Google is in advanced talks to pay around $500 million for Yelp, according to a story from TechCrunch confirmed by the New York Times, which described the talks in straightforward business terms: "Google has been showing greater interest in the local business market in the United States."

But Yelp isn't just any online content startup. It wields disproportionate power over local merchants, from restaurants to auto body shops, and said merchants have repeatedly told tales of Yelp offering to let them re-arrange reviews if they took out ads — and of disappearing positive reviews in retaliation when they complained about the ethics of the situation. The San Francisco-area alt-weekly East Bay Express ran a series of articles on such practices, and the story eventually went national.

One business owner got so frustrated with Yelp users — and Yelp Inc.'s passive aggressive handling of her — that she ended up in a wrestling match with a reviewer she had flamed on email.

The company is also known for its raging, drunken, fleshy user parties, which are thrown, alternately, by the company itself and by the restaurants subject to its users' reviews.

Google has already seen its reputation as the "Don't Be Evil" internet company erode significantly, most recently after CEO Eric Schmidt said people should consider not having secrets, a story that spread widely online and in the news media. If it's going to seduce Yelp, Google should make sure its remaining friends know the company plans to reform its new toy rather than join its caddish pursuits.

(Top pics: Yelp co-founder Russel Simmons has fun with an employee at a Yelp holiday party, from this Valleywag post.)

Way to win reader trust, Post-Dispatch!



The employee's comment was just one word: "Pussy." It was a stupid response to a stupid blog post, entitled "What's the craziest thing you've ever eaten?" The joke was a groaner, to be sure. And one that was annoyingly re-posted once after administrators deleted it. But the comment posed no threat to anyone or anything other than perhaps good taste. So it's bizarre how far the author of the post to which it was attached went next: The author, , Kurt Greenbaum,looked at the IP address on the comment, associated it with a local school, called the school and forwarded them all data on the commenter.

Then, Greenbaum later wrote, the guy got busted:

The school's IT director took a shine to the challenge... he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

Score one for Greenbaum! Now St. Louis-ians won't dumbly assume they can speak anonymously to the local paper, or that newspaper staffers, of all people, might have some sympathy for the soon-to-be unemployed. And we can't imagine anyone else hurling the word "Pussy" at Kurt Greenbaum again. Because this is clealry a guy with a thick skin.

(Pic from Greenbaum's Flickr)

[via Read-Write Web]

That's bad news not only for News Corp. chairman Murdoch but also for all the other old media barons hoping online paywalls will save their bacon. Even those who will pay can't decide if they want to buy individual articles via micropayments, subscribe to print-online bundles or subscribe to just the website:

Then there's the anecdotal evidence collected by Ad Age's Simon Dumenco, who surfed the comments section of Murdoch's websites and found that most of his own readers thought his paywall would fail. Some were downright mean, like Times of London reader Robin Stack: "It will reduce your wealth and influence; please do it."

So, in order to have any hope of weaning consumers off free content, the likes of Murdoch will have to offer a diverse array of payment plans and work like hell to change the thinking of the vast majority of his existing audience. For moguls used to exploiting their readers' and viewers' basest instincts, that sounds like an awful lot of persuading.

NYT editor Bill Keller told Clark Hoyt that the paper is "within weeks of a decision" on the long-discussed question of whether, and how, to charge for its online news.

So here is what their decision will be: You will have to pay for their online news. One way or another! Maybe you will pay a $5 per month subscription fee, or maybe you will pay micropayments for every story, or maybe they will roll out tiered membership packages with fancy extras designed to get hardcore fans to pay more in exchange for more access. Probably a certain level of news will be free, and a better level of news will not be free. Or maybe someone there has actually come up with an elegant solution to this mess! Though we doubt it.

But somehow we will all have to pay something, because if we don't, the New York Times is totally going to go broke, bit by bit, by giving its product away for free. Which is something that it and every other newspaper have now come to realize. A more interesting question: Will any of the NYT's star columnists flee the paper if they're shoved behind a pay wall, like Newsday's Saul Friedman just did?

They might! These same NYT columnists sat through the Times Select fiasco and watched their readership drop precipitously. Things are different now though! Because somebody like, say, Thomas Friedman, or David Pogue, or Maureen Dowd, could legitimately decide that their own BRAND would gain more by going off on their own than by sitting behind a paywall at the NYT. Thanks for the help with everything, Times, but we're off to be A Brand Called Me-s! Fewer readers could hurt their speaking fees. Can't have that.

This result would bring in some much-needed fresh blood and get rid of Thomas Fucking Friedman, so let's all pray it goes down exactly like that. We have our (employer's) credit card ready, Bill Keller.

By Mediaite's tally, 32% of the more than 500 commenters on the story said they'd pay to read the NYT online. Let's call that one-third!

Now let's make some generous assumptions. Quantcast estimates that NYtimes.com gets about 15 million monthly US readers. (We asked the company how many comments they get; they haven't gotten back to us yet). Their weekday circulation is around 650k. So the question becomes: How many of those online users who currently pay nothing would pay, say, $5 per month (a number the NYT was floating in a survey earlier this year) to read the website?

Since one-third of the commenters on a story about the paper's staffing issues said they would, does that mean one-third of the total would? We are currently laughing derisively at that assertion! These commenters are people who not only are interested enough in the inner workings of the paper to read a story about its staffing issues—already a small minority—but also interested enough to comment on the story, which takes a certain level of commitment at the NYT's website. So we have a small subset of a small subset of the paper's online readers; namely, those readers most interested in the financial fate of the NYT. Of those, one-third say they're willing to pay.

Let's very generously say a quarter of online readers fall into the first subset, and a quarter of those fall into the second subset. Therefore, the number of online readers willing to pay would be 1/4 times 1/4 times 1/3 times 15 million, or 312,500 readers. If they all paid $5 per month, the NYT would make an extra $18.75 million per year. Which is nice and all, but would not even cover the interest payments on their subprime Mexican loan.

The NYT may in fact get more online readers worldwide, but then again, our assumptions here were already overly generous. In other words, the company's salvation will not be found in the comments section.

We've included only e-readers (and one tablet computer) that are either developed by old media companies or have gone out of their way to partner with them; think of this as a compilation of would-be media saviors dressed up as gadgets.

Maker: Barnes & Noble (the retailer)
Name: E-Reader
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble (the publisher); access to books scanned by Google Books; a B&N e-book store. (More)

Maker: Apple
Name: Apple Tablet (unofficial)
Caveat: A tablet computer is much more capable than an e-reader, usually offering the resolution, sound and video capabilities of a laptop computer along with a full-color display.
Old media tie-ins: Apple is in content talks with the New York Times, a large magazine group and at least two textbook companies, sources told our colleagues at Gizmodo. (More)

Maker:Sony
Names:Reader Touch, Reader Pocket
Old media tie-ins: Sony has a great feature that will let you check out e-books from one the oldest distribution mediums out there: your local library. Publishers can't be thrilled with "Library Finder," to say nothing of Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Oh well!

Maker: Plastic Logic Ltd.
Name: Plastic Logic Reader
Old media tie-ins: Content deals with Gannett Co.'s USA Today and Pearson PLC's Financial Times. Digital bookstore from Barnes & Noble.

Maker: Amazon.com
Name: Kindle DX, Kindle 2
Old media tie-ins: e-Books — from fiction to textbooks — sold by Amazon; a variety of newspapers, including the New York Times; a variety of magazines, including Time. Non-participating newspapers, including those owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., have complained about the paltry 30 percent cut of revenues they were offered for sales on the device.

Maker: iRex
Name: DR800SG (catchy!)
Old media tie-ins: Books from Barnes & Noble's e-book store. B&N gets around.

And, bringing up the rear, there are the media companies whose devices are, for now, mostly talk.

Maker: Hearst Corp. and FirstPaper LLC
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: Would presumably include content from Hearst newspapers like the Chronicle-s in San Francisco and Houston and from magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan. There has been talk of a hardware device developed by Hearst and, more recently, of an open software platform developed with FirstPaper.

Maker: Time Inc.
Name: Unknown
Old media tie-ins: There are conflicting accounts over whether Time Inc. is interested in making this device. Former Valleywag Owen Thomas of NBC Bay Area obtained a June 2009 presentation indicating plans to finish a prototype this year; Peter Kafka's sources at All Things D said the magazine division of Time Warner is interested in creating a virtual store rather than a physical device. Either way, the company is said to be seeking partnerships with other magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Meredith and Hearst, according to the documents reviewed by Thomas.

(UPDATE: Added Sony Reader due to Library Finder feature.)

(Pics via Gizmodo unless otherwise noted)

In 2005, not long after News Corp. bought MySpace, when it still seemed like a brilliant purchase... I congratulated him on the acquisition. "Now," he said, "we're in the stalking business."

Later in his Vanity Fair column, Wolff recounts how Murdoch asked the founders of Google "Why don't you read newspapers?", gave "a walleyed stare" during all conversations about Web news and tried to beat Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to death with his cane.

Kidding; even after buying MySpace, Murdoch was over the moon for Zuckerberg. He invited the founder to speak at a News Corp. executive retreat, huddled with him throughout dinner — sparking obvious jealousy in MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe — and soon declared people were "all going to Facebook at the moment" rather than MySpace. All this according to Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace.

The point is, Rupert Murdoch has always kind of hated on MySpace, cruelly, in public.

(Pic: Murdoch and MySpace CEO DeWolfe at the opening of MySpace's San Francisco office in Oct. 2007. Getty Images.)

"I think it will come down to a gut call," editor Bill Keller tells the Observer. But the Times' gut has been notoriously wrong about the Web in the past. Remember that time the paper passed on the chance to invest in a little startup called "Google?" Or "Amazon.com?" Or "Yahoo?" Good times.

Is there any way for the Times to maybe ask the guts of Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Evan Williams (Twitter, Blogger) and just go with that, somehow? Their guts just seem smarter, about the internet.

(Pic: Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger at the unveiling of Amazon's Kindle DX in May. Getty.)

Oh, sad newspaper industry. Does anyone believe in you anymore?

Private equity billionaire Warren Hellman was to be the savior of the San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst's cash-bleeding newspaper, which has laid off scores of journalists as recently as last week. But talks with the newspaper and the union weren't as interesting to Hellman, ultimately, as a sexy new idea: Become a sort of Arianna Huffington of the San Francisco-area news market.

So Hellman is now setting up an online (primarily) news operation for the region, according to reports in the San Francisco Business Times and New York Times. Like Huffington's Huffington Post, the venture's staff will include a hefty dose of amateur reporters, including students rom the University of California, Berkeley's graduate journalism school and possibly, according to some of the initial discussions we heard about, local volunteers. Unlike HuffPo, however, it would be a nonprofit, and will work with the local public radio station KQED.

It's a smart move: Even as they greedily snap up iPhones and Macbooks, the Bay Area's tech savvy readers have been abandoning the print edition of the Chronicle, whose circulation fell more than 20 percent over five years to 370,000. The paper lost around $4 million per month last year. Hellman's gambit is also commendable. By pumping $5 million of his foundation's cash into the venture, Hellman seeds a money stream that should help at least some laid off local journalists

But, in an interview with the New York Times, Hellman was cruelly blunt about the loser in all of this: papers like the Chronicle. Asked about whether he was ushering them to an early grave, Hellman said:

I think that demise might be inevitable, anyway. This might put journalism, broadly defined, on a much more stable foundation.

Wow. Perhaps the Times should ask its own executives that same question: The paper confirmed in its own news columns it has been in lengthy talks with Hellman's group "about the possibility of supplying [the group's] reporting to a San Francisco edition that the [Times] plans to start."

Newspapers: Even other newspapers relish feasting on their corpses. Strictly in the interest of the "civic good," of couse.

(Pic: Hellman, by AP.)

While the U.S. government can't seem to get its shit together and grow green energy, Google's living up to their motto to "don't be evil," the company and announced that they're working on a slew of technologies aimed at cutting energy costs.

The first: a new, cheaper form of solar thermal technology. Rather than relying on traditional heliostats, which track the sun's movement and aligns panels accordingly, the company is trying to develop new mirrors that will be at least half the price. Then, as if that's not enough, they're also looking into constructing gas turbines that feed off the sun, rather than natural gas, which would, in turn, reduce your energy bill, according to Bill Weihl, the company's "green energy czar."

In two to three years we could be demonstrating a significant scale pilot system that would generate a lot of power and would be clearly mass manufacturable at a cost that would give us a levelized cost of electricity that would be in the 5 cents or sub 5 cents a kilowatt hour range.

Of course, like any organization looking to improve the world, Google's not focused solely on science, but, as we all know, information. The newest effort on that front is a plan to compensate online newspapers for their content, which would be done through a "system of micropayments" akin to the consumption-oriented Google Checkout.

While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year. The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time.

This would help get newspaper publisher's off the company's back, yes, but does nothing to help alleviate another information-related headache: the ongoing battle over Google Books.

That project has hit its fair share of road blocks, particularly negotiations around the "Book Rights Registry," which would keep track of which publishers, authors and the like should get cash for their digitized publications. A judge will rule on that next month. But, as a growing world power, Google's facing international pressure on that issue, with some foreign government's whining that the company's efforts will derail their own plans for digital libraries.

While certainly economically motivated, all of these anti-Google objections show the company's vast and growing power. It couldn't fight the Chinese government's censors, but it's sure as shit doing its best to challenge other well-established institution's ways and means.

Like a good government, Google's bringing people together and at least making an attempt to keep the peace. That doesn't always work, no, but with most of the developed world using the company in some way, shape or form, it's looking more and more likely that Google's power will soon extend far beyond one's computer screen. Let's just hope they keep their aforementioned promise, or else we're all totally fucked.

It's the perfect repellant for criminally-minded urban digerati, much like the classical music piped outside convenience stores to discourage teenaged loiterers. The Barcelona design firm Mitemite prices it around $85, according to the New York Times' gadget blog, which could buy you a year's worth of real newspapers to wrap your laptop in. But then you'd have to deal with ink, clutter, the pressure to read up on international affairs. Ick.

(Pic: Mitemite via Times)

Murdoch's "Chief Digital Officer" (gag) Jonathan Miller is trying to put together a "consortium that would charge for news distributed online," the Los Angeles Times reports. Read: A content cartel. Miller is trying to recruit the New York Times Company, Washington Post Comany, Hearst and Tribune as charter members. So if Murdoch is bluffing about paid content, as we've speculated, trying to get his competitors to make the leap while his own free websites poach their readers, Miller doesn't know about it.

Which is probably just as well: Legitimate Businessmen with reason to think they might get hassled by the feds have to be careful what they tell one another. Need to know basis only!

Fun with reporters desperately seeking sources! Here's a HARO request from Fox News, looking for help for a story that could be big:

18)Summary: Allergic to Wi-Fi?
Name: Karlie Pouliot
Category: Health/Fitness
Email: [Redacted]
Title: Health Producer
Media Outlet: FOX NEWS
Specific Geographic Region: N
Region: New York City area
Deadline: 01:07am EASTERN - 31 July

Query:
Do you ever feel sick, dizzy and confused? You could be allergic to Wi-Fi! Were looking for patients who suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity and doctors who specialize in treating it.

Journalism in action, ladies and gentlemen.


Here, via Guest of a Guest, is a photo of Thrillist boss Ben Lerer at some Thrillist-sponsored beach party thing in the Hamptons last weekend. Yep.


This story about how Swiffer set up a "lounge" at some convention to attract blogger coverage is a good reminder that we're all just dancing monkeys for corporate America. Write your Twitter about your Swiffer Lounge experience, monkey. Dance.


Navy-besieged Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg's peers speak up: "On a personal note, I had to laugh at Gordon's complaint about "Carol's attempts to bully other reporters and establish dominance" on the base. When I traveled to Gitmo in January for our story on the base's final days, Rosenberg helped me from start to finish with my reporting and asked nothing in return." Conversely, none of the Navy commander's peers have come forward yet to say he is not a crybaby.


The Washington Post has replaced sourpuss TV critic Tom Shales with Hank Stuever. But they're giving Shales a column in the Style section where he will "will illuminate, pontificate and eviscerate, on TV and other subjects" and generally continue being self-important. Michael Calderone has the full memo.

A tipster was selected for a survey on nytimes.com and graciously copy/pasted from it for our benefit. The Times was gauging interest in two premium packages that it calls NYT Gold and NYT Silver. Market research is apparently ongoing and it's entirely possible, even likely, that the pricing and features outlined below aren't a final plan. But they are the most detail we've seen of just what the Times is hoping people will pay for on their web site as print revenue vanishes.

The packages carry an annual cost of $150 and $50, respectively, and emphasize behind-the-scenes benefits like newsroom tours, exclusive videos of reporters telling "the story behind the story" and ancient back issues. In this, the new packages repeat the core mistake of the Times' last, abortive effort at premium online content, the TimesSelect opinion section: Assuming people are fascinated with the Times as a brand, and with the deep thinking of its insiders. Really, most Web readers just like the news. But the NYT's most valuable, expensive to produce product would seem to remain free under the new plan.

Aside from the tote bag, which could have a certain retro chic if the paper doesn't soon conquer its deep financial problems, the most compelling benefit is called FirstLook and gives paying customers an early peek at the news: "You'll... get access to some stories before they appear in print or online." However, whether this is an early look at a political scoop or the Dining section isn't clear.

UPDATE: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty writes, "It's very early in the process. We are still in the data collection phase."

The Times' plans, as outlined in an nytimes.com user survey:

(Top pic: Times chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr, by JD Lasica)

When the Chronicle's website this morning yanked a column lambasting the mayor, charges of political cowardice quickly followed. The paper was scared, but not of the mayor: Frightened for its business, the paper is now charging for some Web content.

Vlae Kershner, News Director for the site, writes that the column in question, by former Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein (pictured), was never supposed to be online in the first place. "It's subscriber-only content that was posted by mistake," he told us.

Following months of discussions about doing this sort of thing, the paper has decided to inaugurate its first premium section, containing Bronstein's column (see the email Chronicle editor Ward Bushee sent us, below). It's a small experiment, but an extraordinary step: SFGate has historically been perhaps the most open newspaper website in the country; unlike other big-city papers, it never even tried to charge for access to its extensive archives.

It's odd that the Chronicle would choose opinion content for its first premium content experiment, given the experience of the The New York Times. The Times abandoned its effort to charge for opinion content, TimesSelect, after discovering that a paywall diminished the paper's voice and reduced its advertising revenue. Plus the market for political and cultural opinion is oversaturated; Bronstein's opinion pieces will likewise be a tough sell. The market pays no attention to newsroom hierarchies that put columnists and former editors up on pedestals.

More salable would be the Chronicle's least glamorous work, local news reporting, and any other beat it truly owns, like restaurant reviews. In politics and food alike, though, the paper faces competition from a growing corps of bloggers who could permanently steal way readers. For its own stake, the Chronicle should make sure it will be able to abandon any future experiments more readily than it launched the current one.

Chronicle editor Bushee's email:

Here's the deal. Phil's column was created from the start to be a print-only column in the Monday Chronicle. When we first started talking about the column, Phil and I agreed to try this as a low-stakes experiment. The experiment is not indicative of any larger plan by the Chronicle, SFGate or Hearst. It is not the start of a premium content imitative or a pay wall. But it was designed to test how different content models can serve different audiences. Each week Phil reaches a significant online audience with his blog, which is not available in print. By introducing a column by Phil that is different in its content and mission from his blog, we can see if it adds value to the printed paper by giving readers unique content that they could not get free online. As with any experiment, it will be evaluated at some point to see if we stick with it or change it.



Unfortunately, the brief appearance of the column on SFGate this week made some people think we were pulling it off because of the content. As you surmised in your note, that was not the case. The column was posted for a short time on SFGate through a misunderstanding and then pulled down when it was discovered.

(Pic" Bronstein, via the Chronicle)

Bloomberg reports that the NYT is floating the idea of charging $5 a month to access its website in a survey of readers. (It also asked if subscribers would be willing to pay $2.50 per month).

Unless anybody has any other bright ideas, this is inevitable, and necessary. There's no way the NYT—or most other papers—can continue to allow their own free website to cannibalize their revenue forever. Print subscription levels will probably never rise again in a meaningful way. Online news is the future. Online ads bring in only a fraction of the revenue of print ads. Therefore, the website has to find another way to generate cash. And that way is charging for content.

If all 650,000 print subscribers paid $5 a month for the website, that would be an instant $39 million per year. More likely, many people would choose either only the print subscription (old people) or only the online subscription (non-old people). That means that the NYT could potentially sell many more online subscriptions than it sells print subscriptions. Its website is orders of magnitudes more popular than its print product already. Five bucks a month is not an outrageous fee for the premium newspaper site on the internet. Yes, the Times would lose some online readers, and therefore some online ad revenue. But they should be able to make up much more than that by charging a reasonable fee—particularly as this practice spreads and becomes more accepted. Bitch now, pay later. The paper will still have to face some pretty severe staff cutbacks. But this is the future. If you like to read the NYT, pay up.

This "ink on paper" solution basically makes the newspaper at least as exciting as the internet, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, which is responsible for the cutting-edge technology:

The newspaper's top editors say they are committed to producing a paper
that can compete effectively against the imagery of the Internet,
glossy magazines and television - or anything else that impinges on a
potential reader's valuable time.

The new edition of the Chronicle debuted today, using the crisp new front page to promote a weeklong series on... fog. Publishers in other towns take note: If this doesn't get newspaper-hating youngsters to read, you may have to start investing your money in some kind of magical, science fiction newspaper with video, instant commentary and constantly-changing headlines. Good luck with that.

This whole argument is premised on the assumption that we must save newspapers. At the cost of making the internet into an inefficient mess! So Richard Posner, professional smart man and US Appeals Court judge who writes 23,000 words per day, floated the idea of banning links (and more!), so internet cannibals don't keep stealing newspaper content for nothing:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Periods, Richard Posner. Try them. To break up text. What you may notice here is that Posner proposes banning linking or paraphrasing copyrighted materials. The problem: this is America dude, we say what we fucking want, amirite?

You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world." What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let's ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

We all know journalism happens only at newspapers. Better to protect them at all costs than to invest in the murky "future."

This idea is supported by a newspaper columnist! Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (who's married to a senator, btw, nothing to see here), also touts the idea of giving newspapers a 24-hour injunction on news they post, during which time it's all theirs, and can't be aggregated by others online.

Fine. You can have your injunction. But you can't stop anyone from discussing, and writing about, current events. As they happen. Go read all those "Twitter Generation" stories you guys are always writing! The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic. I guess you could also help save newspapers by passing a law that everyone has to buy one every day, or by making it illegal for TV news to exist. That doesn't make those things good ideas.

If Bill Gates pledged to make it so computers could not be operated properly until the user could prove they had read today's Cleveland Plain-Dealer that might save a reporter and he is a monster for not doing so, QED.
[Pic: Chronicling America]

Readers tend to spend gobs and gobs of time on newspaper sites. Indeed, their level of engagement has been print journalism's strongest asset online, but that's changing: According to data from Nielsen Online, readers are spending less time on top newspaper websites, including six minutes less per month at Washingtonpost.com, one minute less per month at USAToday.com and a minute and a half less per month at NYTimes.com.

That's a natural consequence of deriving new traffic growth from a Search Engine Optimization staff, as we've heard anecdotally is happening at many papers. The count of unique users goes up, while the value of each reader for advertisers goes down.

And when the likes of Huffington Post comes to town with a local section — HuffPo launched in New York Monday — it becomes that much harder to convince advertisers you have a special relationship with the locals.

The ideal strategy for newspapers would be to hold the local audience while cultivating new niches likely to be a lucrative as the online ad market grows more sophisticated. Unfortunately, there's hardly a newspaper in the country that can afford to take its sweet time.