Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Plain Dealer Among Papers Teaming with Politico

From Editor and Publisher:

    Politico, the online political news site, has launched a new content sharing network that will provide news items to other news outlets -- including several newspapers -- in exchange for ad placements on their sites, the Web site revealed Tuesday.

    In an announcement, Politico states that it has partnered with Adify, a vertical ad network management company, to launch the Politico Network. Through the new venture, media organizations selected by Politico editors will have access to the site's top stories for use online and in print.

    "The Politico Network also brings a new revenue model to these media partners: Politico will sell national advertising to be placed on partners’ websites, and revenue from those ads will be shared between Politico and the media outlets," the release stated.

    Among those news outlets already signed up for the network are The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Denver Post, and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Politico stated.
In fairly short order Politico has become a journalistic force, though who knows how the economics look. The received wisdom at the time of launch was that Politico needed a viable print counterpart to survive. This may be a way to accomplish that.

News organizations are working on all sorts of content/ad revenue sharing models as the economics of news gathering shift and tighten. The value of an outfit like Politico is that it can serve multiple segments simultaneously. They report the deep minutiae for us political junkies, but can synthesize that into more reader-friendly stories for normal people.

1 comments:

Ed Esposito said...

This is even more interesting considering the trend of established media to use content from providers such as Politico in lieu of Associated Press, posing very real questions on the viability of larger, central-based news organizations as gatekeepers of credible information.

Given the collaborative nature of so-called "new media" it is fascinating to see how organizations who traditionally hold content close to the vest as news they own are being challenged by the open-source shareware mentality of building coverage on the web. It's even evident in the statewide news sharing agreement among the big papers, in some aspects bypassing the state AP in favor of finally sharing their content.

Part of the shakeup of traditional media models with more to come...