. After a few such events, the subscriber cancels. Now, where is your advertising dollar going to go?
In Portland, The Oregonian has converted one or more of its modern presses, which used to help get newspapers published early, early a.m., to publishing several free, “throw away”, magazines. The effect of this has been to cause the newscarriers to get a late start on keeping the publisher’s 5:30 promise. I’m not an insider, but it appears that the medio moguls, local or elsewhere, started this adventure at a very bad time (2007), without any unique content–”slick” is not content–and without a plan to get them delivered, except through the independent carriers. Just assume they all don’t get delivered to the intended readers.
So, to Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, I hope you luck out and keep your job, because your “moral imperative” to come to the aid of newspapers like The Oregonian is about the stupidest thing you could have done or said as a businessman. They will be gone within a few years and you can’t help them.
June 20th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Gee Darryl, I hope you’re wrong.
Maybe the daily newspaper becomes a weekly digest or something. But it’s always nice to pick up at the coffee shop or on the ferry. Who wants to schlep their computer all the time just to read the local news?
I also worry about losing journalists. We can’t rely on bloggers to write for free. We need impartial writers to travel to important meetings, to war-torn countries, to investigate complex stories and to gather facts and quotes. Quality writers will not do this for free and it’s not proven that they can make money just by writing for online publications.
Even WIRED is still printed on dead trees….
June 25th, 2008 at 6:23 am
Marlow,
In The Seattle Times this AM was a circular from the king of internet marketing, Amazon, advertising Amazon Fresh.
I agree with your thoughts about the need to keep good journalism out there for us all. One of my favorite things to do is read a Sunday New York Times.
So maybe there needs to be some cross marketing and sharing of information and advertising to keep the print media in line (and online). I would like to see it be other advertising than real estate, since real estate print advertising has proven to be so meaningless.