As you may have heard, Cars.com has announced that it will be purchased by the Gannett Company, which currently owns a 27% stake in Cars.com and has been a media partner with the Miami Herald and our parent company, The McClatchy Company, for many years.

We are excited to announce that we will remain your key contact for Cars.com and continue our relationship with this award-winning online destination for car shoppers. The Miami Herald is committed to providing you excellent service and support to drive your success locally, using all of our print, digital and direct marketing solutions.

With 16.5 million new vehicle sales forecast for 2014, it is important to stay in front of potential customers and ahead of the competition. More than 80% of the Cars.com audience is currently in the market for a vehicle. The Miami Herald and Cars.com will drive shoppers to your dealership.
Cars.com offers a way for you to:

• Boost your brand. Differentiate yourself from the competition through your dealer profile.
• Drive more in-market sales. Use optimized search results to showcase your business.
• Keep you ahead of the curve. Our monthly Market Intelligence Reports help you make more informed business decisions.
• Grow your service business. Cars.com has seen a sevenfold increase in traffic to its service-related content, giving your service department powerful online visibility.
• Capture mobile shoppers. Cars.com was named the top-rated third-party mobile site last year by a JD Powers study and is committed to improving upon that user experience to grow your business.
• Reach a larger audience. Nearly half of all vehicles sold in the United States during a nine-month window were to shoppers who had visited Cars.com.

As your partner, we are committed to making your business even more successful. We will be reaching out to you in the coming weeks to answer any questions you may have, share with you our latest products and services and ensure that we are exceeding your expectations.

We look forward to continuing our relationship with you and Cars.com.
Best regards,
Sam Brown
VP Advertising
Miami Herald

After less than a decade of existence, smartphones and tablets this year will draw more money from advertisers than the centuries-old newspaper industry or the nearly century-old radio sector, a sign of just how rapidly technology is transforming media habits.

Read the entire story at the Wall Street Journal

Caliente, the new weekly shopper from Miami Herald

Coming soon from the Miami Herald to a doorstep near you, if you happen to live in the Westchester area… Caliente is the new free, weekly, spanish-language tabloid delivered to 33012 33013 33010 33126 33125 and 33135 zip codes. The plan is for a spicy mix of celebrity gossip and paid ads. Aye caramba!

Paywalls are becoming increasingly prevalent at newspaper websites across the United States. Eleven of the country’s largest-selling 20 newspapers are either charging for access or have announced plans to do so.

So says this article (free) in The Guardian. The writer, Roy Greenslade, goes on to quote Washington Post CEO Don Graham:

“The reason we haven’t adopted [a paywall] yet is that we haven’t found one that actually adds to profits. But we are going to continue to study every model of paywall and think about that, as well as think about keeping it free.”

Graham, and other newspaper leaders are coming at this all wrong. They are blinded by long experience in an industry where profits flowed from printing a finished product each day. Well those days are gone, and that type of thinking needs to go too…

Newspapers in 2013 need to adopt a more flexible, iterative development model for their online operations. Don Graham and others should not be searching for the one “silver bullet” of paywalls, something to buy, set and forget. Instead, they need to dive in and understand that each day is now a science experiment with the results indicated in pageviews, subs and ad revenue. Newspapers need to move away from the manufacturing mindset and begin to understand that online operations are never “done,” they need to be under constant daily development.