Village Voice Media Shows the Industry How to Make Ad Revenue

Village Voice Media thinks it can teach others how to pull new sources of ad revenue.

Forbes.com – Jim Larkin, chief executive officer of the Village Voice Media publishing company, is baffled by other media companies these days.

Over the past year, news outlets have scurried to go local in hopes of pulling in new ad revenue from mom-and-pop shops that have traditionally turned only to the local Yellow Pages to place their ads. In September, ESPN launched ESPNBoston.com, and a Dallas site is in the works. Patch, a unit of AOL, rolled out in March of this year, attracting eyes and advertisers in communities where newspapers have scaled back or closed shop. The New York Times launched its own online version, “The Local,” in two Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as in South Orange, Millburn and Maplewood, N.J. Local online ad spending is expected to reach $14.2 billion this year, up 12% over 2008, according to media analytics firm Borrell Associates.

Larkin’s view of the phenomenon: Well, duh. The 60-year-old Phoenix native and his long-time business partner Michael Lacey have spent almost 30 years building their own variety. It was called New Times Media until 2006, when the owners merged it with the New York weekly the Village Voice, (now Village Voice Media). It’s the publisher of 14 local publications, including the Houston Press, the LA Weekly, and of course the 54-year-old Village Voice.
Read more at forbes.com

Deadline Hollywood Daily sold for several million dollars; LA Weekly to hire new showbiz blogger

Good bye Nikki, we wish you the best… more to come…
In March 2006, Nikki Finke started Deadline Hollywood Daily as an outlet for scoops that couldn’t wait for her column in LA Weekly. She initially earned nothing extra for the blog.

Today she has sold the site, which she owns entirely, to Mail.com Media Group in a deal worth several million dollars.

“I have really sacrificed, but it was a conscious decision and I love doing this,” Finke said of the experience.

According to a person familiar with the terms, Finke, the site’s sole owner and writer-editor, will get a low seven-figure sum to sell Deadline Hollywood Daily plus several million dollars over the life of a five-year-plus employment contract. The deal also grants her a portion of the site’s advertising revenue.

Though it took its name from Finke’s column in the paper, LA Weekly had no ownership stake in Deadline Hollywood Daily. The Village Voice Media-owned publication simply sold ads and, after the site started to grow, paid Finke a stipend.

Read more at latimes.com

Media War in LA

Now the fight gets good…
The slugfest continues. As we mentioned yesterday, VVM Executive Editor Mike Lacey responded via a blog post to the recent LA Times story critical of the LA Weekly and its news editor Jill Stewart. Lacey ranted against the author of the story, James Rainey, and his only named source, Marc Cooper. Lacey called Cooper “a bitter, disgruntled former employee,” and yesterday evening Cooper responded with a note in the blog comments, which can be read below.

Read the rest at mediabistro.com

LA Times Talking About the LA Weekly

Where I do appreciate the attempt to be non-bias, this article reeks of slant by the Times. It is an obvius attempt at misdirection. Read at your own risk.
latimes.com – When the LA Weekly wrote a lengthy story last September about how little Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa attended to his official duties, it wasn’t plowing fresh soil.

The mayor’s exuberant fundraising and his frenetic campaigning on behalf of presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton had already received plenty of attention, in this paper and elsewhere.

The media, rightly, should do whatever it can to determine if a politician is already measuring the drapes for his next office while sitting in his current one.

But as it has with several stories in recent times, the Weekly didn’t let the facts speak for themselves in its Villaraigosa takedown.

Instead, it employed more semantic spin than Kobe Bryant puts on a jump shot, along with a prosecutorial methodology that proved much more about the declining quality of our city’s dominant alternative newspaper than it did about our attention-grasping mayor.

I got to thinking about this when the Phoenix-based company that publishes the Weekly forced the resignation of its thoughtful editor, Laurie Ochoa, late last month.

It was the latest departure in a protracted exodus by many of the Weekly’s best-known and most accomplished journalists.
Read the rest at: latimes.com.

Finally Getting it Right: Super Bowl XLIII

This match will be the main reason I buy this game. The Super Bowl this year was such an officiating fiasco, that this will come as a small relief to get it right… EVERYDAY!

pwnordie.com –
Mark July on your calenders Arizona Cardinals fans, this is the first time you will be able to get revenge on the Pittsburgh Steelers after they beat your team in Super Bowl XLIII. GameStop is offering an exclusive demo of Madden NFL 10 for those that have reserved the game from them. This demo will feature four quarters of football (5mins each) between the two Super Bowl teams that will allow Steelers players to win the trophy again and Cardinals fans to end in their favor, much like our simulation of the game.

The cover of the game features Troy Polamalu and Larry Fitzgerald, both stars of the most recent Super Bowl so the selection of these two teams for the demo is a natural fit. Hopefully both of these players are able to avoid the “Madden Curse” (unless of course they are playing my team).
Read the rest at: pwnordie.com

LikeMe App for the Pre

Having one of the first apps on the new Palm Pre offers a swelling of pride, and a pain in the head. I will do my best to keep a smile on my face, but I am not in love with social media geared towards only liking things. It keeps thing positive, but doesn’t allow for much wiggle room of opinion. That being said, our site and our iPhone app are very useful and fun. Here is a somewhat shabby article written on the subject.

LikeMe, a social recommendation site similar to Yelp.com lets users rate and review local businesses, attractions, restaurants, and clubs. After you join the service, you can upload info about yourself, your favorite places, and your favorite things to do in order to kick start the service’s personalized social recommendation engine.

Now the app joins a handful of others (really, just a handful) on the new Palm Pre. But before you go and download this one, there’s something you need to consider about LikeMe: their reviews may be compromised.

At the beginning of this year, LikeMe came under fire when it came out that a lot of the reviews on the site were written by ad representatives for Village Voice Media (VVM), owner of over a dozen weekly papers and a LikeMe partner. The reviews, all good of course, focused on businesses that advertised in the VVM papers. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Read the rest of the article at: readwriteweb.com