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Newspaper & Yellow Page Pubs Must Adapt

Search engines have changed consumer expectations for shopping and finding local businesses. Newspaper publishers have been forced to adapt their traditional media offerings for readers and advertisers.

This reality, and its implications for traditional and online media, is examined in a new report by The Kelsey Group entitled, �Newspapers 2.0, Part 3: Changing Directions in Newspaper Advertising.� This third and final installment of The Kelsey Group�s White Paper series about the future of newspapers highlights the opportunities and imperatives for online convergence with other locally serving media, such as Yellow Pages.

Among the report�s key findings:

- Search engines have trained users to adopt a holistic perspective that involves an expectation for comprehensive data that blurs traditional boundaries between categories of local media advertising.

- New technology providers will attempt to reach a larger segment of local advertisers that don�t traditionally buy space in newspapers, such as plumbers, lawyers, doctors, and other small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that traditionally considered Yellow Pages their primary local advertising channel.

- Newspapers possess the advantage of local relevance and trust across news, community, event and classified categories. To compete with the search giants, they must develop better search technology for indexing and serving combined local and national news, classifieds and Yellow Pages results.

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