The company’s publishing segment operating revenue was down 5.3% year-over-year to $1.01 billion for the quarter. Ad revenues were $670.7 million in the quarter compared to $722.3 million in the fourth quarter last year.

Digital revenues in the Publishing segment, however, were up 6.9% in the quarter.

Here’s the part of the report that pertains to Gannett’s digital business:

Digital segment operating revenues were 9.4 percent higher in the quarter and totaled $181.5 million due primarily to strong revenue growth at CareerBuilder. Digital Segment operating expenses increased 10.6 percent to $142.8 million reflecting significantly higher sales incentive and bonus costs associated with higher revenue levels for CareerBuilder. Due to substantially higher year-over-year revenue as the quarter progressed, a significant number of sales personnel exceeded their annual sales goals very late in the quarter, and were therefore entitled to incremental commissions and bonuses. There were also incremental costs for new initiatives and new product development by PointRoll and ShopLocal. These incremental costs for CareerBuilder, PointRoll and ShopLocal together totaled approximately $9 million for the quarter. Digital segment operating income was 5.3 percent higher on a reported basis and was up 2.5 percent on a non-GAAP basis. Operating cash flow was $46.6 million, an increase of 3.2 percent.

USATODAY.com is one of the most popular newspaper sites on the Web and the USA TODAY app is now a top news app with more than 11 million downloads including those across iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows. In December, Gannett’s consolidated domestic Internet audience share was 50.8 million unique visitors reaching 23.0 percent of the Internet audience, according to Comscore Media Metrix. Newsquest is also an Internet leader in the UK where its network of web sites attracted 66.3 million monthly page impressions from approximately 8.7 million unique users in December 2011. CareerBuilder’s unique visitors in the fourth quarter averaged 21.2 million.

“We have scanned millions of pages of historical newspapers and made them available online for the first time ever,” the project’s creators say. “Search millions of articles by keyword, name, location, date or title and watch your results appear in an instant. Compare this with hours of painstaking manual searching through hard copies or microfilm often requiring a visit to the British Library in North London and it is easy to appreciate the ground breaking nature of this project.”

The collection covers most runs of newspapers published in the UK since 1800. “The scale of the newspaper publishing industry from the early 19th century onwards is enormous, with many cities and towns publishing several newspapers simultaneously, often aimed at distinct audiences depending on social status, geographical location and political affiliation. The first stage of this project focuses on runs published before 1900 and will include titles from cities such as Birmingham, Derby, Manchester, Nottingham, Norwich, Leeds and York, along with local titles from London boroughs,” the creators say. “Newspapers which aimed for county circulation – from Staffordshire to Sussex – will also feature prominently, providing an unrivalled picture of provincial life spanning the whole of the 19th century.”

What you can search with the service:

• News articles
• Family notices (births, marriages, deaths, engagements, anniversaries, birthdays, congratulations)
• Letters (to the editor)
• Obituaries
• Advertisements (classifieds, shipping notices, appointments, illustrations, editorial cartoons, etc.)

As part of the process, each page is segmented into “classified zones” designed to help users search more efficiently.

The team behind the project has been scanning up to 8,000 digital images per day from the original bound newspaper pages. This includes what the team calls “some of the rarest and most fragile newspapers”. Some pages, the team says, are as big as two feed wide.

The study titled “How America Shops and Spends 2011,” found that 79 percent of adults said they “took action” as a result of newspaper advertising in the past month including clipping a coupon (54%), making a purchase (46%), visiting a website to learn more (37%), and trying something for the first time (20%).

“This important new research reaffirms the power of newspaper advertising to engage consumers and drive them to take action,” said NAA President and CEO John Sturm.

“More than all other media, adults continue to turn to newspapers to inform shopping decisions that lead to purchases. They are an opt-in media in an opt-out world, making newspaper advertising an ideal and effective choice for advertisers who want to reach consumers ready to shop and spend.”

Advertising on local newspaper websites ranked second (behind only e-mailed store or product information) among online options for advertising sources, beating general interest websites, paid ads that appear on the right side of the search engines , ads on social network pages, and ads on mobile devices.

The study found that other media trailed behind newspapers as the main source for checking advertising. he closest competitor – the Internet – trailed newspapers by seven percentage points (35 percent vs. 28 percent) Direct mail received a 12 percent response, and television was cited by nine percent of respondents.

Other highlights from the study include:

*More than half of all adults (52 percent) identify newspapers as the medium they use to help plan shopping or make purchase decisions.

*Almost three-fourths (72 percent) of all adults regularly or occasionally read newspaper preprints; For Sunday inserts, this figure increases to 90 percent of all adults. Over the course of 30 days, 8 in 10 adults (79 percent) acted on newspaper preprint advertising.

*Nearly four-in-10 (38 percent) adults who identify themselves as newspaper “non-readers” recalled other forms of engagement in the past week, including checking sales in local stores, clipping coupons, comparing prices, checking movie or TV listings and classifieds.

Financial terms of the deal were not released.

Three veteran media executives are behind Journalism Online including Steven Brill, founder of Court TV, Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and Leo Hindery, a former chief executive of AT&T Broadband.

Journalism Online created a payment platform called “Press+” that allows newspapers and magazines to charge readers for access to online content via a password-protected website. Press+ allows publishers to offer users a mix of options for subscribing to premium content, including metered and mobile/tablet access, improved site functionality, and out-of-market access.

“Our publishing customers continue to develop multi-channel advertising and editorial strategies and Press+ provides a valuable tool for monetizing content,” said Thomas J. Quinlan III, RR Donnelley’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

“We provide solutions across the entire breadth of the publishing supply chain, from content creation and digital asset management through subscription solicitations, processing and renewals. Press+ enhances our offering and opens new avenues for publishers to generate incremental subscription and advertising revenue.”

I should preface this by disclosing that I am not an avid iPad user, so the iPad experience itself is not something I deal with on a day-to-day basis. I find using an iPad to read a newspaper/magazine much more inconvenient, awkward, and uncomfortable than just holding an actual magazine or newspaper and reading it. But that’s the tablet reading experience itself, so I won’t dwell on that. 

I was also using the app on a clunky AT&T connection, which may not be as ideal as the Wi-fi connection, but therein lies another problem. A. That’s not the most convenient experience for reading this kind of publication on the go. B. I really don’t have to worry about a connection with print. 

Much of the content I found in The Daily is around topics that are widely discussed in other free sources on the web. In fact, non-subscribers can even access The Daily content for free on the web if someone chooses to share it with them. This makes the lack of a simple web site displaying the content annoying, but if it had that, it would just be another news site, and not a special paid iPad app. 

Of course, it’s no surprise to see someone has already solved this problem. This person has made an online index posting links to all of The Daily’s content. It’s not stealing the content, mind you. It’s all available on the web. It’s just being linked to. We know how News Corp. has viewed such practices in the past (see past complaints against Google). We’ll see if the site remains up and running, and whether others pop up in its place.

Even within the app itself, the front page experience is quite lacking compared to that of any news site on the web. Most sites will allow you to take a brief overview of a lot of the top stories at a glance. It requires a little more digging with The Daily.

Not all of the content in The Daily caters to the web. The interactive stuff is unique to the app experience, but how much of a demand for this kind of stuff is there really? If this is the digital answer to newspapers and magazines, isn’t the point (from the user’s perspective) more about the content? The interactive stuff mostly seems like a gimmick. It looks cool, but is it something really worth paying for? Is the experience really that compelling for the long term? 

Now, to be clear, I’m not knocking the quality of the content, although I will say it could use a bit more quantity and in-depth Wall Street Journal-type pieces. There is certainly stuff in there that plenty of people would read if it were on the web. There are videos that plenty of people would watch (the Egypt coverage stands out). 

Much of this content is mixed in with a lot of intrusive advertising. Sure, there are a lot of ads on web content and in print content, but they are easier to ignore if you want to (not necessarily a bad thing for The Daily from an advertiser’s perspective, but from a user’s perspective, it’s a bit much). 

The videos in The Daily have some issues. Sometimes the picture quality was severely lacking. The play button on videos leaves you wondering if a video’s even going to begin playing. It seems delayed before it even starts trying to load the video, and then you have to wait for it to load, and then you have to sit through an intro that reminds you that you’re using "The Daily". 

The updating system isn’t the most user-friendly. The publication frequently updates, but you have to sit there and wait for it to do so, and when it does, it’s not very clear what the new content is without some digging. For comparison, if you were on a news website, you would simply see the new story appear at the top of the headlines. 

To me, The Daily brings some of the drawbacks to print publications to the digital-style publication, while bringing back some of the drawbacks of the digital-style publication (aka: the web) to the print-style publication. For example, if you buy a newspaper or magazine, you can keep it and read it later easily. With the Daily there’s no apparent archive of past content. If there is one, it’s not clear enough. 

To me, the presentation of The Daily feels like a step back for digital content rather than the way forward. I may be proven dead wrong, but I can easily use an RSS reader or Twitter or Facebook or Google News from the iPad and get realtime news as it comes from a variety of sources (as many as I like – personalized to my preferences) in a much better organized format – for free, which seems a lot more useful.  

Now, if you really like the content provided by The Daily, then more power to you. Pay for it. If you love the writers’ perspectives offered, then great – maybe it’s worth paying for. I have nothing against these elements of the publication. But The Daily and all others who follow this model must bring something truly unique and compelling to make it worth paying for an app, that users have to use separately from the other apps they’re already using and from the web at large.

If you want to add another app to your list of things to check out on a regular basis, then maybe this is for you. Frankly, I can’t see using the app that much even if it were free. I might read the content if it were on a site or in a feed, but that’s a different story. I would almost rather pay for the same content in a traditional web format than for the app version, but that’s just my personal opinion. What’s yours?

WebProNews spoke with Bobby Bonaparte, the Product Manager of PostPost, about TigerLogic’s launch of its social newspaper for Facebook.

The idea for PostPost “Was born from born from a simple observation – our friends are better at sharing content that is interesting and relevant than traditional news aggregators,” said Bonaparte.

“We wanted the ability to collect, categorize, and consume the actual news out of our Facebook newsfeeds in one place. Moreover, we wanted the ability to quickly skim relevant articles and see more of why it was shared in the first place with out having to click through, and without having to engage with the rest of Facebook.”

“Facebook’s newsfeed is geared more towards helping you learn more about your friends and PostPost seeks to help you learn more from your friends. So much content that our friends are sharing gets lost through the Facebook Stream, and PostPost is a more intuitive way of consuming that content — content that is relevant.”

When asked about similar service for Twitter, Bonaparte said, “We are open to user feedback.  We like to work in close collaboration with users to try to improve our products.  We think Twitter feeds would be an excellent addition to V.2 .”
 

Orgininal Article

Data management firm TigerLogic has introduced PostPost, a real-time personal social newspaper that collects and curates posts shared by a user’s Facebook friends into a newspaper style layout.

To access PostPost, users can login in using Facebook Connect, and all shared links, pictures, videos, articles from their Facebook friends will be displayed on the front page of their personal paper.

PostPost is integrated with TigerLogic’s yolink search-enhancing technology to help readers search PostPost’s real-time content and return actionable search results with key terms in context.  

"PostPost delivers a lot of information from a myriad of sources and yolink search is the best way to actually search through it all and reveal what hides behind the hundreds of links,” said Brian Cheek, Director of Business Development at TigerLogic.

PostPost is available for free and over the next few months, the TigerLogic PostPost team will add new features to the service.

Kobo is backed by Indigo Books & Music, Borders, REDgroup Retail, Cheung Kong Holdings, and others. In July, Borders launched its own branded eBook store powered by Kobo. At that time, Border CEO Mike Edwards said, "The race to emerge as a retail leader within the digital category is just starting." 

Since then, Samsung has unveiled its Android-powered Galaxy Tab, and Kobo announced that it would be supplying the e-reader technology for it. Kobo has apps for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Android, and Palm Pre. 

Today’s announcement, however, only applies to the reader, the iPhone and iPad apps at this point. Publications include: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Scientist, The Seattle Times, Wilson Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, American Scholar, China International Business, Columbus Dispatch , Guideposts, Harvard Business Review, National Review, New York Observer, PC Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Reason, The Christian Science Monitor Daily Briefing, The Nation, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist, and The Globe & Mail.   

The company says it will continue to expand its offerings in this area. The newspapers’ and magazines’ formats are emulated on Kobo’s offerings. Still, readers can customize text sizes.

"Kobo continues to build on our commitment of making sure that consumers have the best reading experience on any device with the largest selection of content worldwide," said Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis. "We’ve had tremendous success with eBooks and we’re very excited to expand the Kobo offering to include newspapers and magazines with a two-week free trial, allowing consumers to try first without any obligation. We continue to bring on top publishers to ensure that Kobo’s newspaper and magazine offering meets our customers’ highest expectations."

After the two-week trial, monthly subscription prices start at $13.99 for newspapers and $2.99 for magazines. Kobo also claims to have over 2.2 million eBooks available.

The report also found newspaper websites reach more than half (55%) of 25-to-34-year-olds and 73 percent of individuals in households earning more than $100,000 a year.

“This data from comScore reinforces how newspaper publishers are leveraging original, high-quality content to build a powerful and engaged audience in the digital space,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

“The analysis also paints a powerful picture of our medium’s Web audience, with newspaper websites attracting consumers that deliver maximum value to advertisers.”

Other highlights from the report include:

Nearly 61% of adults aged 18 and over visited a newspaper Website in September. In that same time period, 51% of individuals in that age group visited Yahoo! News Network, 22% visited CNN and 27% visited MSNBC

The comScore data for those September visitors also show that users generated nearly 4.1 billion page views and spent more than 3.3 billion minutes on the sites.
 

Forty-one percent of adults in E-Reader Households visited a newspaper website during the past month, compared to 27 percent of total adults. They are 48 percent more likely than all consumers nationally to have visited a newspaper website during this time frame.

Adults in E-Reader Households are nine percent more likely than all adults nationally to have read a printed newspaper during the past week. Nationally, 71 percent of adults in e-reader households read a daily or Sunday paper during the past week, versus 65 percent of all adults.

"E-reader devices are becoming an important technology for millions of Americans and our data confirms their emergence as a natural companion to newspapers," said Gary Meo, senior vice president of digital media and newspaper services for Scarborough Research.

"At this point, many newspaper publishers are determining strategies for making their content available on e-reader devices, and this is creating a new opportunity to monetize content and increase readership."

More than a third (41%) of adults who live in e-reader households visited a broadcast television website during the past month; they are 42 percent more likely than other adults to do so.

Nearly twenty (18%) of adults in e-reader households accessed a radio station website during the past month; they are 38 percent more likely to visit a radio station website.

Adults in e-reader households are 86 percent more likely than the average adult to spend 20+ hours online weekly, and more than twice as likely to use the Internet to blog, use auction websites, listen to podcasts or take college courses online.

"E-readers initially were designed to make the printed word available on a handheld digital device. But with the introduction of the iPad, plus functionality being added to other devices on the market, the e-reader phenomena has gone beyond the printed word to be a key portal for all types of mobile content – from magazines and newspapers to movies and music," said Mr. Meo.

"As these devices continue to grow in popularity, content providers will need to develop strategies and apps that help their brands connect with the emerging e-reader audience."

Lots of people (and publications) seem to be under the impression that the iPad is just what the print industry needs to offset declines in revenue. Sorry, I’m still not convinced. That’s not to say they won’t sell some tablet issues, but the fundamental problem is still there. People don’t want to pay for content, and as long as they can still access the web (from the same device no less), people are going to find plenty of free content to suffice. 

I’d go so far as to say,  a lot of people will find the tablet versions of publications less appealing, particularly if prices remain comparable to print versions (which so far, they pretty much have). Why not just buy the print version if you’re going to fork out $5 for the issue? 

Granted, app-based issues can do more. They can be more interactive and provide video and rich content (and ads). Still, users can get such experiences from the web one way or another. 

Another potential obstacle is how this will work across platforms. Apple’s rumored store would be one thing, but publications are going to have to create versions that are compatible with Android and other platforms for every issue – probably a great deal more time consuming and resource-using than a single app, at least if enough is going to be put into these issues to make them stand out from the print versions (i.e. that rich content). 

The biggest obstacle is that few people in the grand scheme of things own an iPad. Yes, they’ve sold well, but it’s not like the cell phone. Not everyone in the room has one. The apps will never sell like the print versions for this very reason. You don’t need any device to pick up a magazine or newspaper and read it. 

Tablet use will grow greatly. There’s no doubt about that, but as phones continue to get smarter, I don’t know that tablets will ever reach the cell phone or PC level of usage.

Now, I can see giving complimentary access to iPad content for subscribers of the print version. Or vice versa. Probably still not the answer, but it would be a nice touch (some already offer the app access to subscribers).