Newspaper sites have done a lot of window dressing with “hyper-local” by adding neighborhood blogs and whatnot. But now some papers are challenging themselves to embrace hyper-local in all things, as they seek to tame Google and Yahoo! in search, take on the Yellow Pages in certain categories, and win back reader loyalty.

A lot of the discussion at this week’s NAA Marketing Conference in Las Vegas focused on such issues  both on and off the podium. The Boston Globe’s Boston.com, for instance, is currently on a mission to make its onsite search more relevant at the hyper-local level by optimizing all its news and features, while crawling local organization sites to come up with content that doesn’t typically come up with Google.

“We’re going for local hockey league schedules and things of that nature,” says Bob Kempf, who was recruited from GateHouse Media’s Wicked Local effort in the surrounding Boston suburbs to hyper-localize Boston.com. The site is also striving to clean up its own archives to bring out the relevance of stories during user searches, in part by building out keyword links in ways that Google’s computers probably can’t see.

Kempf, whose skunkworks reports into Michael Zimbalist at The New York Times Co., and may be applied to other company sites, says he is under no illusion that notices of a hockey schedule or clever article links will make the site a default search engine over Google or Yahoo!. But he says the effort could extend the newspaper’s mission in a way that the search engines probably won’t. And that should translate to more effective local advertising.

One issue with such a federated search approach, however, is that readers don’t always want such a 360-degree view when they are searching their newspaper site. Kempf says readers often just want to see what articles a newspaper has published, in their traditional chronological order. The site may have to offer an option to readers of straight articles, he says. It is a challenge to retrain reader expectations.

The highlight of Day 2 of the NAA show was a local search panel. The length of sessions (90 minutes) results in a lower number of sessions than I’m used to attending, but the quality has in most cases made up for the quantity.

Local search has many applications to newspapers in the many forms it takes, including directory listings, classifieds, video, and mobile. Integrating all these elements to create more robust and attractive local destinations was a core theme of this panel.

Google’s education of the marketplace on what search should be  and the bar it raised in doing so  has made this job more difficult for traditionally tech-averse newspaper publishers (the industry’s overall place in the tech learning curve could be gleaned from the explanations sometimes required from the stage when terms like RSS were used).

But as mentioned yesterday, the industry is coming around and has made some sizable steps in some cases. There was a time in the not too distant past when some newspaper execs were liable to think that VoIP is a low-carb vodka and blogging is a primitive form of punishment (sometimes it is). But there is still a long way to go and, to their credit, many in the industry realize this  at least that’s the message that could be heard clearly all week here in Las Vegas.

So users’ expectations of the search experience have been molded by Google, and newspapers have a significant challenge in meeting that expectation. This isn’t only due to a lack of ability or affinity for the technology required to make it happen but is also, as I’m beginning to learn, a function of the discreet and segmented nature of newspaper content.

In order to create unified search results that combine news, classifieds and Yellow Pages content (which is something to shoot for, as we’ve said in the past), these traditionally disparate buckets of info must be brought together. There are good reasons that they erstwhile have not, besides newspapers’ lack of online innovation, which is often blamed for better or worse.

The challenge is that these different types of content have different data formats and there are correspondingly different ways to index them. Similarly, users use different terms and different search behavior to find each of them. Search queries in news can be myriad in quality and quantity when compared with that of classifieds. Classifieds in turn involve broader and more search terms than Yellow Pages content, which, by comparison, has content neatly packaged into a much smaller bucket of standard search headings.

Oodle’s Craig Donato offered this “reality check” during a classifieds/directory convergence panel at the last Drilling Down on Local conference, and Terry Millard of Planet Discover expressed similar thoughts at the NAA show.

“In automating unified search, you will get roughly 60 [percent] to 80 percent accuracy in contextually relevant results,” he said. To improve this, many on the panel agreed that an investment in manpower is necessary to manage the accuracy of the data and contextual relevance of search results. The upfront requirement to make this happen is difficult to execute and has proved scary for many publishers, according to Millard.

Another option is to integrate “social search” platforms that utilize users to tag content. This can involve a difficult adoption curve, which is why some private-label social search platforms available to newspapers run a “passive tracking” of user behavior to identify their interests (specific to a certain site, user or grouping of users), without requiring them to actively do so. These include companies we’ve written about here such as Collarity and Eurekster.

Many other challenges come in to this discussion such as branding (using the legacy brand or a new domain  a question of “brand baggage” vs. brand equity). The investment and patience required to face all these challenges and create a compelling local search destination was continually echoed by others on the panel (rest of panel members listed here).

After all, Google wasn’t built in a day; it took four years to monetize its content and see ad revenues. Unfortunately many newspapers don’t have that luxury because of finite resources and falling revenues. But it shouldn’t take that long, and opportunities do exist despite all these challenges.

“It won’t take four years, but it also won’t happen overnight,” asserted Millard.

Tomorrow, Yahoo!’s Hilary Schneider will have a much anticipated keynote that I’ll cover here along with more of a conference recap, and key takeaways from other sessions. More on today’s events can also be found over at Search Engine Watch.

Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn’t fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday’s New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: “but Sidewalk was really aimed at what we now call local search. Sidewalk is one (business) we should not have gotten out of.”

It is interesting to speculate what the Web would be like today if Microsoft had not sold Sidewalk. The Kelsey Report’s Program Director at the time, Dan Miller, founder and senior analyst for Opus Research, described MSN Sidewalk as “Microsoft’s private labeling of the Internet. It includes pure access, a home page, personalized utilities (including your favorites) and both technical and generic customer support for all of Microsoft’s products and services.” The relaunch of Sidewalk.com (a stand-alone city guide) to MSN Sidewalk (an online guide) took a page out of the Yellow Pages songbook by calling itself the place that brings buyers and sellers together.

Microsoft executives described e-commerce as “find, choose, buy.” By 1999, Microsoft claimed 4.7 million unduplicated visitors each month to the more than 70 Sidewalk cities with more than 6,000 local businesses participating as advertisers and paying an estimated $26 million for space on MSN Sidewalk. MSN Sidewalk was highly complementary to Microsoft’s core business of selling and supporting software (think a platform for distributing software upgrades, providing free e-mail  hotmail  and sustaining dialogue with its development community). TKG believed that the only downside to Microsoft was that this business required a long-term investment. In October 1998, Dan wrote, “We’d like to go on the record right now saying that MSN Sidewalk, as an Internet Yellow Pages or buyer’s guide, might fail  in the near term there probably isn’t enough traffic on the worldwide Web to justify its advertising rates.”

He further questioned the depth of local sales relationships and the dearth of merchants with transaction processing infrastructure to support “a stand-alone business. That’s just the point. Microsoft does not treat its Internet-based operations as a stand-alone business. It is very much its core operation and is becoming more so as operating systems and applications programs are distributed across IP-based networks,” Dan wrote.

So it was not surprising to read the New York Times article about Steve Ballmer regretting the decision to sell Microsoft Sidewalk in 1999. We thought it was a mistake at the time (although when the Internet bubble burst not too long afterward it didn’t seem wrong). But Ballmer is wrestling with the same issues today that he was then because the company stepped back from making that long-term investment. If they hadn’t, MSN might be in the same position that Windows and Office are.

Fox Interactive Media, the home of MySpace, Fox Sports, Fox News and other sites, definitely has local on its agenda and is rolling out several new features to bring users more in touch with their communities, says Dan Strauss, VP and general manager, who was speaking on a panel at the NAA Marketing Conference in Las Vegas.

Strauss, who got his start in local 12 years ago as the first head of Advance’s Cleveland.com, says one of the company’s biggest local-themed projects is a “news discovery” area for MySpace, which should launch in a couple of months. My Space already has a nascent local classified area. “It’s not just newspapers, but blogs.”

Another related FIM effort (perhaps the same effort?) is MyFoxLocal from the sports division. Soft launches have already occurred for MyFoxLA, MyFox Chicago and one or two other markets, he says. “Fox News will be involved too, says Strauss. “We’re helping communities cover stories.”

Meanwhile, newspaper sites appearing on the NAA panel with Strauss said they are working to complement MySpace’s appeal to young people with local offerings. “Local matters,” says Bakotopia GM Dan Pachecho. Bakotopia is the youth-oriented site for The Bakersfield Californian, a family-owned newspaper in the Inland Empire community. He notes that people will want to interact with other people and businesses that are nearby.

Pachecho says the company is in the midst of rolling out a Yelp-like “Insider Guide” that will contain profiles on local businesses. He sees the guide as a natural extension of a MySpace-like personal profile section. “If a user can create a profile, why can’t a restaurant? Why can’t people review that restaurant?”

One advantage that his company has over non-local rivals is that it has established multiple access points for Bakersfield residents, he adds. “Businesses can interactive in nine ways” over its nine sites, says Pachecho. The company is also mulling over new revenue ops, such as charging businesses to send out targeted text messages.

(My colleague Mike Boland has much more play-by-play coverage from the convention. Check out his previous posts.)

There have been lots of newspaper news and announcements in and around the NAA show so far, and I imagine much more to come. Here is a sampling:

 LostRemote reports that The San Francisco Chronicle is experimenting with podcasts of users that call in to express thoughts or give feedback. This could be an interesting experiment that puts a new twist on the principles of the longstanding Letters to the Editor department. This type of creative thinking is being talked about a lot during sessions at the NAA show. But as mentioned in the previous post, it probably goes without saying that talk and action are two different things.

 LostRemote also reports on a recent survey of teachers that affirms much of what we already know about print newspapers falling behind television and the Web as a top source of news for young people.

 Topix.net announced that it will integrate its free general merchandise classifieds across Tribune Co. newspaper Web sites by May (starting right away with Baltimoresun.com). Topix.net is here at the NAA show, and I hope to catch up with the company to get more information. Tribune’s ownership structure meanwhile continues to be shrouded in question marks.

 Elsewhere in Tribune Co., the publisher has made a somewhat uncharacteristically progressive move in announcing a partnership with video sharing site vMix in order to enable user-generated content across its 50 newspaper sites (including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and New York’s Newsday). This will include the capability for user-generated videos, photos and blogs.

 Lastly, online ad sales firm AdStar has partnered with Kaango, an online classified publishing platform used by, among others, Scripps and MediaNews Group. These publishers will now be able to have a one-stop shop approach to sell print and Web classified space. I’m scheduled to talk to AdStar later today and will have more info then.

In the meantime ClickZ’s Kate Kaye reports from the NAA show about some of the classified deals mentioned above that are signaling the continued recognition that publishers need to embrace and build better online models. She also has an interesting angle on the AdStar/Kaango deal; how MediaNews Group’s lead in the recently formed Yahoo! advertiser consortium could position Yahoo! to rival Google’s forays into print advertising distribution.

More to come later.

I’m at the Newspaper Association of America’s annual Marketing Conference in Las Vegas this week, where there have been lots of interesting sessions that I’ll break down in individual blog posts later. Most of the sessions were breakouts involving five different tracks, which presented the always-tough trade-off between the benefits of variety, and the reality that you can’t be in two or three concurrent sessions of interest at the same time.

I haven’t been to many past NAA shows, nor have I covered the newspaper industry long enough to have perspective on the changing industry attitudes this type of gathering can exemplify year after year (I will defer to Peter Krasilovsky on that one). But the attitude throughout the conference grounds and sessions seems to have an air of industry change, and a recognition of the need to adapt to the online models that have threatened longstanding core product models. Of course this isn’t entirely new, and recognition and execution are two different things.

During an afternoon classified session, Tom Hite, classified ad manager of OPUBCO Communications Group, gave many examples of the creative models that are working for some classified Web sites. His ultimate takeaway was that there is no one-size-fits-all model in these quickly changing times for classifieds. To be responsive to your particular market dynamics and to design and build Web site models that take those unique elements into consideration are key (but easier said than done). Newspapers to date largely haven’t had the technical chops to pull this off. And again, many examples were given, so these weren’t just generalities and empty aspirations. I’ll get into some of those examples and a deeper analysis of this session in a later post and in next week’s Local Media Journal.

There was also a very interesting social networking panel that looked at the opportunities to integrate social networking into newspaper Web sites. The thinking goes that news is very conducive to opinion and user feedback, as are many community assets held by newspapers such as classifieds and hyper-local content (recently the subject of much discussion in the newspaper world).

One of the key takeaways was that social networking components of any online newspaper can do more than attract users and raise session lengths (MySpace session lengths can be more than two hours, according to Dan Strauss, VP and GM of Fox Interactive Media, who sat on the panel). Something often ignored is social networking’s ability to generate and facilitate community interaction and compete with other media such as television. This can get readers engaged in local and national subjects that are core competencies of newspapers. There are direct and (equally important) indirect benefits to social networking for online newspapers in other words. This session also deserves its own post  more in-depth than this overview post can offer  so stay tuned.

Yell.com, which calls itself the United Kingdom’s local search engine, is working with Oodle.co.uk, a search engine for local classified advertisements, which will enable people who access Yell.com to post their own free advertisements on the site.

While Yell is certainly not the first Yellow Pages publisher to offer classifieds (not to mention newspaper publishers that offer Yellow Pages), its approach is interesting. Eddie Cheng, president of Yell.com, said, “We are always ready to try new approaches to ensure that Yell.com is a key destination for Web users.” We agree that this will increase traffic and enhance Yell.com’s position in the U.K. marketplace.

Yellow Pages Group has made several major acquisitions in the classified advertising space, as have Eniro and Sensis, among others. Online local directional media continues its march toward convergence.

From Nokia’s 4Q earnings call transcript (courtesy of 123Jump.com):

“Nokia, the maker of mobile phones, reported profit growth of 19% to EUR 1.27 billion from EUR 1.07 billion a year earlier, exceeding analysts’ forecasts. The company shipped 106 million handsets, up 19% sequentially and 26% from a year ago. The estimated market share was 36%, unchanged from the third quarter and up from 34% in the year-ago period. In 2007, Nokia expects industry mobile device volume to grow by up to 10% from an estimated 978 million units in 2006.”

AP reported that Copiepresse, a copyright protection group that represents 17 French and German-language Belgian newspapers, asked Yahoo! to remove links that point to the newspapers’ content. At issue is whether a cached page (a copy of content that is hosted on a search engine’s server) constitutes copyright infringement.

Groklaw’s Sean Daly interviewed Margaret Boribon of Copiepresse back in October 2006 about a similarly themed lawsuit against Google. In the U.S., Google successfully defended against a similar claim. The judge found that Google was protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright act. In the E.U., the laws are not as clear in all member countries.

Meanwhile, the U.K. government opted not to back a change that extended greater legal protection to search engines. The decision will be left to a European Commission review later in 2007.

Regardless of the legal environment, some newspapers in the U.K. actually find search engines a valuable source of new consumers. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, The Daily Telegraph and others are bidding against each other for keywords that drive traffic to their news stories. These papers realize that Google gives them access to an audience outside their typical geographic boundary. In other words, an audience they wouldn’t otherwise reach.

Since newspapers are under pressure, many are offering deep discounts, free weekly delivery and other incentives for new print readers. The clear point of these programs is to prop up declining circulation. It seems like The Daily Telegraph at least understands that the Internet is a valuable customer acquisition tool for new customers. The Internet can even extend a company’s geographic reach.

In a New York Times article, Ted Turner said: “He loved newspapers but was not sure of their future. ‘It’s an outmoded technology,’ he said.”

One thing is for certain, newspapers like those in Belgium, are going to have to adapt if they are going to survive. Perhaps the Belgian newspapers should consider a trip to The Daily Telegraph to learn the inherent value of a good SEO/SEM program. On the other hand, maybe they can just wait it out until this search engine fad finally disappears once and for all.

Nielsen/NetRatings has announced U.S. search share rankings for December 2006. Google Search tops the list with an estimated 3 billion search queries, representing 51 percent of all search queries conducted last month.