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Can newspaper group deliver online?

Jeff Pelline Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Jeff Pelline is editor of CNET News.com. Jeff promises to buy a Toyota Prius once hybrid cars are allowed in the carpool lane with solo drivers.
Jeff Pelline
2 min read

It's easy to write off newspapers when it comes to winning the new media war. After all, the ink-stained wretches got trumped by Craigslist and most have lagged their real-time competitors, largely for fear of cannibalizing print. Futurists point to a day when a Google-Amazon alliance called "Googlezon" will make the New York Times irrelevant. We'll see.

In the meantime, this centuries-old business (with its strong branding, deep pockets and business know-how on both the sales and edit side) is getting smarter: Last night Gannett, Knight-Ridder and Tribune Co. said they bought a 75 percent stake in news aggregator Topix.net, a 9-person start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. I've used Topix for a while, searching for local news using my ZIP code, for example; it's a cool aggregation site that aims to make news searches easier than on Google, Yahoo or MSN (of growing interest to anybody who's tired of getting the typical laundry list of results). Without spending much money, the media biggies have bought into a technology that lets them place relevant ads (including local ones) next to online articles. You know, the ones readers actually want to see.

The papers have stumbled before. None of today's articles mentioned the industry's ill-fated Web venture called New Century Networks, also billed as a news aggregation play. I'm not saying newspapers will win, but the playing field is much more level than most people think. (On a personal note, I just came back from a trip to Gannett's state-of-the-art offices in Virginia, to help judge the Gerald Loeb business journalism awards. Gannett's emerging online business is one to watch. People LOL (laughed out loud) when its USA Today newspaper launched, but the rag is profitable and its design--featuring short stories and intense use of graphics--is widely copied, including on Web sites).