This is an interesting picture by Jin Lee for Bloomberg News:
Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. chairman and publisher of The New York Times Co., departs the company’s shareholders meeting at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 … using a back exit door.
Just in case.
New York Times Co. shareholders, led by Morgan Stanley, withheld 42 percent of their votes from directors to protest the Sulzberger family’s control over the company.
Five years ago, The New York Times stock was $51.88 (July 5, 2002).
This Friday, the same shares were traded at $18.87.
Not the best financial performance for a first-class newspaper.
The Sulzberger family has a problem.
They need money.
But Wall Street is not listening.
The stock is so cheap that almost any rival could buy all the available shares for next to nothing.
You don’t need to be a Google to buy all this stock.
The problem and the solution here is, again, the family.
“Trying to assess the true importance of the Internet now is like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk if they were aware of the potential of American Airlines Advantage Miles,” said The New York Times Publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.
Sorry, but Yahoo!, MySpace, Google, Flickr, YouTube or Facebook, for example, are quite mature developments and the slow response of many traditional media publishers shows that they are not the Wright brothers of the Internet.
Today, The New York Times stock is lower than ever.
Around $18 right now.
Going down again and again after Morgan Stanley sold its nearly 10.4 million shares in the newspaper.
The newsroom is producing a first-class product, but the business management is doing a third-class job.
Facebook is not another Google is a great column by John Naughton.
I was very impressed by the news about Facebook and then I asked our expert, Christian Oliver, and he responded like John Naughton:
Nothing beats meeting people…
I am glad to be in agreement with our British colleague.
And against the current opinion trend.
What about a mega-merge between Google and Apple?
Apple has a market capitalization of $107 billion.
Google’s value stands at $160 billion.
Assume Apple holders would get a hefty premium for their shares – let’s call if 40% – and you end up with something close to a merger of equals.
The last New York magazine cover story on iGod fuels this idea.
And the logos are ready…
There is a blog that sees the merge happening before 2012 after these steps…
…and this Apple product portfolio:
Read this amazing column by a journalism professor to undestand why so many newspapers and journalists still don’t have a clue about Google and what news aggregators do.
If this is the case, how can a serious newspaper publish such a piece?
Jeff Jarvis goes ballistic and responds here for all of us:
“Don’t blame Google for your bad management.”
The American university tradition of “publish or perish” becomes “publish and perish” and perhaps the Berkeley Faculty needs to reconsider the need of such old-fashioned brilliant minds.
No, Google is not killing newspapers.
We are.
If Google’s logo can be different…
Why not newspapers’?
I hope this time is for real, but things are starting to sound too much like a bubble again when we hear about advertising sponsored stuff. Remember free computers? free Internet access? Those were also advertising sponsored and didn’t work as well as initially thought. After the bubble burst, nobody believed in advertising. Things are changing again.
Google is talking about free cell phones for those willing to see targeted advertising. Will this work? Maybe. We have come a long way from the days of the Internet bubble in terms of advertising technology, and Google is one of the companies that turned the tables in this respect. If a company can pull this off, it’s Google.
The advertising world is increasingly more complex, no wonder Search Engine Optimization experts are able to charge top dollar. The problem is that most media companies are being left out by the technology companies who are creating the new advertising channels. Oh, the blurring lines.
What is it that we do best? Create content? Sell advertising? Print newspapers?
Google, which insists on defining itself as a technology company, doesn’t really create content, but they do sell advertising, indeed, as we mentioned before, they are now experimenting with selling advertising for newspapers. Maybe we should leave the technology and the selling to companies like Google and concentrate 100% on content generation. Quality content I should stress.
Or maybe not.
One thing is for sure, newspapers need to be nimble at adopting advertising technologies in order to offer a complete and compelling proposition for their clients, or the likes of Google will offer a better deal, placing their ads next to your content in Google News.
How long before Google News comes with a printable, customizable edition with advertising sold by them?
Read more about free cellphones from Google at CNNMoney:
This makes sense to me because of the convenience factor for some advertisers. However, its not enough and not nearly what Google could be doing to revolutionize print advertising.
From what the article reads, it seems that this trial is only limited to selling, thus Google only acts as another distributor of ads for the selected papers.
The beauty of AdSense is the advanced algorithms that allow very good contextual positioning of advertising and efficiency tracking. This might not translate as well to a world of one edition per day but at least Google should try the contextual component of its system with newspapers.
Doing this would require the integration of Google’s system and the newspaper’s editorial system. This would allow effective contextual advertisement in print.
The question is, would newspapers allow it? I’m sure many won’t. Too bad because this is the future of print advertisement. Someone will allow it and that someone will win.
Google to Try Selling Advertisements for Newspapers – washingtonpost.com
