[COMMENTARY] Witnessing evolution of newspaper industry

Four years ago, most of us wouldn’t have predicted award-winning TV series would debut via online streaming on websites such as Netflix and Hulu and would never be aired on cable or network television. Likewise, just four years ago most of us wouldn’t believe we would get news updates on our watches.

During my four years as the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America, I have watched nearly every media industry shift dramatically in response to the ever-changing technology and consumption habits of our audiences.

The same holds true for newspapers. This industry has been around far longer than radio, television or telecommunications, and some critics have questioned how we will continue to remain relevant in today’s digital world.

But today’s numbers speak for themselves: In the United States, the newspaper digital audience is skyrocketing, reaching 176 million unique visitors across all platforms in March (comScore, 2015). Circulation revenue is also rising, both in the United States and around the world. According to the 2015 World Press Trends Survey, global newspaper circulation revenue exceeded advertising revenue for the first time ever.

The reason? Newspapers are leveraging technology and audience data more than ever to create new content, products and services that attract audiences and advertisers. The appetite for quality content and information is insatiable, and over the last few years, we have transformed into an industry that adopts and utilizes the latest developments in social, mobile, print and video to better reach consumers with interesting and engaging content.

Let’s look at a few of the ways the news industry has evolved:

Social media: Newspapers are successfully tapping into our desire to remain “plugged in” and up-to-date on the latest happenings. USA Today, for example, uses Snapchat to cover live sporting events through instantly-delivered photos and captions. Periscope, Twitter’s live-streaming service that debuted in the spring, is being leveraged by reporters and media outlets as a way to give viewers the inside look at breaking news, sports events,and even political press conferences. The New York Times even used WhatsApp, a messaging app that is incredibly popular outside the United States, to broadcast information about the Pope’s visit to South America to its international audience.

Apps: Newspapers have developed niche apps with customized content, such as the New York Times Cooking App and the Denver Post’s Colorado Ski Guide, to build on popular features and further engage specific audiences looking to more deeply explore their areas of interest.

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Print special features: In response to readers’ desires for quality leisure-reading, newspapers have begun offering expanded Sunday sections, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer’s new lifestyle section, “Live, Life, Love.” Similarly, the Chicago Tribune has doubled its opinion pages, following the growing reader interest in local commentary.

New revenue streams: Advertisers are still taking notice of the growing audience and continued demand for newsworthy, useful content. This has inspired the recent interest in native advertising, or sponsored content, as a way to provide advertisements that don’t disrupt the reader experience and still provide valuable information. And today, advertising is just one part of a fully-diversified revenue stream, which includes event marketing, digital marketing services and increasing circulation content.

Much has changed in four years, and I can say with confidence that the newspaper industry is poised to continue evolving with new technologies and engaging content in the years to come. It’s been an honor to serve as CEO of NAA during the last four years and I look forward to cheering the industry’s continued success.

Via: The Times

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Planned Parenthood Business Partner Wants ‘50 Livers a Week’ – As For Aborted Baby Heads: ‘Lab Techs Freak Out’

(CNSNews.com) – In the latest undercover investigative video of Planned Parenthood, a biotech CEO says her company could handle delivery of  “another 50 livers a week” taken from aborted babies and then, while discussing the shipment of intact baby heads and brains, the CEO laughs about making sure the child’s eyes are closed and says, “Tell the lab it’s coming!”

This conversation occurs during a luncheon meeting with StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer and the “buyers” (actors) representing a fetal tissue procurement company, and one other unidentified man at the table. The undercover video was made by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) and it is the eighth video to be released since mid-July.

The CEO of StemExpress, shown in the video, is Cate Dyer. Her older sister, Charlotte Ivancic is the outgoing health policy adviser to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

During the lunch conversation, which took place on May 22, 2015, one of the “buyers” asks Dyer, “What would make your lab happy?”

“Another 50 livers a week,” Dyer responds. “We’re working with almost like triple digit number clinics,” she explains, “and we still need more.”

Dyer added that, “Planned Parenthood has volume, because they are a volume institution.”

StemExpress, in Placerville, Calif., acted as a middleman between Planned Parenthood abortion clinics and research institutions looking for aborted baby parts. The company cut ties with Planned Parenthood on Aug. 14, following the outcry over the investigative videos that were released in late July and which named StemExpress.

Via: CNS News

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STEMEXPRESS CEO: TECHS ‘FREAK OUT’ WHEN RECEIVING WHOLE BABY HEADS IN THE MAIL

A Federal Judge lifted the temporary restraining order blocking the Center for Medical Progress from releasing a video taken secretly with StemExpress CEO Cate Dyer.

As the order was lifted, CMP immediately released a transcript of the conversation in advance of StemExpress trying to get another restraining order. David Daleiden, founder of CMP, told Breitbart News he is working feverishly to cut a new video. The transcript paints a graphic picture.

StemExpress is a California-based privately held company that buys baby body parts, repackages them and sells them at enormous markups to research facilities around the country. Until this current scandal, her company bought most of its body parts from Planned Parenthood clinics. StemExpress announced two weeks ago it would sever ties with the abortion giant.

The transcript, which Breitbart News obtained from Daleiden, shows Dyer admitting that her company receives intact fetuses, referred to in the transcript as “cases.” She tells an actor posing as a buyer, “Oh, yeah, I mean if you had intact cases, which we’ve done a lot, we sometimes ship those back to our lab in its entirety.”

At one point Dyer laughs about mailing out whole baby heads to her lab buyers in the mail. “They’ll open the box, go, ‘Oh God!’ So yeah, so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that. They are not capable.” She says lab technicians “freak out, and have meltdowns” when receiving whole heads.

Dyer complains that sometimes the intact fetuses are “destroyed” by bad handling at the abortion facility. “…Because it’s just, and the procurement for us, I mean it can go really sideways, depending on the facility, and then our samples are destroyed, and we’re like, ‘Really?’ This was all so much work, and then just to have them be destroyed is awful. I mean we have researchers wait forever, and they want certain things, you know, perfectly done, so we started bringing them back even to manage it from a procurement expert standpoint.”

She complains to the buyer about bad conditions in the clinics. “I’ve seen staph come out of clinics. I’ve seen all sorts of things come out of clinics…”

Asked what would make her lab happy, Dyer says, “Another 50 livers a week.” She says the volume of baby parts is enormous. She says her company will see consistent growth in the buying and selling of baby parts.

Dyer says she feels great support from Planned Parenthood, particularly since StemExpress is viewed as a “champion of the cause. They need champions and if you’re not a champion, then you should go.”

She also describes Planned Parenthood as a huge supplier of baby parts. “Planned Parenthood has volume,” she says. “..they are a volume business.” Planned Parenthood insists abortion is only 3% of their business, a figure that has been widely debunked, even by abortion advocates.

Follow Austin Ruse on Twitter @austinruse

Via: Breitbart

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Maureen Dowd: Starbucks' Howard Schultz Urged to Challenge Hillary

.Howard Schultz, the chairman and CEO of Starbucks, is being urged to challenge Hillary 

Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Schultz, 62, is getting encouragement from supporters because they believe "the time is right for someone who's not a political lifer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said on Saturday. "It may be a tempting proposition."

Raised in low-income housing in Brooklyn, Schultz later graduated from Northern Michigan University. He bought Starbucks in 1988 and built the company to where its operating income totaled $939 million in its most recent quarter, on $4.9 billion in sales.

Schultz also once owned the Seattle Supersonics.

"He has strong opinions, and even position papers, about what he calls the fraying American dream," writes Dowd, who has long criticized Clinton and former President Bill Clinton.

She referenced the book Schultz co-wrote last year, "For Love of Country: What Our Veterans Can Teach Us About Citizenship, Heroism, and Sacrifice."

"While he was promoting his book on veterans last year, he honed a message about making government work again and finding 'authentic, truthful leadership,'" Dowd said.

Via: Newsmax

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THE INSIDE STORY OF STARBUCKS'S RACE TOGETHER CAMPAIGN, NO FOAM

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has always tried to do right by his company, his customers & his country. So why did Race Together go so wrong?

It’s early April, just five days after a police officer fatally shot Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in South Carolina, and the Starbucks CEO is on stage at Spelman College, the historically black institution of higher learning for women. He’s here for a panel discussion with United Negro College Fund chief Michael Lomax and Spelman president Beverly ­Tatum, author of the best seller Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Schultz is seated in an awkwardly large white sofa-chair, fielding tough questions from the crowd, mostly black students who have come to hear this white, 61-year-old billionaire speak about racial inequality.

Not long ago, he might have looked more out of place. But the crowd already knows that the head of the world’s largest coffee company is willing to thrust himself into this emotionally charged issue. Only three weeks earlier, he made waves with Starbucks’s "Race Together" initiative, an effort to spark a national dialogue about race in response to the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner—two other unarmed black men—and subsequent civil unrest. It was a bold idea that backfired. Starbucks had encouraged its baristas to write "Race Together" on the cups of coffee they served and engage customers in conversations. But critics lampooned what came across as a superficial gesture, and the backlash exploded onto social media, where Race Together received 2.5 billion impressions in less than 48 hours—much of it, Schultz complains, driven by a barrage of negative tweets filled with "visceral hate and contempt for the company and for me personally."

Via: Fast Company

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[VIDEO] mObama: 'We're Going to Have to...Re-market and Re-brand' the Affordable Care Act

(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama told a gathering of corporate executives Tuesday he's confident that his model of health care will work in the end, but he said he's going to have to "re-brand" it to sell it to a skeptical public.

He didn't use the word "Obamacare" once on Tuesday in talking about his health care law, but he mentioned the "Affordable Care Act" seven times.

"So, look, I am confident that the model that we built, which works off of the existing private insurance system, is one that will succeed," Obama told the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

"We are going to have to, (a) fix the website so everybody feels confident about that. We're going to have to, obviously, re-market and re-brand, and that will be challenging in this political environment."

During a campaign stop in Colorado last year, the president embraced the name that Republicans had given to his health insurance law: "The Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare," Obama said in August 2012. "I actually like the name," he added. "Because I do care -- that's why we fought so hard to make it happen."

Via: CNS News

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If You Like Your Insurance, You Can Rent It... Maybe

The main reason I left the insurance industry years ago was the fatigue of marketing a product that is misunderstood by the vast majority of its customer base, not to mention the majority of functionaries inside the industry. I was a lousy agent frankly, but for some reason, the concepts were very intuitive to me. I was the high scorer in of all of those licensing and continuing-ed type classes, but those don't pay the bills, so for reasons of money and sanity, I left.

Alas, this escape was only temporary, as we all now live in a country where the industry is being seized by a president who remains totally oblivious to its realities. Yet he insists on occupying the position as grand poobah CEO of all of it, and ruling by edict. And his epic "fix" can be translated this way:

If you like your coverage, you can rent it. Maybe.

There are so many problems with what he said, it's hard to know where to start -- so let's start with the absurdity of a one-year fix. That's no fix. Even terminal cancer caregivers score being "fixed" in terms of a five-year survival. Besides, Obama's 29 public pronouncements that you can "keep your insurance" were never mitigated with a "sell by" date. He hasn't fixed Obamacare, and in fact, he hasn't even fixed his "incorrect promise" by this. That promise depends, I guess, on what the meaning of "period" is.

Via: American Thinker

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WZ Exclusive: David’s Bridal Transitioning ALL Full-Timers To Part Time Because of Obamacare…

I just had lunch with a friend who is a manager of a David’s Bridal. She told me all store managers received an email from the CEO of David’s Bridal.  The e-mail explains that all store employees will begin to transition to part-time employment as of last week.   The e-mail goes on to say the decision was made as a result of the impact providing insurance to employees would cause to the company, in accordance with the requirements of the ACA.

David’s Bridal employs thousands of employees across America in its 300 stores.

Via: Weasel Zippers

First Lady Michelle Obama To Give Keynote Address At Disney’s ‘Veterans Institute’ Workshop On November 14

Complimentary ‘Veterans Institute’ program is designed to encourage and support hiring of military veterans Disney will share expertise from its ‘Heroes Work Here’ initiative with other companies to help them build their own veteran-hiring programs

Burbank, Calif. and Lake Buena Vista, Fla. – First Lady Michelle Obama will give the keynote address at Disney’s first-ever Veterans Institute workshop on November 14, 2013 at Walt Disney World Resort. Building on its successful Heroes Work Here initiative to hire, train and support military veterans, Disney is hosting the free Veterans Institute workshop to inspire other companies to employ servicemen and women transitioning to the private sector.

The First Lady has made supporting military families and U.S. troops a top priority. In 2011 Mrs. Obama and Dr. Jill Biden launched Joining Forces, an initiative dedicated to connecting servicemen and women, veterans, and military spouses with the resources they need to find jobs at home. Through this initiative, Mrs. Obama and Dr. Biden have met with military families, learned about their successes and challenges, and have connected them with businesses and non-profit organizations as they look for work in the private sector. Joining Forces highlights the workforce potential of veterans and military spouses, expands employment and career development opportunities for veterans and military spouses, and helps employers create military family-friendly workplaces.

“We applaud First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to raise awareness of the strengths and unique needs of veterans and their families, and we are honored to have her join Disney’s first-ever ‘Veterans Institute,’ a program designed to showcase the value of veterans, share best hiring practices, and encourage greater employment opportunities for military men and women transitioning into civilian life,” said Robert A. Iger, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company.

Via: Web Wire

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