Google Eyes Print -- After Papers Drop the Ball

By: David S. Hirschman The decision by major newspapers to let Google auction off print ads is a smart move. Google will fill space in the papers that might otherwise hold house ads, and a wider range of customers will appear in their pages, ultimately benefiting everyone.

But this is a situation in which Google should have never been involved.

By now, newspaper companies should have already formed their own partnerships to create a similar system to auction off ads on the Web. Unfortunately, no one before Google was forward-thinking enough to make it happen.

This particular part of the game has been lost for now, but as newspapers cede a portion of their ad revenue for Google to act as a middleman, there should be a lesson learned: whatever the "next thing" is, newspaper companies should figure it out and get on it right now, before someone comes along and does it first. If Google and Craig's List can siphon away precious business that newspapers have traditionally counted on, others are already at work looking for similar ways to carve out their own piece of the pie.

In a recent column I pointed to video as a major key for newspapers retention of "readers/viewers" in the coming years. I believe it's only a matter of time before every major online newspaper story will be expected to have some sort of video attached to it. And if Google is now brokering print ads, it's not hard to imagine that the company will come up with an equally effective plan to broker syndicated proprietary local and national video news footage via YouTube (with its own ads), to newspaper sites around the country.

Newspapers should be making their own deals to secure this kind of footage and then sell their own ads on it. Video footage from the local TV news should be distributed to the area's newspaper sites (with ads, of course), enhancing coverage of local stories in the way that Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC use their coverage of national and international stories alongside stories online.

In turn, newspapers could share written content with these television stations, giving them sneak peaks at portions of investigative pieces which could run during the nightly news, promoting the stories that will appear in print the following morning. This is already done, in a few places, but needs to be done much more.

Another good area to focus on would be shoring up the kind of local content and services that major Internet companies are not yet organized enough to capitalize on. Newspaper sites should be their own local versions of Wikipedia and MySpace and Yahoo. More than just news sources, newspaper sites should also include a compendium of all the searchable information about specific local businesses and institutions too obscure or too small-ball for the Web giants to compile (thus far).

If a restaurant opens, for instance, the owners should be able to create a page within a local newspaper's site, entering menu information and hours, and uploading pictures and other relevant information. All related content from the newspaper (reviews, relevant features about ingredients or dishes) should then be linked to on the page, and readers should be able to comment, or upload their own multimedia content related to the restaurant.

This page would become the store's avatar within the context of the newspaper's site, and would be a one-stop shop for information on the store. Later, whenever any news content appears that relates to this store, the paper would link to that page, referring readers to the equivalent of a dossier containing everything about place.

Newspapers could then auction off advertising on this reference page; presumably a business would want to buy up the ad space on its own page, in order to unify the message their and keep competitors from intruding.

The same concept could be applied to the local high school's baseball team, which would create its own page to report statistics and minutiae, and post the videos from games. In this case, the ad space could be of interest (and easy to sell) to both local sporting goods stores and national chains selling related products and gear. The paper's site could charge more for each click on this page, because it would be more or less guaranteed that the only people interested in high school baseball would be very likely to be interested in, say, cleats.

In this system, newspapers become a forum in which people create their own niche groups, uploading their own information, and creating a localized identity. They establish their own preferences and identify themselves as potential consumers of niche information and products.

Basically, the name of the game for newspapers now is to be creative, provide more value for customers, and seize on new ways to make money. The old revenue streams are clearly (if slowly) disappearing, and relying on competitors like Google to lead the way with partnerships will only quicken the decline.