• by John Gaffney , July 16, 2002

This Year’s Newspaper Model: Earlier this week, Media News Group CEO William Dean Singleton urged his colleagues in the newspaper business to start acting like a technology business. This guy’s thinking. He’s not looking at the plague of lower readership and scattered ad revenue drops among many newspapers as a fad. He’s challenging the business model, which is the best way to start to solve the media puzzle that is the future of newspapers. Embracing satellite technology enabled USA Today to become a national newspaper. Embracing internet technology has extended the reach and urgency of most papers. Singleton is on the right track. Newspapers, both local and national, need to see themselves as information organizers and generators. Wireless technology needs to be revisited by newspapers. There has to be a content format that works for cell phones and PDAs. There has to be a way advertisers can work with it as well. Embracing technology is not just a neat idea to jazz the reader. Technology needs to be embraced to improve advertising urgency and new methods of ad delivery as well.

Still Tough Sledding: USA Today and The New York Times posted weak ad results for June yesterday. The New York Times revenue picture concerns me. Here’s a media property that does everything right, and it can’t hit the ad revenue numbers in this market. That’s why I think newspapers need to look at their foundations. If The New York Times is having trouble, newspapers are having trouble.

Look At AOL This Way: If About.com was running the entire Primedia business, and even went out of its way to institute its own business culture at Primedia, would that make sense to you right now? That’s essentially what we have at AOL/TW.