Hearst’s Newspaper Business, Apple News Ads, Publishers Warming to Amazon and Echo, NYT Newsroom Changes, Being Magazine of the Year: A Q&A with Mother Jones’ Claudia Smukler, TFP’s New AEM Mobile e-Book, InDesign Tip: Publish Online Embed and Share Options

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 Hearst’s newspaper acquisitions and overall growth strategy, Apple’s plan to let publishers deliver their own ads in Apple News, why publishers are liking Amazon and its new Echo home assistant, changes to the New York Times newsroom, and more.

  • In the struggling newspaper business, Hearst is in “acquisition mode,” according to a Ken Doctor Q&A with Mark Aldam, president of the Hearst Newspaper Group. Most recently, Hearst became the biggest publisher in Connecticut with its purchase of the New Haven Register, along with Connecticut Magazine and other titles. And prior to that, it acquired, among other properties, 24 weeklies related to its “highly profitable” Houston Chronicle newspaper, expanding its reach in Texas, where it already owns six dailies. In the Q&A, Aldam details what’s behind this growth, the publisher’s overall strategy, the role of content, and more.
  • Described as a “black hole” with “a ton of scale but no dollars,” Apple News has held a tight rein on ad delivery, meaning publishing partners have seen very little revenue from the popular news app. But that may be changing, says an Ad Age report. In the works is a potential fix that will allow publishers to use their own tech to deliver advertising within their Apple News content, which could generate as much money as advertising on their own sites, according to the post. “Apple has to do something soon or publishers will pull out,” notes one partner.
  • While there’s a growing tide of resentment directed toward Google, Facebook, and other tech platforms these days, publishers are liking Amazon—for now, says a Digiday post. For one, publishing companies are seeing a lot of potential in Echo, Amazon’s popular voice-activated home assistant, and finding it easy to work with the company on issues around media content for the device, including news and music. Given the newness of the technology, there’s a lot to learn on both sides, in terms of what kind of content users will want and how they’ll want it delivered, the article points out. Amazon is “flexible,” says one media partner. “They not only take the feedback, but they learn from us. It’s a bidirectional flow.”
  • And following a recent staff walk-out in support of copy editors at The New York Times,  Executive Editor Dean Banquet posted a column on newsroom editing changes—including the elimination of its stand-alone copy desk—to “streamline that system and move faster in the digital age.” As Banquet notes, the aim is to meet the needs of an evolving news environment, which he points out is no longer predominately print-based but more dependent on video and multimedia elements, as well as fast, mobile delivery. Resources are being shifted, rather than cut, to “modernize an editing system that now has to accommodate many different kinds of storytelling,” he says.

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Image: Nieman Lab

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Posted by: Monica Sambataro

Monica Sambataro
Monica Sambataro is a contributing editor and copyeditor for Technology for Publishing. Her publishing background includes work for leading technology- and business-related magazines and websites.
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