New Name for Yahoo/AOL, Business Insider News Streaming, Q&A: Fortune’s Clifton Leaf, The Economist’s U.S. Strategy, InDesign Tip: Improved Hyperlinks Panel Performance
Welcome to Technology for Publishing’s roundup of news, stories of interest, and tips for media industry pros! This week, we’re sharing posts about Verizon’s new name for AOL/Yahoo and plans to take on Google, how Business Insider is aiming to stream business news on its social platforms, a Q&A with Fortune’s new editor in chief, how The Economist is gearing up to conquer the U.S., and more.
Verizon revealed that “Oath” will be the new name of the combined AOL and Yahoo upon completion of its acquisition of the latter’s core web business. Calling it “a terrible name that comes second only to Tronc,” a Verge report says the real concern is what’s behind Verizon’s plan to increase revenue by owning the media that travels over its network. “It’s going to churn out as much cheap content as it can from AOL and Yahoo and tell advertisers it can do a better job of delivering eyeballs because it has better ad-tracking capabilities than Google and Facebook,” it says. In short, the goal is to outdo the duopoly. And with the resolution President Trump signed earlier this week allowing ISPs to share consumers’ browsing histories, Verizon moves closer to its goal: “It’s the beginning of a very important fight about ad tracking across the entire Internet,” the article concludes.- Business Insider is targeting its “large, millennial, executive audience” with the launch of a business news show streamed from its popular Facebook and Twitter accounts. “It’s clear that executives and investors want convenient and mobile programming,” Henry Blodget, BI’s global editor in chief and CEO, told Adweek. Called “The Bottom Line,” the program will be broken up into individual stories, he explains, and then distributed on BI’s social platforms—which combined have 9 million followers. BI has competition, however, including CNBC and WSJ Live, the report notes.
- Min ran a Q&A with Fortune’s new EIC, Clifton Leaf, detailing his vision as the publication—like many of its competitors—transforms to meet new market demands. With growth in both video (up 85% year over year) and, somewhat surprisingly, print (up 11%), Leaf says “our trajectory is more evolutionary than revolutionary” across platforms, noting the challenge for the nearly nine-decades-old magazine is “to make sure our reporting—which has always been thoughtful and substantial—is also quick enough and accessible enough.” Along with that, he adds, is the all-important question of how to get consumers to pay for that content. Leaf says he’s optimistic that sustainable business models will emerge, though, and that “the right audiences will embrace them.”
- And Folio offered an inside look at another business news institution—The Economist—and how it’s planning to offset declines in advertising revenue and win over American audiences willing to pay for quality content. Says Michael Brunt, CMO of the 175-year-old publication, “Our single biggest marketing challenge in the U.S. is awareness,” a problem it’s tackling on several fronts. That includes overhauling its print-digital subscription model, expanding its efforts around social media and messaging apps, and even so-called experiential marketing. The Economist’s philosophy? As Brunt says in the article, it’s the mantra of customer-service organizations everywhere: “The answer is yes; what is the question?”
On the Technology for Publishing Blog
- InDesign CC 2017: Adobe improved the InDesign Hyperlinks panel to make it easier to work with InDesign documents that contain multiple hyperlinks. Check out Monica Murphy’s new tip for details.
- And don’t miss TFP CEO Margot Knorr Mancini’s latest article on the components of an effective content infrastructure—and how publishers are successfully integrating them to build a foundation for content monetization.
- Also check out our latest infographic pick: an illustrated timeline of the most popular books of all time, from Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey to modern-day blockbusters like Harry Potter.
Image: The Verge
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Posted by: Monica Sambataro
