How Google beat AP with Iowa caucus results

As GOP workers in Des Moines entered and verified each precinct’s results on a system set up by Google, the current totals were pushed to a map on Google’s elections page, to the home page of the Republican Party of Iowa, and to precinct and county-level tables accessible by anyone, including the AP. Google’s experiment showed how an innovative technology company can push in on the turf of a venerable news organization that prides itself on getting it first and getting it right. Read more here

Radio Still Growing

There are more radio stations today (14,952) then there were a few months ago. The number of AM stations, FM commercial stations, and FM educational stations all increased since the end of September, 2011. Read more here

New York Times, Washington Post, AP Found NewsRight

A project first developed by the Associated Press and initially named the News Licensing Group, NewsRight launched Thursday with 29 investors, including the AP, New York Times Company, Washington Post Company and numerous other major newspaper corporations.

This is not a program to halt aggregation practiced by the likes of the Huffington Post or many other news organizations. If effort is put in to rewrite the work, NewsRight will let you be (at least for now). Those that just “scrape” stories are the target.

Read more here

'NYT' Raises Newsstand Price, Shores Up Declining Revs

NYTCO is trying to shore up falling revenues and flagging profitability as it enters the new year. The rapid increase in the newsstand price is part of NYTCO’s push to offset steep declines in ad revenue by increasing circulation revenues -- a strategy which paid off for a few years, but now necessitates another price hike. The circulation revenue strategy is especially precarious given ongoing declines in overall newsstand sales; it is likely to be a short-term solution at best. NYTCO’s total ad revenues have declined from $2.05 billion in 2007 to $1.3 billion in 2010. Read more here

Lots of Newspaper Deals, But Not Much Hope

The last three months of 2011 brought a sudden flurry of deals in the newspaper industry, with a number of fair-sized metropolitan and regional dailies trading hands. But the increased pace of deal-making doesn’t reflect improved fundamentals for newspaper publishing, which is expected to suffer another round of losses in 2012. Some of the newspapers were profitable when they traded hands, according to owners and buyers -- but the spate of acquisitions in no way suggests an industry that is on the upswing -- or has even hit bottom. In this context, newspaper publishers are going to have to continue cutting their workforces to trim costs. Smaller newspapers generally continue to do better than their large metro daily counterparts. Read more here