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  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

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Press Mentions

  • Ad Age/Nat Ives: It's Back: 25 MORE Media People You Should Follow on Twitter
    25 media types worth following on Twitter.
  • Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble Globally
    The few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"
  • NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price?
    “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.” He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”
  • Economist: It isn’t just newspapers: much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
    Ken Doctor of Outsell, a research firm, reckons that the Kindle appeals to baby-boomers who would otherwise read a paper magazine or newspaper. The young prefer their iPhones and their aggregators. Indeed, the top four magazines on Kindle, according to Amazon’s website, are the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. Not much of a youth market there.
  • Forbes: San Diego News Shoot-Out
    "The Union-Tribune is cratering. That opens a hole in the market and the opportunity for some unconventional business models."
  • BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices
    “There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”
  • AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is saf
    The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."
  • Guardian: Seattle mourns the last day of its venerable Post Intelligencer
    "There's a lot less reporting happening, on a national scale. For the 1,500 or so daily newspapers, it's just a matter of getting smaller and smaller."
  • Seattle Times: Seattle's oldest newspaper goes to press for the final time
    "They're bringing the full force of their national relationships and content to bear on Seattle. They [Hearst] could sustain this experiment indefinitely. If it makes a million or loses a million, that's nothing to a company like Hearst."
  • AP: Hearst hopes Web-only Seattle P-I will turn profit
    "It [online-only PI] definitely can make money. They have a head start in terms of the brand and (Web) traffic. They have to run like hell to create a new identity."

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

My Work as an Outsell Analyst

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December 26, 2005

Fresh Thinking for the New Year

Optimistic thought for the New Year:  Maybe the sturm und drang around a Knight Ridder* sale will be a good thing.

It's not as if KR is an isolated example of a newspaper company embattled by Internet disruption. All the other newspaper companies face the same, increasingly urgent pressures.  To  quote and apply, with great license,  German pastor Martin Niemoller:  "Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me."

Why  a good thing?

Well, the issues faced by the news companies aren't ones new to this year. My god, the average age of newspaper readers is 55, and I remember chairing a KR-wide task force, some 17 years ago, on what to do about "young readers."  (Short answer: Not enough).  Then as the Internet threatened to forever change both reader and buyer/seller relationships (first classified, now retail), the industry response has largely been too little, too late, too limited.

The cutbacks in newsrooms have already been unprecedented -- 2000 alone in 2005, or almost 4% in one year. Maybe, though, the institutional push to sell KR has finally raised the right alarms.

Thursday, the Newspaper Guild made a public push to buy seven of the KR papers with Guild contracts. It said it had retained two companies, one heavily experienced in ESOPs, to help them figure out how to do it. Now my colleagues are having a bit of email fun, discussing how a Guild-owned paper might work.  (How many Guild members does it take to......).

Still, the notion of thinking through the ownership issue a different way is key, and I applaud the Guild on its initiative. Similarly, Knight Rudder alumni editors'
public letter on affirming journalistic values  is a good step.  It raises the public profile of the idea that these journalistic outfits are different.

Neither the Guild's nor the editors' stand begins to describe how they would compete in this new Internet world. That's the discussion though that has lots of mouths to feed it.

For now, let the voices of looking at the KR sale a different way rise in volume, to best pierce through business as usual.

*Disclosure: Ken Doctor is a retired Knight Ridder journalist and retains financial holdings in the company.

December 26, 2005 |

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