Newspapers of the future will mainly take digital form but will continue to be printed since many consumers are likely to still prefer paper over tablets and smartphones, leading industry executives say.
  "The last newspaper will be printed long after I'm gone," said Raju Narisetti, senior vice president of strategy at News Corp., owner of such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and The Times of London.
Narisetti drew a comparison with radio in the early 1950s, when consumers began purchasing televisions quickly, raising concerns that the older technology would disappear. 

  In these short-staffed times, it may be hard for small media companies to have a robust social media strategy (or any kind of strategy for that matter). Time is at a premium and staff members are already over-burdened. Enter dlvr.it (pronounced deliver it). dlvd.it is a platform that will scrape your website for information and post to your twitter and or Facebook page automatically. Best of all it's free!

  New Research from Borrell Associates indicates that when looking for new customers, 37 percent of small businesses claim that print newspaper ads are the best source for attracting customers, following referrals from other customers (67 percent), the company website (57.9 percent) and referrals from friends and family (54.8 percent). Print also beats out television, mobile, direct mail, e-mail marketing and other campaigns.

  After one of my local dealers said this about my newspaper: "I'm looking for a smart phone and you're still trying to sell me a pager," I started looking for digital solutions. I've developed a great Automitve Solution for publishers with the help of my friends at Autoconx.

  If you watched football last weekend like I did, you saw this ad a hundred times. The thing that caught my attention is that "Paul" the main character in the spot sees a Verizon print ad to get the whole story started. Could it be that print advertising still works? 

  Publishers must realize the core sales team for legacy media is unfit for effectively selling digital solutions. As one expert said years ago: "Only about 20% of a legacy media sales team can really understand digital and sell it effectively." That is still true today.
  And the 20% figure still holds true today. At the BIA/Kelsey "Leading in Local" conference last month in New Orleans, I heard several people from media companies cite the same figure. The "20% rule" seems to be a fact of nature.

  Yelp and a coalition of like-minded travel and shopping websites have created an elegant demonstration of the way they say Google biases search results in favor of Google's pages.
  It's a Chrome browser extension that Yelp says strips Google+ pages from Google's search results, forcing the search engine to display only the "organic" results Yelp says Google would serve if it wasn't biased in favor of Google's own sites and links.

  It's no secret that conventional advertising is not as effective as it used to be. Even though digital ad spend increases every year, an average conversion rate hovers somewhere between 2-4 percent. If you get anywhere between the 5-10 percent range, that's like winning the lottery. So then what's a marketer to do to boost these conversion rates?
  What types of ads are currently available for marketers?
  Depending on your marketing goal and ad budget, you have a plethora of choices from which you can choose to get your message out to consumers. Common ad types available for marketers include:

 Views Have Long Been Digital Advertising's Currency. Those Days May Be Numbered.
The internet is awash in page views. In August, roughly 3.5 trillion web pages were loaded on computers worldwide, according to measurement firm ComScore. Ad dollars are going with the flow, with internet advertising revenues in the U.S. reaching $43 billion last year. But about 70% of that went to the top 10 ad-selling companies, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook. Large ad networks siphon off much of the rest, leaving premium publishers parched. Those publishers have also been hurt by the shift to mobile, where rates are significantly less, as well as downward pricing pressure from increasingly automated ad sales.

 An Oklahoma study finds that more rural residents prefer to get information via their newspaper (either print or online) than any other mode of communication. For groups trying to reach rural constituents, that's important to keep in mind.
  The decline of newspapers has made many headlines in recent years.  Lower revenue, declining readership, and increasing competition from a variety of online sources have led many to believe that traditional newspapers are on their way out. 

Some recent survey results from Oklahoma, however, make clear that rural residents still highly value their local newspapers. 

 When is a print advertorial a native ad? The Washington Post published an ad for Shell in Thursday's print edition that it's touting as its first native ad in print. Shell used the ad, which ran on A13, to tell readers about the work it's doing to improve energy efficiency. A nearly identical version ran online.
 Many will no doubt see the Shell ad as a classic advertorial type ad that publications have run in print forever. But the Post said the Shell execution is true native because it's integrated among editorial stories on the page. It's labeled "sponsor generated content" and visual cues of background shading and fonts that are different from the surrounding articles.

  The decade-long speculation game on the fate of the St. Paul Pioneer Press has ratcheted up - again.
  The paper is currently owned by a hedge fund group, Alden Global Capital, and doing business under the corporate banner of Digital First Media. Like other hedge funds that have dallied in newspapers, Alden has never hidden the short-term nature of its investment interest in the PiPress and the 75 other papers it controls, which include the Denver Post, the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Daily News. 
  So after months of speculation, the company's Sept. 12 announcement that it was officially putting the entire Digital First collection up for sale came as no great surprise.