Noticias 
Hearst Newspapers president Steve Swartz's year-end message to employees.
Dear Colleagues, I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for the work you've done this year to help transform our business. The difficulties we've experienced in 2009 need not be repeated here. But as we close this year, with our web sites continuing to set page view records, with sales of Sunday subscriptions running ahead of last year's pace, and having recorded in December our fourth straight monthly gain in year-over-year profits, I believe we have much to be proud of, much to look forward to in 2010, and, of course, much work still to do.
Beginning with January’s 100 Days of Change and continuing through today, we've worked steadily at transformation, first realigning our expense base, then making our sales organizations into digital as well as print sales consultants, building multi-product packages to meet our clients needs. The evidence of progress is there. Of the more than 800 newspapers in the consortium selling Yahoo display inventory, all four Hearst metros are in the top 20 in sales, and our Houston Chronicle is the number one seller by more than $1 million. Our Power Day strategy of focusing most of our circulation marketing on Sunday subscriptions is bearing fruit, so much so that we believe each of our metros will be up in total Sunday circulation on next September’s ABC statement, and many will also be up a second or Power Day, generally Thursday or Friday. Our newsrooms continue to innovate in print and in digital form while maintaining our aggressive enterprise efforts. Just yesterday, the city of Albany, N.Y. agreed to turn over to our Times Union thousands of parking tickets that had been voided. The Times Union and our legal department had filed suit to gain access to the tickets after writing about the forgiving of parking tickets for certain well-connected residents.
For all we've accomplished, we know our efforts at transformation have just begun. The world becomes more digital every day, and so must we.
By now, many of you have seen the presentation and video that lays out our digital content strategy for 2010, and those of you who haven’t will by early January. We will build the household penetration of our free web sites by making them much more visual and by assembling the richest possible package of local information and data. To aid in this effort we will deploy our new Nstein digital content management and distribution system and we'll deploy the content aggregation engine that our colleagues in the entertainment division have used to power the new LMK.com. We will launch a paid version of our daily news and information product that will live inside the free web site and contain exclusives and higher levels of customization. And we will develop deep vertical content areas offering highly specialized reporting, content aggregation and data assembly on subjects such as the oil and gas industry for our Texas markets or state government in Albany.
There is an exciting new level of cooperation that is emerging in the media industry that will aid our efforts. The Associated Press is taking the lead in a new effort in search that aims to offer our industry’s content in real time through dynamically generated topics pages. For too long, these search page views have been going to other sites whose content isn't nearly as rich or credible but who have been better organized for the search engines. Our company has come together with Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith and News Corp. to try to set standards for publishing to digital devices and setting payment mechanisms that should make the conversion to digital publishing easier for consumers and advertisers. This initiative, along with our company's efforts to engineer a digital publishing platform, now known as Skiff, promise to put Hearst at the center of our industry's digital transformation.
Our work to become the digital marketing services agent for our customers will move to another level in 2010 as we add capability in advertising effectiveness analytics, search engine optimization, social media management, digital circulars and coupons and mobile marketing products. We will continue to build on our strong partnership with Yahoo as we also add new partners.
Marketing will return to the forefront of our efforts in 2010, as we spend time, effort and money promoting our exclusive content to consumers and our digital marketing services capabilities to our advertising clients. We will also greatly enhance our efforts in customer research, as this digital age requires fast experimentation but also fast feedback and fast adjustment.
Frank Bennack and I wish you and your family Happy Holidays and best wishes for a prosperous 2010.
