Martin Nisenholtz, the SVP of Digital Operations at The New York Times Company was speaking at the OMMA Global conference in New York City. Nisenholtz revealed that Twitter drives 10% of The New York Times’ traffic. The New York Times Twitter account has 1.8 million followers thus far and the number is growing at a rapid pace. This is “up from 0 a year ago,” according to Nisenholtz.
The interesting part about the traffic that The New York Times is getting from Twitter is that the micro-blogging company is not getting any money out of it. Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model as of right now. But given how much major news agencies are relying on the micro-blogging service, the company could eventually take advantage of their situation. Dave Morgan of Simul Media revealed the quote from Nisenholtz as shown in the above screen shot.
The New York Times needed an infusion of cash recently as their stock price has not been doing so great. Harbinger Capital, a company that owns about 19% of NYT stock wanted to unload it to Hollywood exec David Geffen and Google.
Last winter the New York Times decided to get more money out of Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim instead of David Geffen, $250 million to be exact. They did this for a reason. Geffen even offered the same terms for the loan.
The New York Times Chairman told Geffen that the company would rather work with Slim because he already owns a major amount of shares in the company and that “he was reportedly also worried about Geffen’s ambition to take over the company.” Geffen made an offer to completely buy out The New York Times this past September.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his family are the major shareholders in The New York Times. His family has controlled the newspaper since 1896 and the company was founded in 1851. Their family said that they were not interested in selling the company outright, but this is the same sentiments that the Bancroft family had with The Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones. Both Dow and The WSJ are now owned by News Corp.
One of the reasons why The New York Times is struggling to compete is because of the speed of information delivery through the Internet. The New York Times has a tendency to not be able to publish information fast enough compared to blogs and Twitter. However The New York Times is one of the few newspapers that have a blog section where information is published fairly quickly.
When content is published on NYT it is difficult to track what information has been updated. This is why they have created a new service called Times Wire which shows the most updated news at the top of the page. The articles appear in reverse chronological order. Times Wire updates every minute.
On Times Wire, there are currently three tabs: All News, Your News, and Business & Tech. Times Wire will most likely appeal to those most interested in Business & Tech, who want their information delivered quickly. The Times Wire page has an RSS feed and has a link to it available on the New York Times homepage now.
Harbinger Capital is a private investment firm that owns about 19% of the New York Times. They bought the stake about one year ago when the stock price was above $19 and now the company is trading at below $7. Clearly they want to unload their equity in the company for a reason because they have been reportedly shopping around for a buyer. Specifically Harbinger looked in the direction of Google and Hollywood exec David Geffen.
Scott Galloway, a professor at NYU’s business school and one out of two board members from Harbinger that sits on the board at the Times made a pitch to Google co-founder Larry Page. Page took a serious look at the Times before deciding to pass. Geffen on the other hand made an offer, but was reportedly turned down. Geffen is the founder of Asylum Records and Geffen Records as well as the co-founder of Dreamworks SKG. Geffen is worth about $6.5 billion.
Recently the New York Times started looking for other revenue streams such as charging for some content on their web site and on the Kindle. If a deal isn’t made with Geffen, it is likely that the Times might turn to telecommunications conglomerate Carlos Slim.
Tim Arango, an editor at the New York Times wrote an article yesterday criticizing the Text-to-Speech feature built in to the Kindle. Arango stated that the Kindle pronounces Barack (rhyming with black) and Obama (rhyming with Alabama). Gawker likens the New York Times homepage to having the same type of content as the Digg homepage based on this article and suggests that the newspaper company is being on the defensive.
If the Times really is being on the defensive side here, they have some work to do. Criticizing a feature that may assist illiterate or dyslexic people understand what is written isn’t exactly the most politically correct target to go after. The text-to-speech feature is provided by Nuance Communications. The correct pronunciation has been added to the President’s name now. The correct pronunciation will be added through a wireless update to the devices.
“These things happen a lot,” stated Nuance executive Steve Chambers. “It’s not even considered a bug. If it encounters a word it has never seen, it approaches it almost like a kid, phonetically.” Now that Arango helped fix a glitch regarding the President’s name, I’m wondering if the Kindle can pronounce Arango correctly.
Today BusinessWeek and GigaOM formed a syndication partnership. BW will be featuring content from Om Malik’s blog network every Monday. After hearing about this, I realized that traditional media companies need blogs like us to keep them looking cool & hip.
This hypothesis is apparent when Guardian Media, a British media company acquired paidContent for over $30 million last week. Another example is that the Washington Post inked deals with paidContent and TechCrunch to syndicate their content. Video blogger, Loren Feldman produces videos for CNET (now owned by CBS) on a regular basis. And then The New York Times bought out the Freakonomics blog in August 2007.
Are traditional media companies having a hard time finding talented journalists and bloggers themselves to provide the same unique content as us? Blogging isn’t rocket science. I’m just blogging to make money to power my own startup ideas, pay the office rent, and learn more about the industry. What are your thoughts? Why does traditional media need us?
The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) has created a plugin that works as an add-on for Firefox just-in-time for the new Firefox launch. The plugin integrates social media into the popular online version of The New York Times publication.
The second step is to register a New York Times account if you do not already have one:
The third step is to import contacts using GMail. What I don’t like is that it gives The New York Times the ability to read who your contacts are and add them to your feed. But what I do like is that the import process goes through the google.com domain name. This means that the login information is not stored in any NYT databases.
Below is a sample of what the plugin tracks from your friends’ data and your data when surfing around the NYT site:
[Credit: NYT]
As you notice from the screen shot above, the plugin essentially acts in a similar fashion as the news feed on the Facebook member homepage. TimesPeople encourages you to build friend lists and share the information based around their website. The company stresses that this is not for social networking purposes, but only intended for information sharing.
The news feed will have RSS subscription capabilities and has a design tailored for the iPhone. Below is how the plugin looks on an iPhone:
This is the first time we’ve endeavored to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publicationto bring you the latest and greatest news. -Wei Luo, Tech Lead Manager of Google Earth
Imagine spinning a digital globe and tapping on a country to find out what is happening there in real-time. It’s possible with Google Earth. To see this feature, the newest version of Google Earth needs to be downloaded and the “Geographic Web” folder has to be turned on.
Here is a screen shot of Google Earth’s new feature on Texas:
Other features in new version of Google Earth includes relevant pictures provided by Panoramio and YouTube videos. The news layers are updated every 15 minutes to make sure that old news is not stuck on the digital globe.
Who knows what Google Earth will stick in here next? You know what would be fun though? A built-in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game.
[1] Google LatLong: All the news that’s fit to print on a map: The New York Times in Google Earth by Wei Luo
I’ve got to hand it to Matt Richtel. Richtel was able to engage a discussion by pointing out that some bloggers have suffered from cardio-related health problems due to stress. Technology bloggers, Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant died from a heart attack. Om Malik had a heart attack and recovered, but made sure to start eliminating bad habits such as smoking and drinking lots of coffee. Malik personally responded by writing a blog post in Miami while on vacation.
Personally, I loved Malik’s response. Malik has turned over a new leaf. He now associates blogging with relaxing rather than being hypercompetitive about everything. Ever since I started enterprise blogging less than 2 years ago, I made sure that everywhere I write, I’m near a large window with a great view and that I enjoy it.Â
The fact of the matter is that I enjoy blogging and make sure its not stressful when I get ready to write to the point where The Bee Gees’ Staying Alive starts playing in the background as I walk up to my computer.
“There’s no time ever — including when you’re sleeping — when you’re not worried about missing a story,†stated Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.  The whole reason why The New York Times is worried that bloggers are stressed is because they are quoting sources from someone whose only focus is to beat CNET, a public company with 2,700 employees. TechCrunch employs about 5 editors and some interns.
Information Source:
[1] The New York Times: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop by Matt Richtel
[2] Techmeme Discussion
Federated Media Publishing, the advertising brokerage company founded by John Batelle is rumored to be raising another amount of funding. The second round of funding is expected to be between $20-$30 million according to Stefanie Olsen, an editor at CNET. The first round of funding was $4.5 million by JPMorgan Partners, the Omidyar Network, and The New York Times. The Omidyar Network was founded by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.
Federated Media also recently employed GCA Savvian Advisors to help them work investment queries. There was a rumor floating that Federated Media was offered $100 million for a buyout, but turned it down. Ad networks around the world are raising funds and are being acquired. Google acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion and Microsoft acquired aQuantive for $6 billion. Yahoo! and AOL have also picked up a couple of advertising companies as well.
Federated Media has been generating large sums of advertising revenue and has even paid some of their clients $1 million. Federated Media’s network of publishers include TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOM, Digg, and BoingBoing.
