Frank Shaw at Waggener Edstrom has some salient points about the on-line/print advertising mix.
Ad Age has a good report about what Hearst is doing with its online properties, looking first at Esquire.
There is general agreement that having the right mix of print and online will be key to any publication thriving for the next decade, the challenge has been defining that mix and then monetizing it in a smart way.
The debate is how much online cannibalizes print, and what the tradeoff is.
Over at Wired, Chris Anderson is continuing to explore the synergy between print and online. The WSJ is looking to push more spot news online. BizWeek has been ramping up their online efforts for a while. Forbes, if you believe the numbers, is booming online.
But as a reader, I don’t think anyone quite has the mix right. I don’t like when print stories trickle online, for example. I don’t like the way it’s hard to find back stories in the New Yorker. I know that reporters often have their stories cut brutally to fit space, but that they aren’t available in their long form in the online version — where there are no space constraints.
I think it would be great to be able to actually click through and read the transcripts of the interviews from an online site (shades of Mark Cuban). So then I start thinking about the physical distribution of the publication simply as a start. See a story, like it. Look online, find more story, more photos, more video, more commentary. Want more — click deeper, find interviews, transcripts, other resources.
The Hearst Corporation and Microsoft launched “News Reader” software this week. The downloadable application provides computer users with a new way to view newspaper content onscreen. The Seattle “P-I Reader” preserves the look and feel of a newspaper.
The layout, the font, the headlines, and the advertising are replicated in the news reading experience on line. You can’t do that with an RSS reader, says Don Dodge.
Clicking on the P-I Reader icon on your desktop will update the P-I Reader with the most recent news. You can then close the program and be on your way. Later, you can read the P-I Reader, offline. A large sampling of the stories are on-line, but to see our full product you need to buy the paper or subscribe to the electronic edition.
