The Oracle of Omaha had little good news for the newspaper industry following Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting. In comments made in the Washington Post, Warren Buffett noted that it was once an excellent investment buying newspapers because a dominant paper in a city could count on steady advertising revenue, and could raise ad rates annually. Not so anymore.
The New York Times takes an interesting look at how newspapers like The Houston Chronicle and Yellow Pages publishers like Bellsouth and SBC Communications have recently become Google and Yahoo adword resellers, leveraging their existing sales relationships with small & medium business owners.
You can see why the search engines would be happy with such a partnership given how expensive and time consuming account managing millions of low value business advertisers would be. But from the newspaper perspective, you have to wonder whether they will learn the game fast enough before their portal partners begin stealing the food from their plates.
One of the most difficult issues for newspaper publishers to resolve is figuring out the optimal relationship between print and web content. A recent column in Wired Magazine challenges the oft triumphed approach taken by the Wall Street Journal to charge readers for access to their online content archive.
