All of that and more is contained in the latest State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which was released on Monday morning (Note: We will be discussing many of these issues and more at our paidContent conference in New York on April 17). There’s a lot to take in, but here are what I believe to be some of the key takeaways:

The Bad News:

• Cutbacks continue, and consumers are leaving: Close to one-third of U.S. adults say they have stopped using a news outlet because of dissatisfaction over the content — in other words, because they weren’t getting the news they wanted, or the news they expected to get. Survey respondents mentioned both fewer stories in general and less complete reporting, and while it’s impossible to know whether this phenomenon is related to the repeated rounds of cutbacks and job losses, it seems likely.



• No one cares about the industry’s financial problems: One interesting aspect of Pew’s research is that only a small number of respondents were even aware of the financial woes of the media industry — and even worse, those who were the most aware of the situation were also the most likely to have stopped using a traditional news outlet. Are some readers choosing to desert what they see as a sinking journalistic ship? It certainly looks that way.
• The disruption of advertising is accelerating: Although digital advertising rose by 17 percent last year, that was not nearly enough to make up for the ongoing decline of print advertising, Pew said. In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue — an even worse ratio than the already dismal 10-to-1 relationship that existed in 2011. And much of the growth in digital is benefiting Google and Facebook.
• It’s not just newspapers any more: The Pew research shows that local television is also being decimated by the disruption in both viewership and advertising revenue — to the point where viewers have started to notice the difference. Whether because of cutbacks or a desire to appeal to more viewers, Pew says that local TV news is also focusing more on sports and entertainment, and less time on crime and political coverage.

The Good News:

• Demand for news is growing, not shrinking: Although it may be coming at the expense of some traditional players, there is clearly a large and growing appetite for news, since the top news sites saw traffic increase by 7 percent in 2012, according to Pew. And the impact of social media seems to be clearly positive, in the sense that those who have heard about news from friends and family through such channels show a stronger interest in finding out more.
• Some outlets are having success with subscriptions: In the wake of the success of the New York Times paywall, many newspapers have erected their own subscription walls, and this is generating some reader-provided revenue that has helped to stanch the bleeding for some publishers (although even for the NYT and the Financial Times, this has not filled the gap entirely).
• The sources are going direct: This is probably one of the most contentious aspects of the disruption in media — namely, the fact that social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms produce a “democratization of distribution” that allows everyone from celebrities to politicians, and even brands and companies themselves, to reach an audience directly. Is that good or bad for journalism? The debate on that question continues to rage.
• New forms of advertising are emerging: This is another contentious topic in media — that is, the rise of what some choose to call “native advertising,” or sponsored content, and in some cases “brand journalism.” To detractors such as political blogger Andrew Sullivan it is ethically dubious, and to many traditional journalists such as former NYT executive editor Bill Keller it is a “slippery slope,” but new media entities like BuzzFeed and even The Atlantic are using it to some success.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As with any overview of the media business, there will be those who see this picture as a glass half-empty, and those who see it as a glass half-full — and perhaps a growing number who have completely lost interest in the glass because they are already getting their water elsewhere. As Emily Bell of Columbia and her fellow authors Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson pointed out in their recent report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” and author Clay Christensen noted in a recent interview at Harvard, upheaval is the order of the day in the media business and will likely be so for some time.

Shirky said in an essay in 2011 that we as a society actually need the media business to be chaotic, as unpleasant as that may be, because we literally don’t have any idea what the future of the industry will look like. Even now there are new entities being born, and new models being applied — like the Forbes “BrandVoice” model, or Sullivan’s direct-to-readers model — that could either be the savior of the industry or a dangerous distraction. If you like bumpy rides with an uncertain ending, the media industry is definitely the place for you.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Scorpp

Its recently-formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds joint venture is acquiring allesklar.com, the operator of 16-year-old meinestadt.de, a network of 337 local news and information sitelets underpinned by several categories of classified ads.

The company claims eight million monthly uniques and is being sold by its founding Stegger family (56.1 percent) and rival publisher Holtzbrink’s Digital Strategy unit (43.9 percent).

Although it publishes several regional, as well as national, newspapers, most of Springer’s online efforts have been at the nationwide level. Now it will gain a large local network through which to pipe meinestadt.de’s existing ads as well as those from Springer’s other sites.

Springer publishes one of the world’s most-read newspapers, Bild, but has also been piling heavily in to online-native classifieds, buying a host of such sites, including French property ads site SeLoger for a whopping €633 million and TotalJobs for £110 million. The publisher also operates autohaus24.de (auto classifieds), immonet.de (real estate) and buecher.de (e-tail).

Springer formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds together with the investor General Atlantic in March when they acquired TotalJobs. The publisher owns 70 percent and the investor 30 percent of the unit.

Announcement.

Local content is integrated into search, maps and mobile and is a new tab in Google+. On its blog, Google explains, “Each place you see in Google+ Local will now be scored using Zagat’s 30-point scale, which tells you all about the various aspects of a place so you can make the best decisions.”

Zagat.com is now free, too

On Zagat’s Google+ page, founders Tim and Nina Zagat write, “We’re excited to announce today that our content is now free on Zagat.com and a cornerstone of the new Google+ Local experience.” They go on to say,

As we’ve always done, we will continue to develop high quality content based on consumer surveys, and make that content available in print, online and on mobile. We hope you will participate by sharing your opinions with the growing community on Google+ — helping more people find great places around the world.

Zagat, which operates in 13 categories and over 100 cities, had charged $24.95 per year or $4.95 per month for access to all of its content. Now the paywall is down and all of that content is free online. Visitors to Zagat.com are prompted to sign in with a Google+ account.

As of this morning, Zagat’s iPad app still costs $9.99 for a “one-year subscription.” I’ve asked the company if that will change.

Will Google+ Local reviews be more useful than Yelp reviews?

With the incorporation of Zagat reviews into its search listings, Google is attempting to create a full-fledged Yelp competitor. (Google attempted to buy Yelp for $500 million in 2009.)

Google+ users can write their own reviews and upload pictures to Local, and can see their friends’ reviews (if their friends are on Google+, that is). As friends as reviews, opinions and pictures, that input is integrated into the overall score other people see. The feature is also integrated into Google and Google Maps so that as users search for locations with those tools, their results might surface reviews from friends.

The new feature and integration could give a boost to the flagging Google+, which, until now, hasn’t offered users much utility that they can’t already get from other social networks. By turning it into something like a Yelp for friends, with reviews, photos and opinions submitted by people you know, who possibly share your interests and taste, Google+ could potentially offer users new value.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land writes, “Marissa Mayer argued to me that Zagat scores can express much more differentiation and nuance because they contain separate scores for food, service and atmosphere vs. a five star scale, which is forced to factor all those considerations into a single rating (read: Yelp).”

He notes that users who want to leave a review “are now asked to fill out a more structured form (food, service, atmosphere/decor) and leave additional comments. Some of those online reviews may also make it back into Zagat proper, at the discretion of Zagat editors.”

Avito.ru, the country’s leading classified ads site, is taking a big $75 million venture round from Accel and Baring Vostock plus previous backers Kinnevik and Northzone.

The company wants to add more primary e-tail to its small ads business, something which could make Avito.ru a cross between Craigslist and eBay.

GP Bullhound, which advised on the deal, says: “The interested investors represented financial parties looking to gain a foothold in the fast growing Russian Internet market, the fifth largest internet market globally.”

The circumstances for success look promising:

• Russia is now Europe’s largest internet population.
• Online ad spending overtook that of in print in 2011.

Most of Russia’s online ad growth has come from display ads and contextual sold by giants Yandex and Mail.ru, rather than classifieds.

Founded in 2007, Avito.ru claims 30 million uniques, a one-hour average dwell time and two billion page views per month, with six million new items added per month.

It claims to be responsible for transactions equalling three percent of Russian annual GDP.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user [yeowatzup].

• News Corp.’s News International is ready to fight market-leading AutoTrader by launching its own website in the space.

• Mail Online publisher A&N Media last week sold the sector’s number-two player, Motors.co.uk, to Manheim Remarketing, which owns the U.S. Autotrader.com, which is unrelated to AutoTrader of the UK, for an undisclosed sum.

• AutoTrader UK owner Trader Media Group (TMG) is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and Apax, which each this week said they were splitting their jointly-owned Emap media group in to three. GMG hopes to sell both TMG and Emap for a windfall in the future.

Trader Media Group is a case study in digital transition, having successfully moved its traditional printed Autotrader classifieds newspaper to be a search-centric digital listings business. 2010/11 profit hit £34.7 million on seven percent higher revenue.

News International wants a piece of that pie. It is recruiting for a product and content head with a “start-up mentality” to build a “premier car digital destination”.

To start this business and take share from AutoTrader, News International will need to build relationships with car dealerships as well as individual private buyers and sellers.

That won’t be easy. With 10.8 million monthly uniques at last disclosure in March 2011, AutoTrader claimed to be 16 times more popular than its nearest rival. It hosts over 6,000 dealer websites.

But News International may get to draw on its Times and Sun newspapers’ strong brands in car content; the former takes car reviews from Top Gear co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Via MotorTrader.com.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media Ltd. is an investor in our parent company, Giga Omni Media.

Now it forecasts a tipping point, saying newspapers are about to lose their traditional stranglehold on this, yet another, advertising market.

“With further strong growth in 2012, there is every prospect that this will be the year when the property industry’s spend on advertising on the internet will exceed that on local newspapers for the first time,” MD Ed Williams said, announcing the results.

Once upon a time, tiny ads in local newspapers were the main, laborious way people searched for homes. Rightmove and its digital peers have been taking that market from some publishers for some time, with better search, photo and information facilities.

Online, advertisers can find better deals and house-seekers can use better products. But some publishers have themselves been playing the online property game for years.

Northcliffe, whose owner DMGT operates Primelocation, Findaproperty and Globrix through its Digital Property Group, is finding property classifieds sales growing. Newsquest is seeing the opposite. Johnston last year said it found the segment “stable”.

The housing market itself is relatively depressed, with transactions little changed from 2008, 2009 and 2010 – half historic levels, Rightmove said, forecasting little change in 2012. Its client base of estate and lettings agents grew by only one percent.

But it managed to add 17 percent more to the average amount it charges advertisers, up to £443 million. So revenue grew 19 percent to £97 million.

DMGT last year agreed to merge its Digital Property Group sites with Zoopla to front up to Rightmove.

Read the full post on GigaOm…

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

In Q4 interim earnings announced Tuesday, Yell pre-tax profit fell 12 percent from a year earlier to £108.6 million, on 15.1 percent less revenue.

• Yell’s print directory business, which makes up 70 percent, lost over a fifth of its sales.
• Its online directories like Yell.com and Yellowbook lost 15.7 percent of sales.
• But its digital services revenue, where Yell is trying to turn the company around by building websites and advertising networks for small businesses, saw 111.8 percent sales growth.

Now, however, Google is making a play for that area with a new, development agency-backed workshop programme, Getting British Business Online, that aims to give free websites and search visibility to UK small business owners for two years.

Yell built 337,000 customer websites last year. Its total digital revenue hit 29.5 percent of the business as the digital customer base grew 9.8 percent to 945,000. But annual digital revenue per customer actually declined 2.5 percent to £508 million because they were taking cheaper services.

“The deteriorating macro environment and a more competitive digital directory market are … driving a faster rate of directory revenue decline,” CEO Mike Pocock said (via release).

“Our digital services revenue continued to grow strongly, reaching an annual run rate of over £140m. We expect this growth to accelerate as our strategic new products come to market.”

Google’s reach-out to small businesses, which is rolling out with workshops in Wales, Liverpool and Africa, is backed by an array of business agencies and sees it refer small businesses to build free websites through Yola.

A turnaround plan Yell unveiled last summer charges it with building out “the first local emarketplace platform for consumers and small and medium enterprises to connect and transact locally”, including loyalty programmes, payment services and business operations.

It aims to flip its revenue make-up to be digital-led by 2015, with digital product development all funded from cash. And it sets out to simplify Yell.com on a self-service ad sales model, and to cut £100 million in costs over 2012 and 2013.

To do it, Yell is going global and looking outside for leaadership. MSN executive producer Scott Moore became Yell Group’s chief digital officer in October, with the group opening new offices in Seattle, a month after Yell announced a new partnership with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Advertising. In January, it hired as chief strategy officer the consultant who helped it pen that strategy at Booz & Co.

It’s worth watching how Le Huffington Post develops, since AOL (NYSE: AOL) and the Huffington Post Media Group are following the partnership pattern with other non-English launches later this year.

The blog will team up with El Pais in Spain for a Spanish edition, which is coming online in March. And — as we first reported last week — it will also launch an Italian site with L’Espresso.

It’s not known how AOL structures its business relationships with HuffPo partners, but paidContent understands that the French groups all share equal equity in the Le Huffington Post. None of the parties have confirmed this, however.

The original, HuffingtonPost.com, has become one of the most popular news sites in the U.S., and one of the most-visited of all sites. Figures from June 2011 showed that it had actually surpassed the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) as the most popular news site in the country. We have contacted comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) for more recent figures and will update this post when we get them.

Update: comScore tells us that in fact in the month of December, HuffingtonPost.com was visited more than any newspaper site in the U.S., with six million more unique visitors than the next-biggest brand, the New York Times — although if you added in other properties like NYT’s About.com, the New York Times’ group would have about 76.5 million uniques. Meanwhile, in the UK, HuffPo.co.uk is at number-11 at the moment. The full tables ranking popular sites in the U.S. and UK are at the end of this post. [original post continues below]

Before today, HuffPo had launched two other international editions — both in English — HuffingtonPost.ca in Canada, and HuffingtonPost.co.uk in the UK.

Both of these were launched on HuffPo’s own steam, without a helping hand from a local partner. That may have been easier to do: given the common English language across the three territories, it’s likely that Canada and the UK were already bringing in some traffic to the U.S. site, and so were natural first-efforts in an international strategy.

Some have wondered if HuffPo could succeed in the UK, however, because the many established UK national dailies already have a strong culture of opinion-led journalism — the kind that has become a popular mainstay of blogging and forms a cornerstone of HuffPo’s success in the U.S. (one other being a lot of aggregation, a one-stop shop for news; another being a sheer proliferation of content, much of it written for free).

It’s perhaps unfair to compare HuffingtonPost.co.uk against other news sites, only six months into its existence. Worth pointing out that AOL, citing figures from comScore, says that traffic on the UK site has been growing steadily since launching in the summer of 2011:

“HuffPost UK currently has 4.1 million 3.5 million unique visitors,” a spokesperson told paidContent in an email, “and has grown nearly 50 percent since it launched six months ago. The site has a large, vibrant group blog, with an expanding roster of 2,500 people who have used its blogging platform, including Tony Blair, Jeremy Hunt, Noel Gallagher, Liz Hurley, Joanna Lumley and Ricky Gervais. Engagement is also strong and growing, with users posting a record 7,000 comments on a single day last week.”

Update 2: That 4.1 million figure is higher than comScore’s numbers detailed below because it includes incoming traffic from outside the UK, while comScore’s numbers measure only UK-based traffic. [original post follows below]

HuffPo first announced its partnership with Le Monde and LNEI in October 2010 — meaning that it is moving quick on getting these products to market once making them public. This is only one part of the company’s Francophonic strategy, though: the Canadian HuffPo is apparently also launching a Quebec edition of HuffingtonPost.ca this month, too.

Source: comScore

Borrell finds that the number of digital-only sales reps — employed by legacy media companies (newspapers, radio and TV) has dropped 23 percent since 2009 as companies focus instead on the idea that “a single sales (and content) force can do it all, and that everything should be focused first on online publishing and sales.” On average, 46 of local media companies now have at least one online-only account executive, compared to 60 percent in August 2009.

Yet the sites that do employ online-only account execs (AEs) “outperform those without by a factor of 2.5″ in terms of gross online revenue per sales rep, according to the report. The difference is even more marked in TV–stations that employ online-only AEs pull in three times the gross revenue as stations that don’t. It’s “clear that having a staff dedicated to selling online advertising — and combining it with the efforts of the legacy media sales force — drives more digital revenues,” but it’s not clear how many online-only sales reps are needed to achieve the best results.

Borrell also looks at how local media companies are organizing their sales reps, and finds the most successful model tends to be “separate digital units with dotted lines” — companies that employ both traditional and digital-only sellers, but have a separate digital division responsible for hitting digital revenue goals and reporting to a separate manager. “Many of these operations saw revenue growth in the 40 to 60 percent range in 2011, while average market growth for local online advertising was 15 percent,” Borrell reports. “The reason is no mystery: With a unit that has sole responsibility for digital sales, goals and lines of responsibility don’t get tangled up in debates about legacy media sales problems.”

More info here.