local media

Barry Diller has advice for local newspapers (from which local radio might draw some wisdom): get local to the granular level.

"All of you have more audience now than you ever did," Diller told attendees of the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange on Tuesday, where he was interviewed by The Washington Post CEO Katharine Weymouth. But the time is now to "get more granular than... (you) ever have done before." He told attendees of his surprise that more local media don't use their unique "ability to be so granular and local that you are every possible grain to anyone who lives in a defined community."

Diller is chairman and senior executive of InterActiveCorp., and his backing of the Aereo local television streaming service has him in the news lately.

He told the conference that "sleepy" companies acting like "recovering alcoholics" in the face of declining ad sales will face extinction as "irrelevant media." Those that spend on innovation will survive.

Read more from NetNewsCheck.com here.

BIA/Kelsey now projects local media ad spending to hit $148.8 billion by 2017. Digital's share of that growth -- now just over 17% -- should grow to nearly 28% in that time.

That projection includes a drop in "traditional media revenues," from $109.4 million last year to $107.6 million, Tom Taylor points out here.

"By 2017, the firm estimates online media will take more than $41 billion of the nearly $149 billion that companies will spend, which means higher investments overall in advertising and marketing," reports MediaPost (here).

BIA/Kelsey says today that local radio 2011 online revenue was up more than 15%, to $439 million (for comparison, local television's online revenues grew even more). And they're predicting "a steady year of online growth" for local radio and television alike.

The data will appear in BIA/Kelsey's new Investing In Television and Investing In Radio publications. BIA/Kelsey credits local media's "assets" ("from valuable local content, to cross-promotional opportunities between on and off-air, and a trained sales staff that understands the local market and the advertiser community") which enable stations to "expand their position in their local markets from solely an over-the-air media source to a local media company that can provide access to local audiences in different, effective ways for their advertiser clients."

Read the company's press release here.