Star Tribune Sold to Private New York Investment Firm

I was surprised this morning to open up the online Strib to see that the Star Tribune was sold to Avista, a private New York investment firm. Chances are you’ll have to register just to read the article, so here is a press release put out by PR Newswire instead.

I’m certainly not in the industry, although it’s definitely surprising to see that the McClatchy Co. (who owns the Star Tribune) sold it for $530 million, under half of what they bought it for in 1998. It’s reported that the Strib’s circulation and advertising has stayed solidly profitable compared to other large dailies. They have also reported, like many other large dailies, that their classified ads have been affected by Internet competition.

I’ve always been a fan of the Star Tribune, but have never advertised or purchased anything from their online or print classifieds or run-of-press ads. To the new regime… make it enticing and easy for me to buy and sell, and I will (online).

01/02/2007 Update: Greg Sterling from Screenwerk provides comments about newspapers and the Star Tribune.

Adding More Relevance to Yahoo Local

Two things that local search engines have been striving to improve are business listing relevance and populating them with deep content. Yahoo Local is trying to improve both by allowing any consumer to submit business information.

With that said, there is an editorial review process. You can be sure that the Yahoo team will make sure the information is both correct and relevant before approving any submission.

Yahoo has arguably been the local search leader between the “big 3″ (Google, Yahoo, MSN), in big part by being the forerunner of user-generated content. Users have been able to place ratings, reviews, and even photos in Yahoo Local for quite some time. Like others, they collaborate with third-party rating and review services such as InsiderPages.

It’s not perfect, but it gets some good use out of me.

Article on Newspapers and the Risk of Going Digital

For many in the Internet industry, we have our opinions on print newspapers and why they struggle versus their online counterparts and competition. It’s easy for us to say why. But most of us (including myself) are not in the industry. We don’t understand the ideals, complexities, and even internal friction between the print and Web newspaper departments.

I’ve given my 2 cents from time to time. I love the idea of user-generated content in online newspapers, and I hate spammy contextual advertising within compelling news articles.

The Tribune in Greeley, Colorado just put out an blog article regarding risk-adverse newspapers and the hesitancy to go digital. It’s the best article regarding this I have read in a long time.

It’s not a subjective article on what newspapers need to do. It’s not a subjective article on why online and search leaves newspapers behind. It’s an article from an Internet division publisher on the trials, tribulations, risks, opportunities, and costs on bringing news to multiple portals.

If we aren’t ready to compete fully in this digital game, then to punt might be the way to go. I doubt, however, that we’ll get very far by stabbing Google in the leg.

I like this quote because so many online news publishers have protested, and even sued Google for crawling news content. We pound our chest about just including a “no index, no follow” tag (meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”), but there are cakes + forks involved.

There are about five other quotes I wanted to post, but it’s probably better just to give the whole article another link. It’s worth the read, twice.

I’m going to try and email the author to see if he has some additional input.

Update: Sweet. Now it looks like we get to register with the Greeley Tribune to read the article… which is one thing I can’t stand about some online newspapers. Too bad. It’s a great article that many won’t read because of it.