NYT & union on collision course

December 28th, 2011

I feel pretty sad about the “profound dismay” expressed by former and current New York Times‘ employees due to a decision by management to freeze the pension plan for foreign bureau employees and other “recent developments.” The union sent a petition letter (384 signatures as of this writing) to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. expressing their concern.

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

A Huffington Post article on the matter by Michael Calderone notes that it could have been worse.

Bill O’Meara, president of the New York Newspaper Guild, said some staffers had considered even “more dramatic” actions.

“There were people who wanted to storm Arthur Sulzberger’s office,” O’Meara told The Huffington Post. “There were people who wanted to stage a walkout.”

The problem here is that this is 1960′s style labor posturing that really feels ancient in today’s media world. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else, but crying for yesterday does nothing to solve today’s problems. Managers of public companies have fiduciary responsibilities to their owners, the shareholders, and people don’t buy or hold stocks in companies that can’t produce growth. It’s not about how much money one makes, nor is it directly about margins; it’s about growth, and there are only two ways to do that. You can increase revenue, which isn’t happening anymore, or you can cut expenses, and that’s what’s happening here.

There’s very little growth in any sector of our economy right now, but this is more than just an economic problem. This is a problem of core business decay, and it will not get any better unless there’s a total reinvention undertaken. The truth and the laws of economics apply to everyone, even a vaunted institution like the New York Times.

What can be done? Take a look at the marvelous work of Lewis DVorkin at Forbes. Here’s a company that has blown out the original concept of making media and replaced it with a much leaner, more nimble and flexible system. The problem, of course, is that there’s no room whatsoever for organized labor’s perspective, which is now simply dead weight around the necks of the people who are trying to save the institution.

But beyond that – and to every individual in media today – the safe harbor that once was “the collective” is no more. It is literally every man and woman for themselves. If your organizations won’t or aren’t able to assist you in reinventing you, then you must do it yourself. I get the letter to the boss, but the arguments are sadly and unfortunately irrelevant. You must take care of you, because nobody will do it for you.

Posted in Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

Big ad money shifting to promotions (and away from media)

December 7th, 2011

Advertisers are now media companies themselves, and as I tried to point out in my last essay, we now find ourselves actually competing with them. The evidence of this is everywhere, but media companies simply ignore it, because the only thing we can see with advertisers is, well, advertising.

For as long as I have known Gordon Borrell, we’ve both been saying that the ad category to watch — due in large part to the disruptive nature of the Internet — is what Borrell calls “Promotions,” the spending of marketing dollars on things other than traditional advertising. So dramatic has the growth been in this category — and what’s projected to come — that the gouge it takes out of advertising budgets won’t be a small bite.

“This was no boating accident; this was a shark!”

Borrell Associates is a research and consulting company that’s driven by data. Once each year, the company produces major trend reports and then tracks those quarterly. Its latest data about the Promotions category is incredibly revealing, especially as it relates to growth.

In an email exchange with Kip Cassino, Borrell’s research guru, he noted that for some time, far more has been spent on promotions than intermediated advertising and that this trend is not only continuing but accelerating.

Most of it is money — five cents off a can of peas at the supermarket, or $2,000 off the next new car you’ll purchase. Discounts, deals, couponing, loyalty programs all share one thing in common: they are vehicles for enhancing sales with the promise of savings.

Promotions have another thing in common as well. Their ROI is immediately apparent. If a store owner puts a coupon on his website or in the daily paper, he knows exactly how much business it brought him — no guessing about “engagement,” or reach and frequency. This appeals to most businesses, especially the smaller ones.

Online promotions have lagged online ad spending, but Cassino says that is changing as well. “With the burgeoning popularity,” he wrote, “of mobile devices — the phones and tablets — online promotions will see massive growth during the coming five years.”

He noted that most businesses don’t separate promotions from advertising, so spending on a website or social media strategy is just “advertising” to them. The ramifications for media companies are stark.

“As overall spending on the intermediated (ad) side of marketing continues to decrease,” he wrote, “these media outlets will either have to learn how to gain revenue from the promotional side or face growing competition for a shrinking revenue pool.”  The result, he added, will resemble “a continuous game of musical chairs.”

Most media companies, Cassino noted, simply ignore the situation. “They note incremental growth on the ad side,” he wrote, “and see no reason to look at where most marketing growth is really occurring.” This is true, he noted, for both legacy and online players. Education, said Cassino, is the first step.

Promotions are not merely an extension of advertising. They have been invisible to many media outlets for decades, because they are primarily tactical tools — the province of the brand or product manager. They are top-line, not bottom line, oriented. Almost any media can find a good spot in promotions, but to do so requires a thorough knowledge of how and when it makes sense, and how it is best applied.

The invisibility is most obvious when it comes to the online world, where, as noted, we’re now competing with the people who have the money. More and more companies are spending promotions dollars on social media, for example, because it really delivers for them. According to Borrell’s latest SOCIAL LA$R™ (Local Ad Spending Report) research, businesses use the following metrics to determine success in this area (in this order):

1. New Customers
2. Additional Fans, Friends, Followers
3. Increased Visits to Business website
4. New email contacts
5. Increased Sales volume
6. Increased Visits to Business Social Network pages
7. Lead Generation
8. Increased Tweet Responses

National advertisers are way out ahead of local businesses, as the below graph shows, which ought to look like a big, fat opportunity to everybody.

When you examine these numbers, it’s pretty clear that businesses — remember, they’re the ones with the money — are now functioning exactly as we function. They are using tools that used to be ours alone, and the energy powering the movement to personal media (which includes businesses) is both abundant and renewable. Our goals are virtually the same as those of business-turned-media-companies, but the problem is we’re still counting on them to support ours. That is not going to last forever.

The opportunity we’ve always had is to use our knowledge and skill to advance this phenomenon and find our new value therein. There’s growth written all over this, and it begins with eyes to see it.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my latest essay, Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments » |

The bundle is the problem

October 30th, 2011

This will be redundant for long-term readers here, but I’ve just read a James Rainey LATimes piece (his last regular column, BTW) about newspapers and tablets that cries out for a reality check, so I’m going to repeat a central theme of The Pomoblog:

The media industries will not find a solution to their problems — no matter how much we “digital first” — without accepting that our infrastructure is what’s being disrupted, not our content.

This concept doesn’t “sell a lot of tapes,” as we used to say in the church business, but it’s the truth, and it’s why I cringe whenever I read articles like Rainey’s. It’s about newspapers getting into the tablet business — as in selling their OWN tablet devices, preloaded with news applications — and especially the experiment in Philadelphia by the publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News. The tablet, the Arnova 10 G2 (huh?), runs for $285 for one year and $339 for two years. The price includes subscriptions to the two papers. Here’s a key paragraph:

The two digitized papers can be downloaded each morning in a couple of minutes via Wi-Fi. What the company calls the “digital” edition looks just like the newspaper, rendered in miniature on the Arnova’s 10-inch screen. Readers turn pages with a swipe of the finger. They open pictures and articles with a tap.

The downloads take time. Another version of The Inquirer ” looks more like a standard news website in compact form.” Access to “live” requires a click to Philly.com and a WiFi connection. Rainey also reports that the Chicago Tribune is about to launch its own tablet, too. Where will this end?

Honestly, folks, Hollywood writers (comic or tragedy) couldn’t create a strategy this off-the-wall. It is so far from reality that I’d really like some of what they must be smoking in Philadelphia.

You see, many if not most newspaper people think the disruption is all about distribution channels, that consumers want their newspaper in electronic form. There’s powerful motivation for believing that (can you say “millions?”), but that doesn’t make it true. What consumers really want is to escape the relentless bombardment of advertising that surrounds and interrupts the content for which they believe they are paying, and technology is enabling that. Time is the new currency, and people want a la carte choices. The bundle is history. Unbundled content is the thing. Unbundled content can be passed around to friends, and you can’t do that with a “digitized paper.” What you can do with it is convince (some) advertisers that their display ads are still being placed in front of large groups of eyeballs. The problem with the news industry isn’t that people have lost their interest in news content. Recent studies show it’s just the opposite. What they have lost interest in is the bundled infrastructure that robs them of choices and wastes their time.

And as I’ve said a million times, the biggest mistake with these kinds of strategies and tactics is that they divert energy and resources that could be better used fighting the real problem (playing offense) instead of protecting the status quo (playing defense).

The bundle is the problem. Fix the problem!

For more information, see these old essays from December of 2005:

The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media
The Economy of Unbundled Advertising
The Unbundled Newsroom

Posted in Newspapers | 1 Comment » |

Oh-oh! Press trust stays low.

October 20th, 2011

The opening sentence in the press release from Gallup says it all:

The majority of Americans still do not have confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 44% of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust and the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured.

Here is the new data from Gallup tacked on to old data from Gallup, so that you can get the big picture. This is in 3-year increments going back to 1973. I’ve been updating and showing this image for ten years, because it immediately ends arguments about the viability of continuing down the same, tired paths.

This slide evidences the insurmountable problem for media companies today, because it slams the door on any attempts by the press to right the ship doing things the way we’ve always done them. It ain’t gonna work. Period.

The standard journalist response to the decline in ratings or circulation is that we’re not doing enough “hard” news, whatever that is. Or we’re not doing enough “investigative” news, whatever that is. Look at that graph. The nostalgia with which most journalists sincerely believe will fix what’s broken has to go back a very long way, for the decline in trust goes back 35 years. Thirty-five years! It’s broken, and we need to start over, not go back to the good old days when the people were spoon-fed by our “expertise.”

This is why contrary opinions, like the one expressed by AP’s David Bauder this week in New life in television’s evening news, are so disappointing. Bauder takes a look at some numbers and concludes that the network evening newscast is back.

…the networks have just completed a TV season where all three grew their audiences for the first time since 2001-02, when terrorists struck and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars began. The growth is continuing for the first few weeks of this season.

The reason he and his list of experts cite is concern about the economy and what he calls “the curating function of the evening news,” which is necessary because, you know, the audience is incapable of figuring out anything for themselves.

People follow news, “but they want someone they trust at the end of the day to explain it to them, to show what it means to them. Somebody credible,” said Michael Corn, executive producer of ABC’s “World News” with Sawyer.

Brand name journalists mean something when people can’t trust the accuracy of what they see online, said Dave Marash, a veteran journalist who worked at ABC News and Al-Jazeera English.

What Bauder and those like him fail to do is overlay the Gallup graph onto attempts to justify the hole in which we find ourselves. Michael Corn apparently believes that people “want someone they can trust at the end of the day to explain it to them.” Right. Now take a look at that graph and repeat that to me.

Folks, let’s be honest. The rise of new media is, in part, a direct response to the Gallup graph, and we make fools of ourselves every time we try to explain it otherwise. Before we say people trust us, we’d better be sure of the facts.

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Journalism, Networks, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media | 3 Comments » |

Newspaper comeback? It’s all about the money

June 29th, 2011

After years of complaining about disruptive forces hammering content, newspapers have finally begun focusing on the real problem, according to local online revenue expert Gordon Borrell. In a wide-ranging email interview about the topic this week, Borrell told me that attention in newspaper front offices has shifted from news content to protecting the one kind of content they have that others don’t. “Newspapers,” he said, “contain the only daily compendium of the Big Sales in a local market, and it’s that franchise that they’re worried about losing — not the local news franchise.”

“They’ve pretty much stopped hand-wringing,” he added, “over companies like Patch infringing on the low-value ‘community news’ turf and have drawn sharp focus on protecting that wildly valuable advertising franchise.”

It’s a good thing, because while the debate has raged about such irrelevant things as whether bloggers are journalists, mixing facts with opinion, hyperlocal news, and personal branding, pureplay Web companies have been decimating the business side of things. Look, the Web didn’t hurt newspapers by taking away their readers; they did so by taking away their money, and I’m happy to see a shift in the numbers this year.

For those of you who still believe it has anything to do with content, here’s an image I put together using data provided by Borrell. Pureplays have been taking local dollars out of the system since the earliest days of the Web, but newspapers were clearly the king. Now look what has happened:

Borrell points to the slight drop in pureplay share and the uptick in newspaper share in 2010 as a sign that newspapers are really beginning to get it.

The big share losses for newspapers were the result of them being lulled into believing they didn’t need to hire extra staffing and that it was all about putting news online and selling ad adjacencies around it. It’s a niche medium where the other half of newspapers’ content — advertising — should be driving the boat. I think they’re well aware of that now, and I think you’re going to see more share growth as a result.

The drop in market share for newspapers has been precipitous during the past five years, and while there are those who would argue that declining circulation is the problem, the reality is that people consuming newspaper content online come close to making up the difference. Moreover, a direct correlation between newspaper circulation and revenue is assumptive, at best, for the only thing we really know for sure is that money has shifted dramatically within the local sphere. Given the realities of companies like Groupon, Facebook, Google and a myriad of others sucking cash from the marketplace, can we really assume that if newspaper circulations were where they used to be that advertising still wouldn’t have moved? I don’t think so.

This is why I’ve been harping so long on the truth that our “business” is actually advertising, not news content. Surrendering the idea that ads adjacent to scarce content is dying is perhaps the hardest thing for newspaper executives to accept, but that’s the reality. Money is money, and the people formerly known as the advertisers are finding highly efficient and effective online methods to spend theirs.

But all is not lost, and Borrell believes the evidence shows a newspaper comeback, of sorts, and he’s optimistic. “Instead of trying to managing everything under one umbrella,” he told me “they’re actually plowing additional resources into the Internet.”

“Their editors or print sales people are less in control,” he added, “allowing their Internet staffs to move more independently and aggressively.”

And, he notes that we shouldn’t forget to examine history, because newspapers can’t be easily written off.

When you look back on any new electronic media — like radio in the 1920s, TV in the 1950s and cable in the 1960s and ‘70s — you see that newspaper companies were among the first to seize the opportunities and make them their own. That’s why you have call letters like WCPO (Cincinnati Post), WBEN (Buffalo Evening Newspaper), and KMST (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). They have a lot at stake, and they leverage themselves into any new business that looks like a threat to their core business. I think you’re going to see newspapers — and perhaps TV stations — basically “own” the local Internet. They have local promotional capabilities to brand a new product, and the feet on the street to develop the content and sell advertising.

That’s a bold statement, and I certainly don’t disagree. The thing that’s different about the Local Web, however, is that it’s ability to generate revenue is outside the mass media box that newspaper companies know so well, and which is also the core business model of radio, television and cable. It’s taken awhile for papers to figure that out, but I agree with Gordon that a shift in the local online market share is at hand.

The Internet is a three-way communications medium. I don’t think anybody has figured out the killer app in terms of enabling commerce, but I’m betting on it happening first at the local level. Will it come from newspapers? I’m not sure, but if it does, it’ll only happen through independent thinkers, those who can separate the making of money from the creation of content.

Posted in Advertising, Borrell Associates, Broadcasting, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media | 5 Comments » |

We must think of ads as content

April 6th, 2011

The extent to which people have paid for the local newspaper in order to access commerce-related content is vastly underestimated when people examine the newspaper crisis today. The arguments are all about the news content and “what’s happening to real journalism,” which has bled over into strategies resulting in pay walls for digital “editions” of the paper, including Rupert Murdoch’s iPad experiment, The Daily. The industry seems to believe that at the height of their popularity, people subscribed to the paper to get at the news content it created, rather than as an access point for commerce within the marketplace.

I know what the studies say, but asking people their opinion and observing human behavior are two different things.

I live in the Dallas/Ft. Worth market, and so I’ve been able to watch the marketing of the Dallas Morning News and its paywall. The TV ads say it all, “Introducing the next generation of the Dallas Morning News.” From the imagery to the prose, the newspaper content is emphasized. It looks like a paper, as the video reveals.. It has those same sections as the paper. “By God, it’s the next generation of the paper.”

It’s designed to get you to think that you’re simply transferring your subscription from one form to another. What we should be doing is innovating something that guarantees subscriptions, instead of trusting our gut on the old model. Such innovations should stress participation in the local economy.

We need to look at the essential question that separates a person from her money: “How does it help me?”

For the newspaper industry, we could answer saying:

• Reading the paper makes me smarter.
• It gives me something to talk about at the water cooler.
• It makes me feel in sync with what’s going on.
• It makes people respect me more for my knowledge.
• It makes me a better citizen.

All of these are nice, but none is strong enough to pry open wallets. There is nothing about news content — especially that which is commodified — that is compelling enough to justify paying for it. Nothing.

Let’s look at this another way,

In response to a provocative question by the New York Times, Arianna Huffington defended her enterprise by saying “I didn’t kill newspapers, darling.. It wasn’t The Huffington Post; it was Craigslist.” This is true and requires a simple examination.

According to Pew’s “State of the News Media” report, classified advertising for newspapers is off about 70 percent in the past decade. When current observers look at this, they generally only consider the actual revenue generated by classifieds, but that doesn’t take into consideration people who paid to have access to those same classifieds — the buyers. For every person who has something to sell, there’s at least one other who wants to buy. In this way, therefore, free classifieds such as Craigslist have doubly impacted newspapers, and I don’t think this can be overstated. I remember back when my family was really into garage sales and how the Saturday paper was a necessity. We rarely sold anything, but we sure wanted — i.e. paid for — access to the classifieds.

The same is true for the Sunday sale papers — and by extension — access to any sale paper any day, to say nothing of access to the movie guide, automobile sales, grocery store sales and on and on.

The value proposition for which consumers paid for newspaper subscriptions was vastly more associated with commerce than people think — the need to participate in selling and, more often, buying in the community. This is a strong, highly compelling reason for people to open their wallets, and it’s being overlooked as newspapers try to reinvent themselves. We’re all about the content when we should be all about the advertising.

But what about the Wall St. Journal and the Financial Times? Don’t people pay to access that news and information? There are many who believe these two publications are different, because readers use the information to make money, but I think the reason for their success is much more basic than that. These two papers don’t share the data, but a considerable number of those subscriptions — I’d guess the vast majority — aren’t paid for by the subscribers themselves, but rather the companies that employ them.

Advertising is in the midst of a revolution. The fastest growing local online category includes advertisers spending tons of money creating their own content. According to the latest from Borrell, the Top 5 local online companies derive all their content from their own advertisers. In fact, half of the top 20 are all-advertising sites.

In 44 of more than 200 markets we track, Groupon or Autotrader.com generates more revenue than the largest local newspaper, TV or radio station online operation in that market. It is a startling revelation considering the fact that Groupon did not have a dime of revenue two years ago. This year, about two dozen of its local operations will generate more than $10 million each. Craigslist, meanwhile, generated about $20 million from its site in New York and about $1.6 million each in Phoenix and Houston. Autotrader.com will bring in more than $10 million per site in more than two dozen cities.

If newspapers are going to beat the thing that’s disrupting them, we must first understand what that thing is. It’s advertising’s increasing use of the personal media revolution to reach potential and real customers via the Web. We simply must tap into that, if we’re going to find the kinds of revenue streams we need to be successful in the months and years ahead. Let’s get our eyes off the content paywalls and onto the distribution of ad content, and let’s make it so compelling that people will be willing to pay to access it, just like the good old days.

Posted in Advertising, Disruptions, Newspapers | No Comments » |

Borrell benchmarks 2010

March 30th, 2011

Borrell Associates released its annual media benchmarking report this week and there are three big stories to report, one that we would consider good news, the others not so much. The report is an annual broad study of the local online advertising marketplace and one that reveals trends that media companies need in order to make good strategic and tactical decisions for the coming year.

THE THREE BIG STORIES

The slice of land held by the “pureplays” has stopped growing. For the past ten years, we’ve watched the pureplays’ slice of the revenue pie locally grow and, like Pacman, devour everything in its path. For the third year in-a-row, the share of revenue going to pureplays has stayed the same. In terms of actual dollars, it grew, because the overall pie grew, but this is an important stemming of the tide for local media companies, because their efforts appear to have stopped the growth of their biggest competition, pureplay Web companies like Google, Yahoo, Groupon, etc.

These Internet companies, which grew share of local online ad dollars from zero to 48% between 2000 and 2008, have hit a wall. Some have folded, others continue to grow, and the biggest have formed partnerships with local newspapers, TV, radio and directories.

Content is king, but not the content most people think. As we say here at AR&D, advertising is content in the Media 2.0 world, and that is born out by this report. According to the Borrell report, the Top 5 local online companies derive all their content from their own advertisers. In fact, half of the top 20 are all-advertising sites.

In 44 of more than 200 markets we track, Groupon or Autotrader.com generates more revenue than the largest local newspaper, TV or radio station online operation in that market. It is a startling revelation considering the fact that Groupon did not have a dime of revenue two years ago. This year, about two dozen of its local operations will generate more than $10 million each. Craigslist, meanwhile, generated about $20 million from its site in New York and about $1.6 million each in Phoenix and Houston. Autotrader.com will bring in more than $10 million per site in more than two dozen cities.

A canyon has formed between legacy media companies that are gaining share in the digital space and those that are losing it. There seems to be no helping some local media companies, those who, for whatever reason, decide not to or are unable to dedicate resources to online efforts, placing their future in jeopardy. At this late date, the energy required to cross the canyon is significantly more than it was a few years ago, and that spells trouble for some.

The most aggressive are seeing 20 percent or more of their ad revenues coming from digital sales. In 2010 they reported double-digit and even triple-digit growth in online revenue as they continued to invest in staffing and technology. On the other side of the canyon are companies that have hamstrung their online ventures with little to no dedicated staffing, allowing the new-media venture to be directed by old-media managers. Their digital revenues remained flat or declined last year.

Overall, the report shows a healthy and blooming market, one that shows promise ahead due to mobile. Online media accounted for $13.5 billion, or 14.9 percent of all local ad spending in 2010.

We are forecasting that to grow this year by 17.8 percent as the economy rebounds and mobile media fuels greater excitement at the local level. Without mobile advertising, “local online” (basically banners and search advertising served up on Web pages) would likely be flat for the foreseeable future, signaling the maturation of what is now a 15-year-old medium and the emergence of a new one to steal the attention. By 2015, the majority of all “online” advertising will become untethered from desktops and will be delivered to mobile devices such as iPads and other tablets, smart phones, and GPS-enabled laptops.

By 2015, Borrell projects that newspapers will be toppled as king of the local advertising marketplace, ending a run that has lasted since anybody first started counting such data. Online will, by then, be a $24 billion dollar market, representing a 22.7 percent share of all local advertising. The Local Web has become a relentless juggernaut, and yet we understand so little about it. And for a marketplace that’s just 15 years old, we can safely predict that many more disruptions lie ahead.

The annual Borrell benchmarking study can be obtain via the Borrell Associates website.   <Link>

Posted in Advertising, Borrell Associates, Broadcasting, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments » |

2011 operating mantra: new value creation

October 22nd, 2010

It’s budgeting time for media companies, so most of us are thinking about the future. We have choices to make, each of us.

Seth Godin has come along and offered a helpful glimpse at the four road options we have when facing choices in both business and life. The looping road, the indecisive new roads, the wrong road, and, of course, the right road. As a media observer and strategist for new media, the first two — and especially the first one, the looping road — are of most interest to me:

You might be stuck because you pick the wrong fork on a looping road. You keep getting better at the route you cover, but it doesn’t go anywhere, you just keep doing it over and over.

This is where I find most media companies in the new media space today. We’re getting better and better at running brand-extension websites and squeezing value out of them, but we’re not really going anywhere. Energy and resources spent serving this beast, therefore, are more costly than energy and resources spent creating new business models, yet most folks are stuck on the boosting brand road, because that’s all we know. Resources it takes to produce a dollar that’s standing still aren’t worth as much as those that produce a dollar that has exponential growth potential.

Another reason we’re stuck on this road is fear of the second:

You might be impatient or unable to stick to your decision to take this particular road, and thus you’re always starting on a new road. Since the new road is always strange to you, you rarely get any better at getting where you’re going.

Here, we’re presented with a suitable choice for tomorrow, but we’re unable or unwilling to give it the long runway it needs to get to a position of self-sustenance and beyond. We say we’re going to stick with it, but we give it a year and then move on to something else with the same results. Maybe that’s the right call, but one of the problems here is that our definition of “what works” is old school and usually built upon a traditional profit and loss statement. That’s because media is manager-driven, and managers need to see the processes delineated before pronouncing their blessing, and even then, the rug can be pulled out from underneath at any time, if the performance doesn’t live up to the projections. Position that against the tech industry that is eating our lunch, and you’ll find a different formula in place. Sure there’s a P&L, but there’s also a willingness to set it aside at any point when the model turns this way or that. Why is that? Because the vision drives the processes, not the other way around. Investor-supported businesses are, by necessity, run by visionaries who drive toward the goal, whether the processes are there or not. Managers? Perhaps. Leaders? Definitely.

I sense a growing willingness by companies to try new things, much more so than just a few years ago, and I think that’s positive. 2010 has certainly been a better year than 2009, and we hope that businesses will make the tough decisions about spending some of that money to invest in tomorrow instead of simply passing it along to shareholders. Wall Street media analyst James M. Marsh with Piper Jaffray told me last week that “the street” recognizes that media stocks are in an era of restructuring, which will likely continue for several years. 2011 is going to be rough, he thinks, and we would certainly agree. The bright spot, however, is where smaller numbers are headed north, where we need to dedicate resources that are producing new value.

That’s because new value creation is the operating mantra of media in 2011.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel Newsletter)

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Economy, Media 2.0, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media | No Comments » |

Free tools in the hands of pros

July 4th, 2010

The Journal Register Company today launched its Ben Franklin Project, in which all of its output as a media company is being created with “free tools found on the Internet.” From from assigning to editing, the whole creating, publishing and distribution of news content on both the web and in print is, as of today, free of any proprietary technology. The launch on July 4th is symbolic — it’s the company’s “independence day.”

Jeff Jarvis (naturally) played a role in this, and his view covers just about everything. It’s noteworthy to me on many levels, but mostly it’s about the quality of “free” tools and how those tools in the hands of professionals can do amazing things.

In my early writings about the “personal media revolution,” I frequently noted that open source software was surprisingly robust and easy-to-use. Back then, most media execs — and especially the technical folks, the engineers — scoffed at their crude form. TV people, for example, were so used to spending $250,000 on just about anything that the idea of “free” was laughable.

I remember building a group weather blog for WKRN in 2004 using Movable Type. GM Mike Sechrist was stunned, and it turned out to be a defining moment as we moved forward in using these tools. We created many blogs, including Nashville is Talking, and the more station employees were exposed to these and other tools, the quicker was their ability to grasp anything about the Web.

There are, of course, many advantages to proprietary software, but we fool ourselves if we think that having such somehow shields us from the disruption created and sustained by those who use open source tools.

My hat’s off to Paxon and the entire crew at the Journal Register Company. It’ll be fun to watch them in the weeks and months ahead.

Posted in Disruptions, Newspapers, Reinventing Local Media, Technology | 2 Comments » |

NYT lawyers play RIAA

June 8th, 2010

You just can’t make this stuff up.

In a mystifying move that only benefits the pockets of the lawyers involved, the New York Times has caused the popular iPad RSS reader, Pulse, to be pulled from the Apple system, because the reader pulls material from the newspaper’s RSS feed. That’s right. Since Pulse is a paid application, the Times figures they are benefiting financially from Times content. Hence, the cease and desist.

Where to begin?

Firstly, the Times — unlike other publishers — provides only links and a sentence in its RSS feeds, so who are we kidding here? Content? This outrageous legal bullying is based in a bullshit, pedantic argument that is contrary to the concept of feeds in the first place. If you don’t want people using your damned feeds, then don’t publish them.

Secondly, because the Times publishes nothing in its feeds, the best Pulse can do is provide visitors to the Times site? Kara Swisher has images of what Times content looks like in Pulse, and I encourage you to go on over and take a look. W. T. F.? Is not Pulse doing the Times a favor? Of course it is; that’s the economy of the link.

Thirdly, if this is the tact that the Times truly wishes to pursue, it’s path to irrelevancy is certain. Pay walls are an understandable reaction to revenue declines from print, but the Web is not print, and this is an attempt to extend the pay wall concept to distributed media via licensing. It will not and cannot work, because the Web won’t allow it. The Times may be within its rights (we’ll see), but closing doors to those who would distribute content closes doors to users, too.

I have been saying for the past ten years that, sooner or later, the lawyers who represent the status quo would attempt to restore things to the way it used to be and that this battle would be long and ugly. Media companies should take a lesson from the RIAA, who ended up suing its own customers in a similar tact. That will likely be next for the Times.

The absurdity of all of this flows from the illogical notion that we don’t “buy” content anymore; we only pay for the right to read, watch or listen to it. This will explode in the faces of those trying to protect their “rights,” because nobody has asked the people formerly known as the customer if this was acceptable.

The New York Times took an enormous step backwards with this move. I wish them well.

UPDATE: Staci gets a response from Robert Christie of the Times, who says the app violates their terms of use (of RSS). Staci rightly suggests we haven’t heard the last of this.

Posted in Copyright, Legal, Newspapers | 1 Comment » |