After weeks of failure by cops, animal-control officers and the bird’s own handlers, a Long Island avian expert finally nabbed a runaway peacock yesterday that humiliated authorities for two weeks.

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The unidentified woman fell around 11 p.m. out of John Jay Hall on West 114th Street, cops said, adding they’re treating it as an apparent accident.

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Second Avenue Subway workers put a protective cover over the wrong hole during escalator-shaft blasting yesterday, sources told The Post — resulting in a massive explosion that rained 100-pound chunks of debris on a busy Upper East Side intersection.

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The Staten Island creep who killed his wife because she refused to pay for cable TV during his hospital stay dined on a huge helping of cosmic payback when he choked to death on a chicken dinner just days before his wrist-slap sentencing.

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“Stop-and-frisk should be continued, after what I went through, being shot for no reason,” a bandaged Shamar Smith told The Post yesterday of the NYPD’s controversial crime-fighting tool.

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A few months ago Mort Zuckerman and Colin Myler, the Daily News owner and new Editor in Chief respectively, met with top executives at the paper to finalize the June 29 renaming and re-launch of a nationally focused New York Daily News website. Similar meetings have followed, the most recent just last week when rank and file employees were given a basic outline of the upcoming national news site. But at the earlier briefing, a mock sales presentation for “Daily News America” was pitched to the six most powerful men at the paper.

Keith Gehm, the national director of digital advertising, recently offered an account of what happened at the meeting, where the British tabloid The Daily Mail was used as a model for the re-launch of the New York paper.

“In England, they’re #1 in digital, #2 in print, and they continue to gain traction in the U.S. market,” Gehm told the others. “Their distinctive style of tabloid journalism is the key to their success.”

“Our site traffic has been moving steadily toward a national audience,” Gehm added, “with 85% of our readers coming from outside the New York demographic.”

After a few more Daily Mail stats, Gehm recalled Zuckerman wanted to know where his paper currently ranked, ways the paper could distinguish itself and whether the Daily News would be able to play at that national level.

“We’re number 13 among major news sites,” Gehm told the owner. The Daily News CEO, William D. Holiber, talked about ways the paper can distinguish itself and its prospects for competing nationally, but Gehm said he could not pass along specifics of Holiber’s remarks because they are part of the paper’s proprietary strategy.

The meeting came to a close after some confidential back and forth about new editorial hires, including Ted Young, who recently announced he was leaving the Daily Mail to head up Daily News America’s new digital news department.

The New York Daily News decision to re-launch itself as a “national” online is a direct response to rising costs, falling ad sales, foreign competition made possible through social media, new hyperlocal online-only publications competing for the local audience and the gradual acceptance of aggregation.

The hole in the boat
Advertising is the problem that lit the fire under the Daily News gamble. The seeds of the change were sown back when the focus of advertising shifted from print to digital sales over the past decade, and agencies quickly overhauled the way online inventory was priced and purchased.

When buying digital advertising space, industry experts agree, there is no longer much of a premium paid for a specific publication’s brand. In the last five or six years, digital ad rates have become fairly standardized across the industry, with advertisers paying a premium for targeting, or the level of tracking features, employed on a site.

“Digital CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) are not going to go up – ever,” said Keith Kelly, a media columnist who has worked for Ad Age, the Daily News and the New York Post over the past 30 years. “There is so much inventory out there and people aren’t brand loyal online, so, why would agencies pay a premium unless you’re pricing in the targeting.”

Along with the premium paid for targeting and tracking readers online, advertisers also pay a web-only premium for paywall audiences. Sites that employ a paywall and command a significant share of a desirable demographic can command higher rates. Two current examples are the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

But tabloid news websites need traffic and have not been able to compete with a paywall lowering the number of unique visitors to their sites.

“Ad agencies want to buy 10 or 20 million eyeballs at a time,” said Kelly. “It used to be 10 million was critical mass and now they say 20 million before an ad agency will give you a serious look rather than just going to Google ad search. You can’t get those numbers behind a paywall.”

Local news websites, like www.dailynews.com, which has competed for relatively small-margin regional ad dollars to date, continue to be pushed ever closer to the breaking point by new competition. Relatively new competitors in the local New York news market coming from outside traditional geographic boundaries, like the Guardian, as well as new local competitors springing up within New York City, like DNA Info.com are making regional advertising a losing proposition.

This has spurred ad executives at papers like the Daily News to expand and go after the “big fish” of the ad sales world. National advertising campaigns are generally larger, more lucrative and often multi-million dollar ad campaigns awarded by agencies almost exclusively to large national news and entertainment networks.

“The difference for them is, other than U.S. News, the Daily News is on its own,” said Keith Kelly. “Even though it’s a direct competitor, the Post has less challenges on the business side because of the economies of scale. It’s already bundled with national publications, cable news networks, in big national ad campaigns.”

Once a big fish in a small regional advertising pond, the Daily News, is facing shrinking print advertising budgets and is finding it hard to survive on the relatively small budgets associated with the regional digital advertising market.

By adding a national component in the form of Daily News America and combining the advertising departments of Daily News America with Zuckerman’s other publication, U.S. News and World Report, CEO William D. Holiber hopes to create a media group that will be able to compete for the larger and more lucrative national ad campaigns.

Starting to move
In April, the Daily News’ entire digital sales force was physically moved within their Broad Street headquarters. They now share the same floor with U.S. News and World Reports’ sales team. On May 15th, the Daily News chief advertising officer, Kerry Dyre, announced internally that the Daily News will be getting a new vice president. Mark Siegal, formally the national digital sales director for U.S. News & World Reports, will oversee all digital advertising for both operations. By lowering the walls between the two sales forces and appointing a single position to oversee the sales efforts of both publications, they have effectively created a national newspaper/magazine “network.”

The sales side is not alone in dealing with the Daily News’ new “go big or go home” effort. On April 24th, it was announced that the editor of the Daily News website, Scott Cohen, who was one of the original architects of Daily News America, would be leaving to join a start up. A month after leaving the publication, he offered the following explanation of the Daily News America’s editorial strategy.

“I saw an opportunity,” said Cohen. “There are national news sites, like the New York Times, national business sites, like the Wall Street Journal, but no national tabloid site, and I figured we could fill that spot.”

“Strictly from the editorial side,” said Cohen, “it was to get more pages. “We had to raise page views and raise them quickly. The New York audience is valuable, but small. We had to grow editorial traffic, so expanding towards a national audience was the answer. On a website, audience is audience.”

When asked about Daily News America’s strategy for expansion, whether satellite news bureaus will be opened across the country or if the new site will simply aggregate national news stories, Cohen answered, “The latter.” “The Daily News has a small D.C. bureau and an L.A. bureau,” he went on to explain, “and you can do a lot of work from your desk now-a-days. That kind of original reporting is a large expense so, no, it will never happen.”

Some, like Cohen, believe the gradual acceptance of aggregation stems from basic economic necessity while others believe it is the byproduct of changing “online” attitudes.

“If they’re using U.S. News & World Reports reporting, it will be better than just aggregating,” said Josh Quittner, editorial director at Flipboard media. “If you look at the success of the Huffington Post, augmenting aggregation with your own reporting is a winning formula these days.”

Along with a gradual acceptance of aggregation, there has also been a shift in the types of stories that drive revenue, and the coherence of print and web versions of the same publication.

“The Daily News business strategy here, it totally makes sense,” said Remy Stern, former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and current news website consultant. “Local content has a limited audience and stories that travel around the country, and around the world with the help of social media, are different kinds of stories. Stories like the tan mom story – it doesn’t matter that she lives in Jersey, it was still picked up in Europe and Asia. Stories with mass appeal, those are the stories that traffic well and you need to focus on them online. If you need to maximize traffic, you focus on those tabloid stories – really huge traffic driving stories where geography doesn’t matter. In print, you focus on different stories. A good example would be the Pedro Espada thing. A cover for the print version of the Post, but it only stayed a lead story on the web for a few hours because local politics doesn’t drive huge traffic online. With the Daily News, there is already a divergence between the print publication and the online pub. They are creating a new channel.”

Stern believes Daily News America will likely focus on the web’s most successful content.

“Celebrity gossip is the biggest driver of traffic as a category,” said Stern. “Look at the top 50 stories online in the last year, by traffic. I’d estimate that 30 of them are celebrity gossip. So what will they focus on? Put it this way, Christine Quinn is no Kim Kardashian.”

The mechanics behind this divergence between print and online are pretty simple. Readers generally reach a news site in one of three ways and their visits are logged as “direct”, “referral” or “search.” “Direct” refers to a reader who types the web address directly into a browser. “Referral,” or social media, refers to a reader who is given the hyperlink to a story through Twitter or Facebook. And “search” refers to readers who research a topic through a search engine and are directed towards a site. Like many of its contemporaries, the Daily News online traffic is currently split evenly between direct, referral and search.

Two-thirds of the traffic on www.dailynews.com is delivered – brought to the site through a hyperlink. Put simply, the internet has become a broker or a liaison, matching readers with stories regardless of geographic boundaries or prior exposure to a particular publication.

So if the online news game is going to involve matchmaking, style will become an even more important part of delivering the news. With Scott Cohen’s exit and Ted Young leaving the Daily Mail to head up Daily News America’s new digital news department, it looks as if the Daily News plans to tap into the British ‘distinctive style’ of punchy tabloid journalism.

By getting the traffic on their site past Kelly’s 20 million mark, they can side step the entire regional ad market. And that is all important to the overall advertising sales efforts, because new regional competetors have made digital regional sales a losing proposition for print publications. This is not the case for online-only regional upstarts, such as DNA Info.com, which do not have the expenses involved in printing and circulation.

New players
DNA Info, wwwdnainfo.com, a hyperlocal online-only news site that launched around the time that Zuckerman’s U.S. News & Word Reports switched over to an online-only publication, recently expanded its coverage to include all five boroughs in New York City. The online news agency has managed to scoop New York’s traditional papers on a few big stories and continues to expand its share of digital advertising pie.

While this is bad for www.dailynews.com, this type of competition shaking up the industry is good for consumers of news. More reporters competing to get the story translates to better coverage of a local market.

Lately, hyperlocals like DNA Info, which have lower operating expenses because they are not saddled with printing and distributing a physical paper to reach New Yorkers, have been converting Post and Daily News readers and gaining small amounts of market share.

One DNA Info reader, with no ties to the publication, who has been converting friends and relatives through social media is Garry Swords, a Manhattan real estate manager.

“I used to buy the Daily News every day on my way into the office, but I haven’t bought a paper in…at least a year. I do check my Twitter feed on my phone, but mostly I glance at DNA Info for local stuff throughout the day. They put stuff up on their site faster than the papers. It’s great. The coverage is not as comprehensive some times, but it’s a lot faster.”

Readers like Swords believes that online-only news sites will invest in reporting instead of paper and therefore will be able to get out in front on stories he is interested in reading. More importantly, Scott Cohen believes it is possible this type of news publication, with no print expenses, may buck the trend and keep newspapers in the field doing original reporting.

“DNA Info, yeah, it could be,” said Cohen. “If they spend something like 90 percent of their budget supporting original reporting, it is possible. I’m not sure if they make any money at all though. Time will tell.”

Regardless of its short track record, internet-only regional news organizations are already showing promise. Back in March, DNA Info scooped both the Daily News and the Post by breaking the story of Anna Gristina, an Upper East Side Madame who ran a brothel out of an apartment house on 78th st. The DNA Info investigative reporter who worked on the story, Murray Weiss, had recently joined DNA Info after being pushed out of the Daily News for “making too much salary” according to Kerry Burke of the Daily News.

While this hyperlocal competition from sites that invest in reporting, like DNA Info, has increased editorial competition and likely improves overall local news coverage on a few stories, competition also comes in the form of news aggregators that invest little to no resources in reporting. This is the competition that has some Daily News insiders worried.

“I use to work at ABC News,” said Scott Cohen, “and every day they use to rip stories – actual pages – right out of the newspaper. The vast majority of original reporting is newspaper reporting. How many blogs are doing original reporting? You can count them on one hand,” said Cohen. “Original reporting originates with newspapers. It is lessening and there is a butterfly effect.”

One of the ripples in Cohen’s butterfly effect is a disturbing “Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” trend amongst traditional news publications that find themselves competing with aggregators. Others agree and worry their publications are throwing in the towel and resorting to aggregation to survive.

As a current Daily News metro desk reporter, Kerry Burke, who has spent half of his twenty-year newspaper career at the Daily News, recently lamented over the pressure he sees his paper responding to regarding the aggregation practice.

“I’ve heard that the Guardian has a staff of 20 here in New York,” said Burke. “I’m out on every major story and I’ve never run into a reporter from the Guardian. We know they’re aggregating our stories.”

As Burke described numerous specific instances of his reporting finding its way into Huffington Post and Guardian stories it became clear that he is not just worried about other papers’ aggregation policies.

“The Guardian’s a paper putting money into becoming an online news entity,” says Burke. “The Daily News is doing the same.”

“When the plane went down in Argentina, I was out there within hours – not anymore,” says Burke. The budget just doesn’t exist anymore. They’ve come to the point where they’re punching up other publications copy. They attribute, but, you need competition! It is the life-blood of real reporting. This [aggregating] cuts a city off from its own people, its own culture. It’s a disaster.

“The danger with the “national” model,” says Burke, “is eventually you get bunch of aggregators, press releases, puff pieces, and eventually the people won’t even bother reading the paper. And I don’t blame them.”

But industry experts see aggregation playing a role in every successful online publication.

“It’s hard for people to get over the fact that aggregation online is here to stay, but it will be part of the formula moving forward,” said Stern.

Regardless of the exact formula, the architects of the new nationally-focused “Daily News America” site have high hopes.

Ted Young, who will take his place at the head of the editorial table of Daily News America on June 15, is coming from a British news site that had 50 million unique impressions (visitors) over the past 18 months. The most recent numbers show the Daily News’ traffic over the last year was 15 million unique impressions. The Daily News current digital ad sales director, Keith Gehm, says that with Daily News America they are hoping for a 67% increase in their first year, raising that number to 25 million unique impressions.

Getting over Kelly’s 20 million impression threshold aside, insiders don’t think the editorial content will change too drastically. Daily News readers will likely find versions of their favorite types stories on the new site.

“The holy trinity will be covered – news, sports and entertainment – That’s what Daily News America will cover,” said Scott Cohen.

David Hausman, 67, was busted last year after a sting operation in which he paid $8,500 for the head of an endangered black rhino.

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A recent auto accident called for the entire front suspension to be replaced on my Mazda 3, along with several body panels and both headlights. I thought the body shop did a pretty good job. With the exception that I had to bring the car back a few times to get the headlights sorted. I couldn’t really see at night, the headlights weren’t quite fitting right and they tended to fill up with water.

This morning, after the third trip to hear that it was, ‘no problem, we’ll take care of it…’, I wrote down the part numbers, checked with the dealership’s parts counter and guess what – not the right headlights for my car. Sounded like an easy fix to me. Get the right parts and we’re good to go, Right?

Not so fast. The service manager explained that it is common practice for insurance companies to mandate re-manufactured parts, if available. Even if you go to your dealership, they have to call around for inferior parts on insurance jobs!

Insurance underwriters will tell anyone who asks that the only insurance company not currently employing this practice is Chubb. Unfortunately, knowledge is not power, because most of Chubb’s customer base are exclusively high net worth individuals. They have no interest in writing an auto policy for anyone living on a reporter’s salary.

So, I’m not rich, my auto policy is with Hanover and my headlights are not the new OEM parts I thought they were. I wonder where they got the axle, tie rod, control arm, bearing, hub…oh man this is starting to make me nauseous!

I understand that insurance companies need to make a profit to stay in business, but is this the best area to save a buck?

I did some more research and there is no regulatory body governing the certification or safety of re-manufactured or re-used auto parts. Apparently, the government wants to keep me from killing myself with soda or cigarettes, but has no opinion when big insurance companies insist that, without my consent, a “slightly used” wheel hub or wiring harness – that no one has signed off on – goes into my car?

Just one more reminder that where it counts, you’re on you’re own. Pay attention, ask questions, and don’t take it for granted that your safety is ‘in good hands.’

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New York is in the middle of its annual weather sweet spot. The dog days of August are behind us, the leaves haven’t started to fall yet and most urban dwellers are feeling the pull toward outdoor activities, mostly because in the back of our collective unconscious memories are the frozen days of January and February, when “going out” is relegated to the few hundred yards between your front door and the nearest subway entrance. With that in mind, it’s up to us to make the most of the next few weeks.

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