It was a total kick to hear that Neeraj Khemlani, Yahoo's general manager and executive editor of news (appointed by Scott Moore) is heading to the Hearst Corporation as a VP of Digital reporting to Frank Bennack, who has been acting CEO since the summer.

Bennack is quoted as saying:"Hearst's major operating groups have all made substantial progress towards our corporate objective of fully participating in the digital transformation. The creation of this new position is designed to accelerate the progress through greater cooperation and synergy across divisional lines. Neeraj is uniquely equipped to help me and my colleagues realize that goal."

"In the last few months, we've been taking a long, hard look at all the things we are doing to ensure we are investing our resources in the projects that will have the biggest impact for our users and partners. While we hoped that Print Ads would create a new revenue stream for newspapers and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, the product has not created the impact that we -- or our partners -- wanted."
-- Google's Spencer Spinnell, Director (now former?) of Google' Print Ads pilot, explaining that while Google will honor committments through March 31st, the plug is being pulled.

Susan sez: Given the dire state of revenue for print properties, this is a clear indicator that Google thinks the margin just isn't there, another thread in the this is going to get worse before it gets better meme. It also makes me wonder if this increases opportunities for Yahoo's newspaper consortium, which has mostly focused on online.

Now that Carol Bartz is onboard at Yahoo! (YHOO), I'm sure she's meeting all the senior people and getting presentations of all the 2009 plans and the critical investments. Having lived through more than one change of the guard at Yahoo!, I'd counsel Carol to consider the following:

1) Optimize premium service revenue
Who can you bring in-or bring back--to help optimize revenue from your premium services businesses? Have Small Business, Personals & flickr--three businesses with healthy paid services--been managed optimally, with the right investments (I think not). If you can add 8% to your revenue stream from these products, you'd see a very healthly number that would off-set concerns about your knowledge of the ad market.

Mark Cuban sez:

Rather than determining a strategy of profitability and growth, from my outsiders viewpoint, large shareholders and directors of Yahoo have become the "HuggyBear Contingent". Just a group trying to dress up Yahoo in order to pimp it out to any bidder it can find.

Dan Gillmor, who was the first person I know to identify personal brand blogging as a category (We The Media, Grassroots Journalism by the people, for the people), released snippets of a white paper he wrote for the Pulitzer Prize Committee as part of their exploration into allowing web-only sites into their journalism and media competition. His post is well worth a read, but I am going to highlight some of his points here:

• The prize needs to evolve to stay relevant.
• Include digital-only, and English-language reporting that didn't originate in the United States.
• Create new categories
• Do away with the distinction between newspapers and other media;, Reward the best work in journalism, defined in the broadest possible way.

Dan's full post is here; I'm interested to see how much further the Committee goes over next 3 years -- there is so much potential impact.

The news that Jerry Yang is stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! filled me with a mixture of delight and sadness.  Delight, because anyone who drove their company's value into the ground like Yang did deserves to be removed (and, in truth, should quickly remove themselves); sadness because I remember how high my hopes were when I joined Yahoo! In 2006 -- and how frustrating it was to have everyone there care so much and work so hard -- only to have top management unable to be effective and make the right calls.

My two years at Yahoo! were a window into multiple changes of direction, resets and re-focusings unmatched by any other company I have worked at (including AOL).  When I came in, Dan Rosensweig was saying connecting people was the key and everyone was scrambling to integrate profiles they didn't have. Midway, it was advertising tools and self-serve that was going to be the core value, and then, later, it turned into being the front door and portal for the world. In between, each of these morphed 47 times, leading to divisions and business lines being shuttled between executives, people being laid off and then offered new positions, and a drift, that once I left the company, 10 months ago, seemed chronic and persistent.

"The big challenge for Facebook, as it has been for AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple and everybody else who ever ran a walled garden, is to make their “platform” something that sits on the Net and the Web, not something that substitutes for it."

-- Doc Searls, stating the obvious quite eloquently in a post that explains why the Facebook walled garden requires time and effort that just ain't worth it to him.

The press release says:

The NY Times points this out as a relevant statement at a time when new ComScore data that shows Google (GOOG) has overtaken Microsoft (MSFT) as the most visited network of web sites, but I like this Ballmer quote from the same talk better in that regard:

Cisco bought FiveAcross, a server-side, templated tool and web services platform provider 2 weeks ago, for a rumored $25 million (which seems hard to believe).

Based on Windows Vista technology, the applet offers a fairly seamless push/pull technology for reading content and getting updates.

--AP strategy chief Jim Kennedy, discussing the AP alliance with NowPublic, quoted by Mark Glaser.

Here's what Ali quotes:

According to Bloomberg, McClatchy will now have 31 newspapers in 29 markets from Anchorage to Miami with 2.76 million in daily and 3.45 million Sunday circulation. In addition, they will move from being the country's second-largest newspaper company to the third-largest , based on circulation. (Gannett Co., owner of USA Today, is the largest, followed by the Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among others.)

Two of the reasons this interests me are personal--first of all, when I was consulting, we worked with the Pluck team on developing and fine-tuning Blogburst; second of all, in working on that project, I became convinced that Dave Panos, Eric Newman and their teams were customer-focused in a way that would truly lead to product value and success (as it did).

For instance, with that kind of dough, Google could have bought the New York Times Company (NYT). I remember talking with Timesman Martin Nisenholtz about how the NYTimes was one of the biggest consumers/placements for Google AdWords, right behind the big portals as they were still called then, Yahoo and AOL (this must have been late 2004.) Nisenholz felt that the Times had to find a way to roll up in size, and not soon after, they bought About.com.