MediaFlect

Lots more buzz about what classified advertising guru Peter Zollman is calling Google’s “all-out move” into the classfied advertising space. Seems the non-media media company has filed for a patent to control an application that would tie into other Google functionality, including the recently disclosed Google Base, to give full classified ad-like functionality to listings. For free, I assume?

One managerr of unaffiliated local sites that give listings for locals and tourists told me yesterday he thinks newspapers are going to start folding in five years, maybe ten. Wonder if he was reading this news.

We here have evidence people will pay for content on the Internet, but not news. Well, yes, but what about WSJ.com? Maybe it’s not news people won’t pay for, but rather news they don’t absolutely need. And maybe, then, there has to be another way to pay for what news organizations produce (whcih is the strategy of sites like MSNBC and CBS, which are going for advertising support.)

NY Times wants to “build a site that can sustain that level of journalism” that supports $250 million budget and 1,200 journalists, says publisher Arthur Sulzberger, answering a question at the Online News Association about whether the Times plans to distribute its info or try to get people to the site.

It’s about “building the NY Times site,” which means, I guess, ads and other revenues that accrue from clicks, and not a more wire service model.

Information “does not yearn to be free. Opinion, quality opinion does not yearn to be free.”

Sulzberger just learned from an audience member that Cheney’s chief of staff Libby was indicted. “What am I doing talking to you?” he jokes, meaning he’ll have to head back to the office, I guess.

Walking over to the Hilton Hotel for the 2005 Online News Association conference in New York today, I grabbed my copies of free tabloids “AM New York” and “metro.” It occurred to me that I pay more for my digital media than print.

And that makes sense: The online versions are worth more – I can see today’s and yesterday’s and weeks-ago news, search headlines or words, email to a friend, easily save stories with a few clicks, sort things into folders, and all without having to stuff a file drawer or two or three. Some sites let me use their functionality to sift and sort and get feeds of what I want, or check how a company’s stock price has moved in relation to a story. I can see what people are commenting about related to a story, and set up or access a tag cloud to see what’s going on in the blog-sphere. I can get RSS feeds of many of the subject areas I’m interested in, including for paid products. In print, I can’t do very much of that at all.

So here’s a rough version of the financials of it: I pay $99 per year for The Wall Street Journal online, about $15 for Avantgo, I get subscriptions to Factiva and Thomson and Reuters through business school (which I have paid for if you count the $60,000 exec MBA tuition). I get access to Time-Warner publications for my family’s $15 or so monthly AOL subscription, and a few things (including WSJ.com ) through T-Mobile Hotspots and a few others through Verizon’s DSL service. In print, I pay for the weekend New York Times, in part because the coupons in there repay that price of about $19/month, and a couple of magazine subscriptions at between $5 and $20/year. One of those magazines, Business2.0, I paid for just to get full access online (though maybe I could’ve achieved the same thing through AOL).

I almost never buy a single copy of a newspaper or magazine, except maybe 25 or 50 cents for a tabloid or when I’m at an airport.

That’s a long, maybe boring, and incomplete litany, but the basic message is that I pay for digital, and not as much for print. I also could desperately use a consolidator, someone who would come to me and say “You can have it all for $25 or $50 or $75 per month.” Or even some way of charging me on a per-use basis.

Regardless: Isn’t media in a digital format to you, the user, worth more than in ink-on-paper format?

By now it’s oldish news that blog creator and aggregator Weblogs Inc., run by the irrepressible Jason Calacanis, is being bought by AOL, after flirtations with a lot of the other big players.

How did Calacanis’s network, home to leading tech-blog Engadget, and other blog powerhouses, get so big so fast, so he’s able to cash out only two years after creating it? One way is through careful and constant use, care and feeding of Google’s Ad Sense ads to maximize revenue. So good, in fact, that Google has done a case study to talk about how Calacanis did it. (Here’s a short piece on the study.) Another way, according to this piece, is by “gaming” blog-rating service Technorati by having all the blogs link and cross-link. Look in the lower right column of any of the Weblogs Inc. blogs, like Engadget, to see the list. But if that’s a crime, there are a LOT of guilty people, from pornographers to B2B sites and major media. (Perhaps it’s more incumbent on the folks writing the blog-crawling algorithms to correct for that, as search engines have corrected as best they can for “keyword packing.” It’s a constant challenge. But can we blame Weblogs for pointing us to its other properties?)

And, when I met Calacanis at the “We Media” conference a couple weeks ago, he told me the secret to his success, and how he’s managed in some instances to leapfrog rival Gawker Media run by Nick Denton: hire good bloggers and keep them. If they do well, and traffic is going up, keep giving them more money, so they’ll stay with Weblogs. Meaning, get good people, and treat them well. Comforting to hear a publisher say the way to gain audience that leads to financial success is by finding and rewarding talented journalists.

While we’re on the topic of blog networks: By way, Glam.com, a fashion blog network pointed out to me by TopButton.com, which I do work for, is being hailed as a sign that the VC money is back for real: Many are calling it the first “vertical” aggregation — a group of properties on a single topic area (fashion) — with serious money behind it since the go-go days.

This won’t get the kind of coverage of an AOL buying Time-Warner, or Yahoo looking to gobble Disney, but I think it’s a small modern example of online buying out meat-space media. Zinio, an expert in, basically, transferring magazines to the Web, has “purchased” online subscription company BlueDolphin . (They call it a merger, but PaidContent, where I contribute and which usually gets it right, says Zinio bought its new partner.)

The magazine industry has moved online in fits and starts, and there are myriad models, from fully free, like Forbes, to nearly fully paid, like many of the Time-Warner titles, to the formerly paid but now mostly free, like Business Week, to the barely online, like Vogue or Vitals , which I used to handle on the Web.

Meanwhile, print magazine companies feel they’re in trouble as they grapple with the new technologies. I find it instructive that the Web technology company would be able to buy the print circulation sales company.

For the record, Texterity and qmags are others who convert magazines to Web distributed formulae.

I blogged on Rebuilding Media about this paper saying they’re on their way as a more successful mechanism. I also wanted to point out here that in reading the paper, if you download the PDF, you can skip to the end pages of it — that’s the meat. The rest is just discussion.

Sounds like pants some powerful women would wear, perhaps, but is a fascinating relatively new feature from Amazon.com (seems to have appeared in the last month or so). Buy works of, say, a couple or few dozen pages, pay 49 cents, and get the right to read them forever, even print them out from your “digital Locker in PDF, HTML, and text e-mail formats.”

Let’s call it the iTunes model brought to books. Wonder when we’ll see books sold a chapter or section at a time. Serialization for the modern era.

First off, my apologies. Was traveling to Los Angeles, part personal, part business, and I won’t make any more excuses for not posting Monday or yesterday.

In Southern Cal, I stayed at a budget place called the Vagabond Inn in San Pedro. They offered two free Wi-Fi transmitters for Internet access, included in the $70 or so per night price for a room. So why is it the luxury Helmsley Park Lane in New York couldn’t offer me a Wi-Fi connection (lower down on page) for less than $250?

Buying a treat at Starbucks the other night, I offhandedly asked the young lady behind the counter how many of the music CDs on their counter they actually sold. She said she thought they had more of them shoplifted. A co-worker concurred. They said the store had lost some $200 to shoplifting the previous month.

But what if everyone had a digital device and for a fee Starbucks would load music into your iPod or laptop or celphone or whatever? Cuppa Joe, Jack in, pay for both. Then they’d make their money from the music sales and not have to worry about the lifted CDs — they could still use a nice display for the music, but there’d be no point in shoplifting a piece of cardboard. (There I go, thinking out loud again.)

I’m not sure how to translate this to sandwiches, which she said were also a big item for shoplifters.