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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"

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« "Saving Journalism and Killing the Press" | Main | McClatchy and National/Local Paradox »

March 27, 2006

10 More (Web-Oriented) Questions for Gary Pruitt

These additional questions for Mr. Pruitt,  just in from a web-savvy colleague who prefers anonymity given the tossing and turning of the publishing world. They highlight the kind of smarts McClatchy will now be expected to bring to its web publishing efforts, given its rank as the #2 newspaper company. (It will still have that rank after selling off Knight Ridder's Dirty Dozen, with first bids due tomorrow.)

What questions would you add?

  1. Did you think twice before deciding to jettison the online audience (55% of KRD’s total unique users and 36% of pageviews in Feb '06) the “dirty dozen” papers would have generated for you? 
  1. What’s your plan for winning more online ad dollars, when the vast majority of those dollars seem to flow to online portals and aggregators with much greater scale of audience? 
  1. Do you have a plan for transitioning your company to an era when the bulk of a news publisher’s revenue must be derived from online rather than print media, or do you plan to be out of the industry before that happens? 
  1. If a recent college graduate asked you why they should pursue a career in either A) journalism, or B) the business of newspaper publishing, what would you tell them? 
  1. Jon Fine reports that according to you, “The growth of craigslist and other almost wholly free classified sites ‘does not mean that [newspapers’ classified] revenues over time will shrink’”. Did you really say that, and if so, can you explain your thinking?
  1. Do newspapers need to do a better job of reaching younger audiences? And if so, what’s your plan to achieve this? 
  1. If you had to choose, today, between running a company focused exclusively on news generation or one focused exclusively on classified ad revenue, which would you choose, and why? 
  1. Do you believe that superior journalism is a direct driver of superior financial performance? If so, can you explain the link between the two? 
  1. Which blogs do you read on a regular basis? And which RSS feeds to you subscribe to? 
  1. In economically stagnant markets, is the need for quality local journalism greater than, or less than, the need for such journalism in rapidly growing markets? And in either case: who should be responsible for providing that journalism?  

March 27, 2006 in 9 Questions |

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Paul Bucalo

I think these are great questions for every publisher.
In fact, I adapted them to be a little more generic and saved them for a future presentation to the publishers in my company.

Posted by: Paul Bucalo | March 29, 2006 at 09:19 AM

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