Gannett got the ten percent chunk from Tribune Company, which is left owning 30.8 percent of the site.  The Tribune’s been having some problems lately, and breaking the 40.8-40.8 tie could also be seen as breaking a sort of piggy bank.

 Sam Zell

Still, Sam Zell, Tribune’s CEO and chairman, chose to emphasize something else when explaining the move.  "This transaction offers us an excellent opportunity to monetize some of the value CareerBuilder has built over the years, while enabling us to maintain a significant stake in a great online property," he stated.

And indeed, considering how shaky economic indicators have been lately, it seems that CareerBuilder might interest a lot of people who have either lost their jobs or are looking for something more secure.  Should things get worse, its popularity will grow.

Gannett isn’t going to go into "vulture mode" or in any other way drastically change CareerBuilder, though.  Even (potentially ironic) employee changeups appear not to be a possibility.

Newspapers have been retrenching with the growth of the Internet, the rise of online classifieds, and the decline of print readers and advertisers. Reaching the audience online may be the way these dinosaurs of media survive the meteor strike of the Internet.

It appears a couple of the bigger ones managed to find leafy trees to sate their appetites. ClickZ said the LA Times and the Seattle Times turned their attentions online to serving the local audience better.

Their payoff arrived in the millions. The LA Times claimed it will hit $25 million in online revenue this year. Eventually, the figure will be 20 percent of the paper’s cash flow by 2011, ClickZ said:

“We’re trying to create the best targeting machine to the Los Angeles DMA,” said Barrett, speaking at this week’s Kelsey Group local media conference in Seattle. Recognizing LA and California are identified with certain topics such as environmentalism, Hollywood, car culture, and immigration, they are central to his content redevelopment scheme. That entails a locally-focused travel section redesign and a behind-the-scenes film site set to launch soon called HollywoodBacklot.com.

The Seattle Times’ effort hinges on a local city and community guide called NWSource. Unlike much of the rest of the country, the real estate crisis has yet to hit Seattle. As a result, Seattle Times VP New Media, Patricia Lee Smith, witnessed ads sell out for neighborhood pages, with local builders buying them up.

The reward comes from CPM rates three times higher than for the websites of the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, she said in the report.

Even as Yahoo rolled up participants in its local online ad plans, the biggest names in publishing hung out on the sidelines. Working with Yahoo means sharing revenue, something that simply isn’t done by those used to setting the rules in the newspaper world.

The New York Times said the particulars of quadrantONE will be disclosed later today. The basic idea gives national advertisers a one-call opportunity to place ads on local newspaper sites around the country.

Attitudes held by the publishers about Internet players like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft may be summarized by a single digit. Not a number, but a certain upraised finger:

“We want to control our own destiny,” said Lincoln Millstein, senior vice president for digital media at Hearst Newspapers.

Executives involved said the newspaper companies understand the local market better than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and can best help national advertisers place their messages on local sites.

Substitute “house money” for “destiny” and one gets a better idea of the motivation in play.

The new initiative could have an impact on Yahoo, as some of the newspapers in its program are also part of quadrantONE. They could possibly co-exist peacefully, but we don’t see that happening. Current evidence suggests Yahoo may see departures from its consortium of more than 600 papers.

For consumers, social media "gives them an opportunity to tell us exactly what they want and what’s important to them in an uninhibited environment," Andy Markowitz, Kraft’s director of digital media, said in an e-mail. "We’re listening and learning as we go."

It’s interesting comparing this to search engine marketing and what 360i refers to as Search Informed Research. Search engine marketing is all about meeting consumers’ explicit needs as they’re expressed (even though some queries may be for future needs, such as researching purchasing a car, which can have different types of searches over several months).

With conversation analysis and social media, there are two kinds of needs and wants expressed by consumers:

• Fleeting: Someone posting a message in a group or on a blog about something that matters to them right now
• Lasting: These are slower to change and generally are posted on parts of their profiles that don’t change as frequently, from their relationship status (on Facebook, a number of great ads have targeted me as someone who’s engaged – a status that has lasted a year but will ultimately change) to they’re favorite sports teams and TV shows. On Facebook, you can target these interests with their ad platform, rather than the immediate needs.

What’s important for marketers is to appreciate the difference between those types needs and interests and tailor their marketing accordingly. When I say that I’m engaged and a fan of The Office and Philip Roth, I’m expressing who I am. When I say I thought the last episode of The Office was pretty good is more useful as one opinion aggregated among many others.

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The latest figures note Yahoo has about 415 daily papers and 140 weeklies participating in the effort, according to AP. Their arrangement provides the newspapers with wholesale pricing for placing listings on HotJobs, giving the papers room to sell online job classifieds at a profit.

An option to have Yahoo serve advertising on those newspaper websites should be available some time in 2008. Yahoo rolled out a long-awaited upgrade to its contextual ad system this year, with a ranking model that makes it work more like industry leader Google’s does.

Profitability at various levels for the consortium has not been enough to entice the biggest news publishers to join on with Yahoo. It has been suggested that Gannett and Tribune want to create their own ad network, rather than share any portion of revenue with a third party.

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Ballmer’s company expects Windows Mobile to ship on 20 million mobiles in 2008. When discussing Microsoft’s plans at a Tokyo conference, the International Herald Tribune noted his remarks about Android, where Ballmer said it was difficult to comment on “just words on paper.”

Zing!

Symbian’s Forsyth, VP of strategy for the mobile OS firm, likened the Google announcement to the common cold. He told the BBC that Linux initiatives keep “coming round and then we go back to business.”

Over 165 million phones in the hands of people run Symbian’s operating system. Forsyth also cited another task associated with putting an OS on millions of phones that Google won’t enjoy – customer support.

“It’s costly, arduous and at times a deeply unsexy job of supporting customers day by day in launching phones. That’s something there’s very little experience of in Google’s environment,” Forsyth said in the report.

Whisper: Papers Plot Online Ad Network

In gambling, the best money to play with is house money. The same goes for advertising, where even an 80/20 split with a third party ad network like Yahoo may be 20 percent too much to give up for news publishers.

The Chicago Tribune cited sources on the creation of this ad network as aiming for “a common sales force” targeting national advertisers. Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, Media News Group and Cox Newspapers have been named as the ad plotters.

Gannett and Tribune declined to sign on with Yahoo for an advertising initiative that has been partially credited with giving Yahoo’s fortunes a slight boost. The Chicago Tribune said the two big publishers did not want to let Yahoo in to their lucrative local advertising business.

Big money brings big egos out in force. Tribune and Gannett rate in the top three newspaper publishers in the US. Rather than take a big slice of the potential ad pie and letting Yahoo do the heavy lifting, they want the whole pie. That’s the kind of thinking that has made thousands of potential readers opt for alternative news sources these days.

The new company, Metromix LLC, will launch Metromix.com in 25 of the country’s top 30 markets, and over 40 markets by the end of 2008. Metromix is a local guide to restaurants, bars, clubs, events, concerts and movies. The guide is currently available in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

"We are pleased to join with Tribune in expanding Metromix," said Jack Williams, president of Gannett Digital.

"Together we can take the established and successful Metromix brand and deliver it — with local authenticity — to all the nation’s top markets. The concept is simple: make it fun, make it relevant, make it the place to go. That’s what Metromix is all about."

Metromix was originally launched by the Chicago Tribune and recently had its 10th anniversary in that city. In cities where Gannett and the Tribune do not have operations they may partner with other media companies to act as local affiliates.

Metromix will be co-owned equally by Gannett and the Tribune. Financial terms of the venture were not disclosed.

GPhone Is Not a Phone?

Google hopes to capture a larger portion of the mobile Internet and online advertising by convincing wireless carriers and mobile phone makers to offer phones based on its software.

Some experts believe that the Google phone project will not be as innovative initially as the iPhone. "The iPhone was a milestone in terms of how people use a mobile device," Karsten Weide of the research firm IDC told the International Herald Tribune. "The GPhone, if it does come out, will help Google with distribution for their online services."

Most analyst believe that Google is not developing a phone to compete with the iPhone, but is creating software that will provide an option to Windows Mobile from Microsoft and other operating systems. Google is not expected to charge phone makers a licensing fee for the software unlike Microsoft.

"The essential point is that Google’s strategy is to lead the creation of an open-source competitor to Windows Mobile," said an industry executive, who did not want his name used because his company has had contacts with Google. "They will put it in the open-source world and take the economics out of the Windows Mobile business."

Major carriers such as Verizon wireless and AT&T are unlikely to be interested in the Google phone project as they have spent billions building their networks and cresting their own Internet portals. They view Google and other search engines as competitors.

Mahesh Veerina, the founder and chief executive of Celunite, a cellphone software company thinks Google’s offering could be appealing to small carriers, who may view it as another way to compete.

If Google phones are popular with users other carriers could be receptive to the technology said Richard Doherty, director of Envisioneering Group, a consulting firm. He said no one wants to be the last carrier to endorse Google.

Google, IBM Create University “Cloud”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Maryland, Stanford University, the University of Washington, and the University of California at Berkeley – these are the six schools.  They’re also, in case you didn’t guess, where those “best young minds” can be found.

As for the hundreds of computers – they’ll essentially come from Google’s and IBM’s pockets.  The International Herald Tribune reports that the two companies have agreed to spend $30 million over the next two years, and Google itself stated that they intend to gather around 1,600 processors.

The aim of the whole initiative, then, is to “address the challenges of internet-scale applications in the future.”  Or, in less lofty terms, to teach people about cloud computing.

It’s impossible to guess what will occur as a result of this development – some very smart people are being given unprecedented access to a huge amount of computational power.  It’s hard not to think of Gdrive, though, and wonder if this is a precursor to its release.