Honolulu's No. 2 paper
joins endangered list
Other shorts: Report: Anderson Cooper meets with CBS
By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Mar 1, 2010
Honolulu’s No. 2 paper joins the endangered list
Evening papers have all but disappeared across America, and now it looks as if another one is facing the axe off the mainland, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The paper’s owner since 2001, Oahu Publications, is set to buy the city’s largest paper, The Honolulu Advertiser, from Gannett and then put the Star-Bulletin on the block. When no offers come in, as appears likely, the company will then close the paper, leaving Honolulu a one-newspaper town. The Advertiser has a circulation of 130,000 to the Star-Bulletin’s 55,000. Offering the paper for sale is a formality required under federal antitrust regulations. The Honolulu deal is similar to a deal Hearst reached a decade ago in San Francisco in which it bought the San Francisco Chronicle and then offered up the Examiner for sale. As it turned out, a buyer was arranged, and the Examiner lives today, but those were different times, when newspapers were making money and their prospects were far rosier.
Report: Anderson Cooper meets with CBS
Could Anderson Cooper be moseying over to CBS once his contract at CNN expires? Regardless of whether that's actually the case, that's sure to be the buzz today, with the New York Times' Media Decoder claiming that Cooper took a meeting with CBS two months ago that may or may not have to do with him succeeding Katie Couric as "Evening News" anchor when her contract expires in 2011. It's all very vague, of course, because no one will talk about it or even confirm that such a meeting took place. But the meeting, if it happened, also could have involved any number of scenarios that don't include "Evening News." Three years ago, when Cooper re-upped with CNN, it was reported that CBS had tried to woo him to join its long-struggling "Early Show." Cooper is a contributor to CBS's "60 Minutes," but his main job is anchoring CNN's nightly 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. news program.
NYT now available on a digital OOH network
Speaking of the New York Times, the paper also had some news about itself to report this morning: As of today, Times content will be splashed across an 850-screens digital network in cafes, coffee shops, newsstands and more through a new deal with out-of-home vendor RMG Networks. The content will be lifted from the NYT web site and broadcast, alongside advertising, in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston. On the left side will be an article, while art (including pictures and short videos) will be shown on the right in a content cycle lasting roughly 14 minutes including the ads. Passersby can download the content they see to their cell phones, where they can also retrieve coupons for the store they're at. There will be an opportunity to expand the program by another 850 screens in the next few months. The Times apparently sees it as a chance to expose new readers to its content, at a time when newspapers are struggling to end long-term circulation slides.
Stern beauty pageant: May the best mistress win
For those who think the Tiger Woods sex scandal has been, up till now, way too tasteful and understated, a subscription to Sirius XM Radio might be in order. A week from Wednesday, Howard Stern will be sponsoring a beauty pageant featuring all the alleged former Woods mistresses that he can get, which so far is four, proving that at least a handful still have some self-respect. As for those others, they were probably lured in by the promise of major prize money, with sponsor AshleyMadison.com, a dating site for married people (motto: "Life is short, have an affair"), promising the winner $100,000. Stern reportedly reached out to Woods' wife, Elin, and invited her to judge the contest, but not surprisingly she has not responded. Meanwhile, Woods' problems go beyond more than the potential embarrassment of a group of his exes in the same room. Over the weekend Gatorade, one of the sponsors who stood behind, dumped Woods, following Accenture and AT&T, who severed ties since the scandal broke in November. The timing of the announcement seemed odd, coming a week after Woods' much-dissected apology, at which time Gatorade said it "wished Tiger well" in working out his problems.
Publishers' new campaign: We're far more engaging
One of the criticisms of the magazine industry in recent years has been that publishers were too focused on selling ad pages for their own titles to take on the bigger challenge of selling magazines as an effective ad medium. That job was left to the Magazine Publishers of America, the industry trade group, and it remained with the MPA even as magazine ad pages saw ever-steeper declines. But now the industry’s largest players have gotten together to sell their medium to readers and marketers in a massive advertising campaign. The participating publishers, Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst, Condé Nast and Wenner Media, have committed to devoting some 1,400 pages of ad space to the campaign at a value of $90 million, based on rates listed on their rate cards, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The core message: The internet is fleeting, magazines engage at a far deeper level. It’s unlikely the campaign will reverse the shift of ad dollars to the internet but it will still be much welcomed by media buyers, at the least giving them fresh arguments for the value of magazines when they pitch their clients.
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