The announced partnership of seven newspaper companies with 176 daily papers and Internet giant Yahoo has the sound of something momentous. In time, it may become that.
"We are getting married to Yahoo in a sense," MediaNews CEO William Dean Singleton, a prime mover of the deal, told his hometown
The Denver Post. "We don't know what the Web is going to look like in three years. We just know we are going to do it with Yahoo."
Possibilities include sharing news content among the papers, and adding Yahoo's search function to the sites. That could blossom to a capability for local search advertising, theoretically a big business but one that has failed to develop so far after a decade of trying.
But the joint venture starts in a homelier place with the newspapers making Yahoo's HotJobs their partner for selling online classifieds. That is a boost to HotJobs, a distant third and fading among online job search services. It sets up a three-way shootout with CareerBuilder -- owned by
Tribune,
Gannett and
McClatchy -- and Monster, the pioneer, which recently has added several newspaper partners.
As that competition plays out, it could just as easily be an impediment as a help to the broad-based cooperation among newspapers that many in the industry have recently been advocating recently.
"My reaction is that this is a baby step and displays the tentativeness that has plagued the industry for the last several years," Tim McGuire, a former president of the
American Society of Newspaper Editors who is now teaching at Arizona State University, commented by e-mail. He added, "It is not an assertive move, and it seems to be hat in hand."
McGuire and an ASU colleague,
Tom Mohr, formerly of Knight Ridder Digital, have advocated that newspapers, on their own, create a common platform and sales network for national online advertising. "Lack of solidarity" and underutilizing "the little leverage they have left" are not means to that end, McGuire wrote in his e-mail message. (In
a Poynter Online centerpiece Oct. 10, McGuire called on newspaper companies to collaborate on their digital futures.)
Mohr said he believes both Yahoo and the newspapers stand to gain from the deal, but characterized the upside for news organizations as relatively limited. (
Read his comments, sent by e-mail Monday evening, here.)
Similarly, Lauren Rich Fine of Merrill Lynch (a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board) headlined a section of her report on the transaction, "No united front for the newspaper industry." Even so and with the economics of the deal unclear, she thought it still amounted to "a worthwhile experiment for the industry," and a definite plus for Yahoo, under the gun after comparatively weak recent financial results to make moves for growth.
The affiliation comes close on the heels of a deal announced earlier this month in which Google agreed to place advertising in a group of 50 newspapers including
USA Today,
The New York Times and
The Washington Post. In similar fashion, the arrangement brings newspapers on board for Google's ambitions to offer a full array of services and placements to advertisers. However, it, too, begins more modestly by matching a select group of Google's key word advertisers with remnant (unsold) space in the participating newspapers.
While some may view these deals as collaborating with or capitulating to key rivals, Google and Yahoo already have a rich set of relationships with newspapers. Yahoo pays syndication fees for some of the content it uses on its news site. Google recently agreed to such a deal with The Associated Press. Also, for several years now, Google has been the vendor for a program it calls
AdSense that places contextual ads based on what online visitors are reading, then splits the revenue with collaborating news organizations (including
The New York Times).
In discussing the Yahoo arrangement, Singleton argued that the deal represents a pooling of the strengths of the newspapers (including those of
Belo,
Hearst,
Cox,
Lee,
E.W. Scripps and
Journal Register) with Yahoo's superior Internet capabilities. If the consortium gathers steam, Singleton said, other companies besides the original seven will be welcome to opt in.
The American Press Institute's year-long
"Newspaper Next" study concludes with a section advocating industry collaboration. It is unclear whether the new venture fits the strategy the report advocates or not.
On the one hand, the report says collaborations work best when mission and scope are narrowly defined initially and when financial expectations are modest as opposed to sweeping. On the other hand, the report advocates innovations that focus on jobs undone and customers not served -- a test that switching online classified partners clearly does not meet.
Markets did not appear particularly swayed by the announcement. Yahoo shares were down slightly for the day, as were Belo and
Scripps.
Coming Monday: Pinpointing the prime time for online news
