LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS HERE ABOUT THE IHT, ITS CONTENT, ITS DESIGN AND ITS FUTURE.

This blog closed back at the end of 2008 (I think).

If you're interested in the future of newspapers, check out my new scrapbook (what others might call a blog) at The Future of Print.

HOWEVER, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO POST ANY COMMENTS ABOUT THE IHT, ITS CONTENT, DESIGN, FUTURE, MANAGEMENT, WHATEVER, OR ABOUT WHY YOU LIKE OR DISLIKE THE IHT, HERE IS THE PLACE TO DO IT.

I have been remiss in checking my gmail for comments received but they're all up to date now, so please, add your comments here on all matters IHT, and I will check them on a regular basis and post them. 

I hope that this can become a discussion board for people interested in the IHT.

New IHT redesign / shuttering of www.iht.com

Think! has moved to The Future of Print, but by dint of the recent redesign of the IHT, this email from IHT reader OPL, and my response.

Please post your views on the new IHT redesign here.

Source: Email from OPL
Date: 02 April, 2008

Ian, any comments on the new IHT print edition and website merger?

The info on www.ihtinfo.com seems to indicate the paper is still--to some extent--a separate operation. Do you have any insight on that? (How much is still really being decided in Paris?)

The paper edition I find cleaner, crisper, more elegant, with undeniably attractive fonts. Most features seem to have been retained bar the "International Life" page. IHT columnists are still there, as is the "In Our Pages" feature. I think the paper looks very contemporary but most of all it still looks like a newspaper--most redesigns these days make papers look more like magazines.

Online, IHT content seems to be diluted in a sea of endless NYTimes.com sections and the IHT logo only appears if you access the global section directly or through IHT.com. If you go to NYTimes.com and change editions the logo at the top remains that of the Times. It's hard to locate IHT-specific content (articles, blogs, link to corp info, archive, other platforms).

And as you've you've no doubt noticed the webmasters made one huge serious mistake I hope they can fix soon: www.gawker.com/5189745/times-nukes-itself-on-google



Ian's response:

OPL, where to begin?

The redesign is good for what it is but it isn't going to sell any more copies of the IHT one way or the other. Deckchairs, Titanic etc. They're not stupid, they know this, but it needed to be done as a holding position in terms of design update and I congratulate them for the job they've done - lots of good obvious stuff. (e.g I liked the extra effort they put into the Chelt. font.)

(Re-design done in-house at NYT - this, btw, could have been done in about 4 weeks any time in the last 4 months to about 4 years, so let's not get too carried away with the accolades; total legacy inertia. People on the business side have been pleading for this type of re-design for at least 10 years or more to my certain knowledge.)

Oh, and one other thing. Is it so damn hard to avoid front page jumps half way through a sentence? I think not. Although the jumps are a lot better.

(BTW: change IHT to International New York Times - or rather, if we are to take a clue from the new url, The Global New York Times - and keep the old IHT format/content the same and no one's really going to give a damn and they've been working towards this probably for some time, even if they won't admit it to themselves, people who work for the IHT or its readers.)

The global edition online is just one big brand marketing fuck-up from top to bottom. (www.global.nytimes.com ? Very catchy and easy to remember: cf. www.iht.com?)

There is complete dissonance at just about every marketing level you care to think of and you really struggle to see any coherent strategy for the IHT brand within what they're up to. One moment the IHT is beneath the NYT, the next above, the IHT adverts don't work, no one tells you what the IHT is, I could go on but I'm tired. As a platform to SELL EFFING NEWSPAPERS internationally like, I don't know, the IHT for example, it's a disgrace. Anyone want to get a free umbrella? Please. Just change the name to The Global New York Times and be done with it.)

Editorially, is is it any better than www.iht.com? Not really. Can it be? Probably. It's got a good editor and I think she'll do great.

Can you easily find IHT-generated content? No. And that's probably precisely the idea.

Design wise, for a savvy international Trib reader, it's a mess. U.S graphic design in complex online information is just not on the cutting edge, and everyone in our globalised world, save Americans, seem to know this.

Separate operation? The future?

They're in danger of giving away the IHT brand for nothing when it has some value, which in the right hands could be considerable. (Not so smart when you're loaded with debt and if you wanted to reduce it you might like to sell the IHT brand at some point - or close the Boston Globe or whatever - but there you go...)

Exactly how much it's worth (let's be clear; it means IHT brand - debatable value - and IHT as newspaper- no value, losing money - now because www.iht.com url, with staggering traffic for NO marketing investment was just trashed!) we don't know until someone makes an offer or they sell it, but they did pay a ridiculous sum of money to a consulting group to put their finger in the air and come up with a number rumoured to vary between not very much and some 10s rather than hundreds of millions; you don't value your properties unless you want to borrow against one or more likely sell one. Actually, I think I know the figure they came up with but I'm trying to be polite both to the people who came up with the number and the people who commissioned the work.)

NYT Co. aren't very good at pricing assets: witness the absurdly rich price they paid the WAPO for their 50% share of the IHT, their disastrous forays into the Manhattan real estate market and the world's worst media share buy back program in living memory.

As to what's being decided in Paris, on a macro level, not a lot. A. Smale does a stand up job but Bill Schmidt (is that how you spell it?), slated to come to Paris from NY to oversee the IHT, did not and remains in NY. I think that pretty much says most of what you need to know.

So, onwards and er, sideways?

P.S The pictures of the columnists do a fantastic job at reminding me every day that for a supposedly international newspaper the commentary is coming from a gallery of white, middle aged (that's polite), male, East Coast Americans. Tres zeitgeist in terms of White House aspirations to project American soft power overseas (sorry: GLOBALLY!!! It's going to end up sounding like The Daily Goddamn Planet or some sort of journalistic battle carrier group that can float around the globe.)

P.P.S Open invitation to IHT - would you like to send me all the reader emails etc you got about the redesign and let me post them on this blog?

And now for the official word to IHT employees:

Dear Colleague, It's an exciting moment in the 122-year history of the International Herald Tribune. Today, the newspaper gets a bold redesign to strengthen its international personality and IHT.com moves to a dynamic new home on the Web, creating fresh new print and online opportunities for international advertisers. Enhanced display environments across news, business and the arts and high-impact positions such as the new larger strip ad on the front page present great new opportunities in the new-look IHT. And with the new online Global Edition, co-branded with The New York Times, targeting our influential global users has never been easier. Together the IHT and The Times are creating a 24/7 global news operation that can serve the followers of both brands wherever they are, and in whatever format they need. We are committed to helping you reach this demanding, global audience with creativity and vision so contact me or your local New York Times Media Group sales consultant today. Kind regards,
	Jean-Christophe Demarta International Advertising Director  The New York Times Media Group

Think! has moved to The Future of Print

I've had it with this blog. Too much time writing and ranting when what I actually want is just a place to gather my thoughts.

You can find that place at The Future of Print.

Unlike Think! it won't be offering it's own commentary - I'll leave you to fill in the gaps - but it will be a one stop shop for anyone concerned about the future of print, and in particular, the future of the NYT and the IHT.

I'm running a bit behind the news curve but over the coming weeks I hope to catch up with all the developments of 2009.

I'll be keeping it pretty minimal and relying on a handful of newsletters to keep me and you in the loop. Hopefully I'll be up to date soon, but I'm not too worried about being behind for a little while - so is every newspaper in the world and c. 90% of the content of their websites.

And besides, if you look at the archives of Think! you will see that Think! was far ahead of the newscurve on issues that have broken out in 2009: not-for-profit newspapers, fears of the NYT Company going bust, paid content and micropayments being just a few examples.

In the spirit of demonstrating that the future of the Internet (as a business model) is far from assured, at The Future of Print I'll be ripping stuff I can get for free off the Net and aggregating it there.

(And to all you advertisers on Mediabistro, I just want to let you know that I can't recall a single advert on it and I look at it EVERY DAY; but I can remember the LVuitton 4-c full back page ad in this week's IHT. Nice yacht, nice environment and yes, nice watch.)

If someone wants to show me how Internet CPMs can pay for a 1,300 person newsroom and multiple foreign bureaus, then I'm all ears.

If somoene wants to show me high impact advertising on the Internet, again, I'm all eyes.

The group think is that print is dead. It is. In it's current form. But group think has a terrific track record of being dead wrong rather than more or less right.

(Thanks PG for that: the only thing I remember you ever saying that made any sense - the bit about 'better to be more or less right than dead wrong', not group think.)


Print, in fact, is far from dead full-stop.

Video did not kill the radio star.

NYT Company to go bankcrupt or public-to-private by the end of 2012 (At the latest! Check revolving credit due dates for relevant deadlines)

REVISED

1. Tribune Company going bust: there's a surprise.

I wonder what it's going to do to NYT Company stock and commercial paper, news of Tribune company probably going bust? (There was one of these little mini-rallies in the markets so not a good day to judge but they're still under $8.)

I wonder when we're going to read an article in either the WSJ or the NYT about what other big newspaper companies could go bust?

You read today's IHT and tell me this recession isn't going to go into 2010 at a minimum, if not 2011/12. How far will advertising opportunities online have improved by then, technology wise; how many people will have changed their reading habits? Don't think the end of a recession is the end of their problems.

I don't think the NYT is going to make it beyond 2012 unless either it goes public to private or comes up with at least one, ideally three game-changing ideas.

This below from PaidContent.org

Tribune Hires Bankruptcy Advisers; May File Ch. 11 This WeekBy Rafat Ali - Sun 07 Dec 2008 03:28 PM PST Tribune, the Sam Zell-owned newspaper chain, has hired bankruptcy advisers in an attempt to stave off potential bankruptcy filing, reports NYT, citing sources. It is using inv*stm*nt bank Lazard and the law firm Sidley Austin, to try and restructure its crippling debt and assess its options, the story says. WSJ says it could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as this week.... Last month, the company reported a Q3 loss of $124 million, compared with earnings of $84 million for the same period last year. Publishing advertising revenues slid 19 percent ($111 million), and as part of that, interactive revenues dropped 7 percent ($4 million). The company has about $12 billion in borrowings, and stayed ahead of the interest payments as a result of asset sales, but the economy and resulting ad decline continues to hit it hard. The company doesn’t have enough cash to pay $1 billion in interest payments this year, and also owes a $512 million debt payment in June. The bankruptcy possibility was raised back in June by S&P analyst Emile Courtney. For all the gory details on the Tribune saga, read our dedicated Tribune section. Update: Another story in the NYT has some more: Rating agencies say Tribune’s short-term problem is not making debt payments, but complying with a quarterly requirement that its main debt from its acquisition of the company not exceed nine times its EBITDA. A failure to comply by end of this month would mean Tribune had technically defaulted, even if it continued to make payments, and that sometimes can lead to bankruptcy. Chicago Tribune does its own story, and quotes a company spokesperson: “It’s an uncertain and difficult environment...We haven’t made any decision. We’re looking at all of our options.” Posted in: Companies, Media

2. Sorry, but that's my last word on the subject, and the end of this blog, or was going to be, until after posting my initial draft of this post, I saw later in the day news in the print edition of yesterday's IHT of the NYT taking out a mortgage on their HQ building in NY to pay the bills.

(This was not on http://www.iht.com/ yesterday morning but IS on today: now go to the article index at the bottom of the page for Tuesday and see that the story is tagged as a regular business story, not as a Technology and Media story which the Tribune bankruptcy story somewhow is; nor is David Carr's article In string of bad news, omens of a long recession . Go figure.)

(While we're on the subject of things that are in the IHT that are not online, if you want to get the best out of the IHT you have to read http://www.iht.com/ and the print edition because NOT everything that goes into the print edition is run on the website, and not everything that is run on the website goes into the print edition. I personally find that annoying - just as I found Roger Cohen's opinion piece being run, untagged as an opinion piece, on the front page of last Saturday's European edition, extracted from NYT Magazine, and not run on http://www.iht.com/ - so much for integration with NYT and so much for carefully separation of news and opinion.)

Times Co. to borrow against building
By Richard Pérez-Peña
Monday, December 8, 2008
The New York Times Company plans to borrow up to $225 million against its mid-Manhattan headquarters building, to ease a potential cash flow squeeze as the company grapples with tighter credit and shrinking profits.
The company has retained Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, to act as its agent to secure financing, either in the form of a mortgage or a sale-leaseback arrangement, said James Follo, the Times Company's chief financial officer.
The Times Company owns 58 percent of the 52-story, 1.5 million-square-foot tower on Eighth Avenue, which was designed by the architect Renzo Piano, and completed last year. The developer Forest City Ratner owns the rest of the building. The Times Company's portion of the building is not currently mortgaged, and some investors have complained that the company has too much of its capital tied up in that real estate.
The company has two revolving lines of credit, each with a ceiling of $400 million, roughly the amount outstanding on the two combined. One of those lines is set to expire in May, and finding a replacement would be difficult given the economic climate and the company's worsening finances. Analysts have said for months that selling or borrowing against assets would be the company's best option for averting a cash flow problem next year.
Standard & Poor's recently lowered its credit rating on the Times Company below investment grade, and Moody's Investors Service has said it was considering a similar move. Times Company stock, which has lost more than half its value this year, closed on Friday at $7.64, down 30 cents. More Articles in Business » A version of this article appeared in print on December 8, 2008, on page B2 of the New York edition.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/08/business/08times.php

That Richard Perlez-Pena can write this press release with so little reporting on what it MEANS is unbelievable.

What it means is that they are truly in trouble.

Anyone know the Woolworths story in the UK?

Bought by an asset stripper, who sold off their excellent high street properties and then rented them back to Woolworths who have now gone bust - because they lost their way and couldn't find anymore finance and had nothing to borrow against as a last chance while they sorted themselves out because all their properties had been sold through a gross act of greed.

Unlike the NYT they didn't have the opportunity to fall back on a building, a building which the NYT VASTLY overpaid for and which contributed to the pile of debt the NYT currently has. (In contrast HSBC has just bought for about what the NYT's is borrowing their office HQ in London from the bank that owned it, turning a tidy profit because, naturally, in this market the Spanish bank they bought it from had paid way over the odds for the building in a boom market, just as the NYT did the same.)

The NYT HQ was, they say, Michael Golden's baby this, this temple to a lack of innovation.

If in doubt as what to do about really huge problems facing your business.....go into the property development business at the top of the market. Insane. (Reminds me of 90s Asia pre-crash when people like brewing companies were borrowing millions to finance their new great expansion plans: property for their new HQ instead of a state of the art brewery.)

So the NYT is hawking the family jewels to pay the bills. And no more comment than a straight report from their media guy.

Just wait for round 2 of this which will be the NYT selling their 58% stake in the building to Forest City Ratner (when Forest or whoever buys them out finds the liquidity in the market to borrow to buy and lease back to NYT).

3. And to make it nearly certain that this will be my last post on this blog about the NYT Company, because I don't want to spend my time watching a train crash in slow motion of an institution that I love (the IHT), guess what has happened to about the most innovative person at the NYT?

The woman in charge of http://www.nytimes.com/ - clearly the most innovative part of their business - has left to join NPR to run their digital operations. Which is what?

A not for profit news media organisation!!

So one of their most talented operative leaves to a not for profit!

And I've been blogging for ages now about how the NYT Co. should and could consider some sort of public to private move with either a not for profit model OR what I think more likely and better, a sort of Capitalism 2.0 model where investors are not expecting alpha returns nor big dividends.

I could link all the posts I've made about this but I can't be shagged.

Over at PaidContent.Org Lauren Rich Fine has had this BRILLIANT idea all by herself!!!! Shows how easy it would be for a humble blogger like me to get a job there as their research director.

By Lauren Rich Fine - Thu 04 Dec 2008 01:00 PM PST
If you want to watch news travel fast, make sure it’s about the newspaper industry. Fitch, a credit-rating service, has predicted that some daily newspapers will go out of business as their parent companies default on their debt and are forced to liquidate. But this prediction is extreme: There are interim steps that papers can take to stave off the cash drain.
More after the jump…
Even if Fitch is right, what if instead of liquidating the assets, the papers were reclassified and/or contributed to a not-for-profit? Presumably, someone could benefit from the tax write-off. Sam Zell, owner of Tribune, sold Newsday earlier this year; perhaps there was a gain he wants to offset. He could contribute the Baltimore Sun to a newly established not-for-profit. There was a group in Baltimore that wanted to buy the paper when Tribune was originally for sale--that group could serve as management for the paper and oversee the not-for-profit.
While converting to a not-for-profit won’t improve the financials, it would allow the paper to ask for philanthropic support, not unlike public radio or television stations. This isn’t meant to be a solution to the industry woes but instead a thought that came about after reading that McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) was collaborating with the Christian Science Monitor, a not-for-profit, in some of their overseas news bureaus. I hadn’t realized there were any not-for-profit papers. I’m also encouraged by the establishment of ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative-journalism organization led by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger.
Recently, I had an on-air personality from one of the local PBS radio stations present to my media-management class at Kent State University. Listening to him discuss the support for the station and the support for National Public Radio, I have to believe there’s enough support out there for a newspaper. If the goal is to save some of these daily newspapers, perhaps this idea could save a few.

Ironically, just after we learn the NYT web lady has jumped to NPR (you can find her resign. memo on Gawker and the Denise Warren memo from the NYT btw) Bill is on NPR worried amongst other things about being tarred with the same brush as other newspapers (which presumably means the others are going bust and his won't):

Opinion: NYT' executive editor - shortage of "quality journalism"
Posted by Katherine Thompson on December 8, 2008 at 10:53 AM
Bill Keller, the New York Times' executive editor, told NPR's Steve Inskeep that, "there's a real shortage of the kind of information that I would call quality journalism."In a comment about the financial health of the newspaper industry and the rise of blogs, "Good journalism does not come cheap. And, therefore, you're not going to find a lot of blogs or nonprofit Web sites that are going to build a Baghdad bureau."He also said that the venerated newspaper is, "Competing for audience with different people." Keller went on to say the Times sometimes gets "tarred with the condition of the industry that we're in."Source: NPR

Quality journalism BILL ME OLD MUCKER these days means not getting things right AFTER THEY HAPPEN but getting things right and LETTING US KNOW BEFORE THEY HAPPEN.

And that is what blogs do SO MUCH BETTER than you and your lot. That's what you can't grasp - that everything has changed and we are living in a conditional information age. Your journalists look BACK - but Bill, sorry to shatter a lifetime's training and experience, but the time line is now FORWARD.

RE-EFFING-TOOL.

The subprime meltdown? HOOCOODANODE?! Not you, but quite a lot of bloggers knew it damn straight and were telling their readers long ago.

As is evident from the fact that there is NO definition from you to your people at the NYT as to what a blog should be and how it should distinguish itself from their regular Newspaper 1.0 reporting, we know you're in trouble. (Maybe Denise can write that memo - see below.)

Here's a freebie: send out a memo telling all NYT bloggers to write conditional information - what might happen, today, tomorrow, next month. Leave yesterday to yesterday's industry - your newspaper and traditional news site.

4. But the icing on the cake as to true depths of the problems facing the NYT Company is who they have replaced her with! You'd think in these difficult media times you could find some real talent, someone with an outstanding track record in digital publishing.

No, apparently not.

Instead they have turned to their advertising sales VP who, apart from working out how to sell a few ads on the site (not hard) has basically NO experience in digital publishing!!! Is there NO ONE at the NYT Company even who is better qualified or innovative than her (Yasmin N. for example or the IHT's Tech editor Shannon)?

Denise Warren is however a loyal NYT lifer and widely loved and respected by IHT and NYT senior ad sales operatives (probably, umm.)

So you're digital talent, can smell a sinking ship when you're on one and you know the stock options are worth very little. What do you do?

Run for the dry ground of NPR - smart woman; NPR know how to recruit first class talent in a sinking market - smart organisation; and the NYT Company which has forever being telling people that the future of the NYT is digital is only able to muster up an ad sales person to be in charge!! It's beyond belief.

What's also beyond belief is all their talk of personalised NYT.com and aggregated news, adding Twitter etc etc. Are analysts (probably yes) supposed to believe this will drive up revenues on nytimes.com and get readership and CPMs up to replace the sinking into oblivion demographics and revenue of the gray mother? It's laughable.

During this recession which could happily last two full financial years, advertising is not only going to shrink but migrate to the Internet, a place during which those people still in business are going to get their advertising technology better and better. When the recession ends, even if the NYT Company is still floating as a public company, that display advertising ain't coming back, the readership will look only worse.

Tipping points I've blogged about - readers, advertisers belief and now we've reached the final ones: mortgaging the house to keep the family business afloat, talent realising what's going to happen, organisation unable to react intelligently.

No, this is my last post unless about all this. (2008 was my year for blogging and I've learnt all I can about it, or at least, all I think I need to learn which probably isn't nearly enough.) I've had an absolute gutful and I need to stop before I come abusive through frustration and regret something I write!

I'll come back in December 2012 and see if I'm right.

I'll come back sooner if a newspaper company contacts me asking for an idea or two. (And yes, I do have some, and no, I haven't put them on this blog. Emails from private equity companies and investors in NYT Company stock will be answered!! As to lenders to NYT Co. I haven't checked your spreads recently but I'd be making sure you've got your credit default gobbleygook paper lined up. As to Moody's, given the slagging off the NYT gave you yesterday, I'd just get on and join S&P: junk paper- nothing to be gained by being nice any more is there?)

P.S This article by David Carr at the NYT would be funny in his lack of awareness of the future of his industry and his employer, if the underlying realities for so many people working in newspapers weren't so breathtakingly awful. To begin with you think, oh, that's good for him, he's got it - then you read on and realise he really hasn't at all. An article of infinite ironies.

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International Herald Tribune
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Content, the once and future king

This is a very good article, which I post on this blog for three reasons.

Firstly, like a lot of material you'll find here it's a sort of newspaper scrapbook for my personal reference - my other news scrapbook you can find at A Place in the Auvergne.

Secondly, I just wanted to cut and paste the entire article to remind Virginia of one important element she has overlooked. Anyone can and will rip and burn your content without earning you a dime. For more evidence of this visit http://www.aplaceintheauvergne.blogspot.com

Lastly, Virginia is yet again an example of media commentary from the No. 1 Newspaper Site in the U.S.A that fails to refer to the NYT and the implications for the journal she is writing for; a subject that it seems is off limits. Until the bitter end?

Content, the once and future king
By Virginia Heffernan
Sunday, December 7, 2008
For years, we in traditional media have consoled ourselves about the increasing irrelevance of our work. First, we insist that content is king. If a story, image, film or report is compelling enough it will flourish on any platform, dominate every spot. By this logic, creators, producers, artists and journalists should attend only to producing great work and leave the changes in the distribution and display of information to nerds in suits.
When that argument doesn't add up, we console ourselves another way. We say that classic 20th-Century forms like Hollywood movies and glossy magazines breed natural digital extensions. A video game can be spun out of "Gossip Girl." Social networks can coalesce around publications like The Economist or Vogue. Maybe these secondary media will draw people to the main event or maybe - we have been reluctant to notice - they will be the main event themselves. Either way, it's O.K. If a trained and talented old hand makes the primary content, young people who understand iMovie or know how to moderate message boards - someone's nephew or baby sitter, maybe - can spin off the other stuff.
Then there's the troublesome third argument, the one we know is true. This is the one that admits that the content that thrives in the new distribution-and-display systems is suspiciously different from the American popular culture we used to love even 10 years ago. Thrillers, it seems, don't flourish on Hulu. No one is reading a six-part investigative series about mayoral malfeasance on Twitter. And if it's the afterthought message boards - the ones moderated by interns - that draw all the traffic, why are we in old media pouring so much money and time into "main event" programming that goes unread and unviewed?
The third argument says we have to change. We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it's not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries - music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows - are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.
The journalist Jeff Jarvis has lately blamed his peers for not apprehending better the changes to our profession wrought by digital technology. The writer Ron Rosenbaum has responded that the best journalists were too busy working to philosophize. Both are right. For 10 years, journalists have hoped to avoid radical job retraining. And who can blame anyone in any profession, midcareer and set in her ways, for avoiding seminars on writing Google-friendly leads or opening her sources to readers? At the same time, a huge number of mainstream journalists have taken to blogging, signed up for Facebook and Twitter, linked to video and experimented with new forms. Jarvis and Rosenbaum are among them.
Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to "tell great stories" or "make arresting images." You don't study the ancient art of storytelling. You learn to produce certain numbers and styles and forms of words and images. You learn to be succinct when a publication loses ad pages. You learn to dilate when an "article" is understood mostly as a delivery vehicle for pictures of a sexy celebrity. The words stack up under certain kinds of headlines that also adhere to strict conventions as to size and tone, and eventually they appear alongside certain kinds of photos and illustrations with certain kinds of captions on pages of certain dimensions that are often shared with advertisements. Just as shooting film for a Hollywood movie is never just filming and acting in a TV ad is never just acting, writing for a magazine is never just writing.
The fact that articles live in digital form and no longer, primarily, on paper, frees them from certain constraints that seem absolutely normal to old-media people and archaic - if not just stupid - to everyone else. Take an example from a recent issue of Self magazine. It contains an article about volunteer work, one that could have been written in a million ways. But because it appears in a magazine with newsstand sales, a subscriber base of women and ads from cosmetics companies and pharmaceuticals, it is, perforce, a colloquial personal essay that expresses in its DNA deeply held beliefs about how women's magazines work and sell and survive. Specifically, it's produced to engender and justify a cover line, that good old device used by glossy magazines to stand out on newsstands. In this case, the cover line reads, "The #1 Happiness Secret You Might Be Missing," and the story touts volunteering as a wellspring of contentment.
But it seems that one day cosmetics companies will perhaps start beefing up their own Web sites. When advertisers become content providers, magazines lose ads and finally drop off newsstands. With no newsstands and no covers, there is no need for cover lines; with no cover lines, the story no longer has to be written in the cover-line-justifying way. Headlines on Newser or The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast draw an audience with new kinds of come-ons.
People who work in traditional media ought either to concentrate on the antiquarian quality of their work, cultivating the exclusive audience of TV viewers or magazine readers that might pay for craftsmanship. Or they should imagine that they are 19 again: spending a day on Twitter or following a recipe from a Mark Bittman video played on a refrigerator that automatically senses what ingredients are missing and texts an order to the grocery store. Then they should think about what content suits the new modes of distribution and could evolve in tandem with them. For old-media types, mental flexibility could be the No. 1 happiness secret.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/07/business/medium08.php

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Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times


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A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

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Sulzberger Ochs Family talks to private equity and sovereign wealth funds to take NYT Company public-to-private: well, it's an idea.

When the car makers start talking about a slowdown lasting into 2010 (Auto slump seen lasting into 2010) , and commodities futures markets reflecting the same, then you know it's going to a be a rough ride.

Even without the recession (which we're now allowed to call it, although NYT business editors please note, it has actually been going on for more than a year - didn't read that in the IHT) question marks remain over the future of the NYT Company.

I have long argued that some sort of public-to-private move by the family looks attractive, with shares trading as low as below $5 and closing yesterday at $7.75 (an uptick day Global stocks rise on anti-recession plays ).

So this move by Yahoo management, ex and existing, to do a management buyout looks interesting, and the above headline to this post is exactly what they are doing. Their share price is/was around the $10 mark and their shareholders would take such a move in a snap. As would many NYT Company shareholders, and indeed employees.

As to those NYT employees, we've long been told that the NYT won't lay off editorial staff, but brace yourself for the invitation made to employees of the FT.

No, we're not going to sack you, true to our word, but we forgot to mention the idea that we would like you work a three day week. Any takers? Get to work on that long planned novel? You could always pitch it to Random House.

FT Staff Invited to Cut Working Week (Guardian)

The Financial Times is offering staff the opportunity to work a three-day week as part of cost-cutting measures designed to avoid the need for job cuts. John Ridding, the Financial Times chief executive, informed staff yesterday that the cost-cutting measures were being put in place as a result of a worsening global economic conditions in an internal email.

Yahoo shares rise on talk of buyout
By Brad Stone
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO: It takes only a glimmer of hope to excite Yahoo shareholders these days.
Investors bid up shares in Yahoo by 7 percent Tuesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that Jonathan Miller, the former chief executive of AOL, had been talking to private equity and sovereign wealth funds to raise $28 billion to $30 billion to buy Yahoo. That would work out to $20 to $22 a share; Yahoo's stock closed up 76 cents at $11.50.
People in private equity circles said Miller had indeed discussed possible options for Yahoo on and off since he left AOL two years ago. But they also said that a private buyout of Yahoo was highly unlikely, given the daunting environment for deal-making and the amount of debt that such a large deal would almost certainly require.
"I would think this would be a very hard number to raise even in an effervescent financial market," said Roger McNamee, a co-founder of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm in Silicon Valley. "In the current market, where there does not appear to be any debt available for any cause, let alone Yahoo, I think this has to be viewed as a long shot."
Miller, now a partner at Velocity Interactive Group, a venture capital firm, did not respond to a request for comment.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that the ears of investors have perked up at the whisper of a possible conclusion to Yahoo's long and twisted corporate story. There have been repeated rumors that Microsoft might rekindle efforts to buy some or all of Yahoo, but Microsoft has mostly debunked these.
Last weekend, The Times of London reported that Miller was working on a deal with Microsoft to buy Yahoo's search business. All parties denied that report.
Jerry Yang, Yahoo's co-founder and chief executive, announced last month that he would step aside once a new chief is found. Yahoo has told at least one major shareholder that it hoped to conclude its search and announce Yang's replacement by the end of the year, but that is an ambitious goal.
A Yahoo spokesman, Brad Williams, would not discuss the timing of the search for a chief executive, and said of the report about Miller that the company would not comment on rumors.
Though Yahoo shareholders and analysts say that a private buyout of Yahoo remains unlikely, they do find elements of that prospect appealing. Yahoo could easily sell off parts of itself, like its search business or its Japanese division, to immediately pay off debt.
Miller, who remains a popular figure in Internet circles, could probably marshal the support of large Yahoo shareholders, many of whom are desperate for a change in management. Miller was the principal architect of AOL's transformation from a dial-up Internet service provider to an online advertising company, which is generally considered to have been a success.
In the 1990s, he was an executive at media outlets like USA Broadcasting, Nickelodeon and Paramount, which could give him the background to create a future for Yahoo in the rapidly changing media business.
One potential hitch is that Miller has a noncompete agreement with his former employer, Time Warner, that extends through March. Miller was forced to withdraw his name from consideration for Yahoo's board over the summer after Time Warner indicated it would enforce the measure.
Sandeep Aggarwal, an Internet analyst at Collins Stewart, said that even talk of Miller's involvement was good for Yahoo and might motivate Microsoft to get off the sidelines.
"Microsoft has had no reason to hurry up and make a move," Aggarwal said. "If Microsoft sees another strategic alternative developing, that might pressure them to move faster. It creates option value for Yahoo, and options never hurt."
But Yahoo continues to face challenges that could discourage anyone courageous enough to think about taking over the business. Though it has the most popular Web site on the Internet, it continues to lose market share in the profitable search business to Google, a relentless opponent. And the market for display advertisements, where Yahoo is strong, is suffering amid the general downturn in advertising.
All these factors, McNamee of Elevation Partners said, are poison to any potential Yahoo deal makers. "Private equity investors hate uncertainty, and the business situation at Yahoo is uncertain enough that it is bound to scare off many deep-pocketed investors," he said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/yahoo.php

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended." The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees



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Web marketing that hopes to learn what attracts a click (IHT)

Further to my posting yesterday on Internet advertising and its shortcomings, this article below from today's IHT.

All sounds rather revolutionary on the face of it doesn't it, but given how long Internet advertising has been around, and given how long direct mail has been around, this really is just panel testing on a massive scale, enabled by technology and large data sets. And it took the industry until 2008 to get here?

I wouldn't be buying too many Internet adverts quite so soon, and why on earth haven't publishers been investing in this type of research to up the value of their ludicrously low price inventory?

What I really love, in these difficult times, is this quite extraordinary comment from Planet What the Hell One are You On:

"I think the creative community has to get very comfortable with results-based outcomes in marketing," said Hanlon, whose company has an interest in Tumri. "There are a lot of creative people who didn't sign up for that kind of world."

Now there is a thought.

Web marketing that hopes to learn what attracts a click
By Stephanie Clifford
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Online advertisers are not lacking in choices: They can display their ads in any color, on any site, with any message, to any audience, with any image.
Now, a new breed of companies is trying to tackle all of those options and determine what ad works for a specific audience. They are creating hundreds of versions of clients' online ads, changing elements like color, type font, message, and image to see what combination draws clicks on a particular site or from a specific audience.
It is technology that could cause a shift in the advertising world. The creators and designers of ads have long believed that a clever idea or emotional resonance drives an ad's success. But that argument may be difficult to make when analysis suggests that it is not an ad's brilliant tagline but its pale-yellow background and sans serif font that attracts customers.
The question is, "how do we combine creative energy, which is a manual and sort of qualitative exercise, with the raw processing power of computing, which is all about quantitative data?" said Tim Hanlon, executive vice president of VivaKi Ventures, the investment unit of Publicis Groupe.
"I think it's clear that the traditional process of agencies is clearly not going to survive the digital era without significant changes to our approaches," Hanlon said.
The push to automate the creative elements of ad units is coming from two companies in California, not Madison Avenue.
Adisn, based in Long Beach, and Tumri, based in Mountain View, are working both sides of the ad equation. On one, they are trying to figure out who is looking at a page by using a mix of behavioral targeting and analysis of the page's content. On the other side, they are assembling an ad on the fly that is meant to appeal to that person.
Both companies assume there is no perfect version of an ad, and instead assemble hundreds of different versions that are displayed on Web sites where their clients have bought ad space, showing versions of an ad to actual consumers as they browse the Web.
That might lead to finding that an ad for a baby supply store is more popular with young mothers when it features a bottle instead of diapers.
(Adisn and Tumri both measure the ad's effectiveness based on parameters the advertiser sets, like how many people clicked on the ad or how many people actually bought something after clicking on it. They compare those with standard ads they run as part of a control group.)
Adisn's approach has been to build a database of related words so it can assess the content of a Web site or blog based on the words on its pages.
Adisn then buys space on Web sites, and uses its information to find an appropriate ad to show visitors to those sites. If a visitor views pages about beaches, weather and Hawaii, it might suggest that the visitor is interested in Hawaiian travel.
Based on that analysis, Adisn's system pulls different components — actors, fonts, background images — to make an ad. For example, it might show an ad with a blue background, an image of a beach, and a text about tickets to Hawaii. "Once we've built this huge database of hundreds of millions of relationships" between words, said Andy Moeck, the chief executive of Adisn, the system can "make a very good real-time decision as to what is the most relevant or appropriate campaign we could show."
Simple Green, the cleaning brand, began working with Adisn this year to advertise a new line of products called Simple Green Naturals.
"If it's a woman looking at a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator, they can show a stainless steel product," said Jessica Frandson, the vice president for marketing for Simple Green. While Frandson gave Adisn a general idea of what she wanted, she also let the agency do almost random combinations with about 10 percent of her ads to see which of those combinations had the highest click-through rates.
"If it wants to be purple and orange, if that's going to be appealing to my customer, then so be it," she said.
Even Moeck said he was often surprised by the success of certain ads. "Some of it, I just scratch my head and say, 'I have no idea,' " he said.
Tumri's approach is slightly different. It creates a template for ads, including slots for the message, the color, the image and other elements.
Unlike Adisn, it does not buy ad space, but lets clients — like Sears and Best Buy — choose and buy space on sites themselves. And rather than building a contextual database like Adisn, Tumri uses whatever targeting approach advertisers are already using, whether it is behavioral or contextual or demographic, and assembles an ad on the fly based on that information.
"It's reporting back to the advertiser and agency saying, 'Guess what? The soccer mom in Indiana likes background three, which was pink, likes image four, which was the SUV, and likes marketing message 12, about room, safety and comfort," said Calvin Lui, chief of Tumri.
Some advertisers are using that information just to see which version of the ad works best, but Lui emphasized that the appropriate ad is not static, and changes all the time as content on the page changes.
While the planners and buyers in advertising agencies are intrigued by the idea of measuring each part of an ad, the creative staff that designs ads is less focused on measurement and more focused on the overall effect.
"I think the creative community has to get very comfortable with results-based outcomes in marketing," said Hanlon, whose company has an interest in Tumri. "There are a lot of creative people who didn't sign up for that kind of world."
Bant Breen, the president of worldwide digital communications at Initiative, the Interpublic Group media buying and planning firm, had a similar view. "The traditional creative process right now is not structured to essentially deliver hundreds of permutations, or hundreds of ideas for messaging," said Breen, whose firm is using Tumri to determine which ads are working.
"There's no doubt that there will be a lot of data that can be collected that could be applied to the creative process."
But, he said, "that's not necessarily an easy discussion to have with great art directors."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/12/03/business/03adco.php

CHECK THIS OUT TOO:
Nielsen starts offering second-by-second data

READ AN ALTERNATIVE IHT DAILY NARRATIVE AT
A PLACE IN THE AUVERGNE

LOOKING FOR A CHRISTMAS BOOK GIFT TO BUY?
"Books about cosmopolitan urbanites discovering the joys of country life are two a penny, but this one is worth a second glance. Walthew's vivid description of the moral stress induced by his job as a high-flying executive with the International Herald Tribune newspaper is worth the cover price alone…. Highly recommended." The Oxford Times

Amazon.co.uk
A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
by
Ian Walthew


'I read A Place in My Country with absolute unalloyed delight. A glorious book.'
Jeremy Irons (actor)

‘Ian Walthew was a newspaper executive with a career that took him round the world, who one day did a mad thing. He saw a for-sale sign on a cottage in the Cotswolds, bought it, resigned and moved in. For the first few weeks he just lay on the grass in a daze. Then he started talking to his neighbours and digging into the rich history of this beautiful part of England. Out of his inquiries grew this affecting and inspiring memoir.What sets it apart from others of its ilk is the author’s enviable immunity to cliché and his determination to love his homeland better than he used to. His elegiac account of relearning how to be an Englishman should be required reading for anyone who claims to know or love this country.’ Financial Times


Amazon.com

A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY
By
Ian Walthew


For more reviews visit ianwalthew.com

Business trip to the IHT in Paris or friends and family coming to visit you? Fed up with hotels? Bring the family (sleeps 6) to superb Montmartre apartment - weekend nights free of charge if minimum of 3 work nights booked;. Cable TV; wifi, free phone calls in France (landlines); large DVD and book library; kids toys, books, travel cot and beds; two double bedrooms; all mod cons; half an hour to Neuilly and 12 mins walk from Eurostar. T&E valid invoices.

10% Discount for NYT employees; 15% Discount for IHT Employees



International Herald Tribune
IHT
New York Times
The NYT Company