February 13, 2002
Event Wrap-up

E&P Conference Notes from Alexis Gutzman

SUMMARY: No summary available.
Editor & Publisher's conference, Interactive Newspapers, was last week in San Jose. The smallish crowd of 280 was visibly concerned about the future of the online publishing industry. You would think there might have been some backslapping at seeing survivors of the past year, but none was in evidence.

Overall, the individual speakers were more interesting than the panels. Individual speakers did not have to take time to agree with themselves. A few bright spots:

* Steve Rossi, president of Knight-Ridder's newspaper division, proved with numbers that the nichiest content does not command the highest CPM - witness the low cost of niche cable TV advertising.

* Bob Cauthorn of The San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate explained his new models for making online advertising more attractive to the advertiser. First, they permit visitors to the site to search the previous week's print ads by keyword and commuting path, so that a visitor can find a furniture sale on the way home from work. Then they turn around and sell advertisers based on what visitors are looking for.

Second, they include job openings from the classifieds on most pages in the site, trying to find those who are only passively looking for a job. Finally, they have planted links to the classifieds so that key categories appear on pages other than in the classified section. Bob also reported that SFGate is nearly consistently profitable.

* Terry Bergen of the Cedar Rapids Gazette made the case for their switch from free to fee for non-print subscribers.

Also noteworthy: neither the conference organizers nor the new (debonair) president of E&P could tell me where/whether next year's conference would take place.

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