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Conferences, Presentations & Speaking Engagements

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

Content Bridges Services

Press Mentions

  • Marketwatch: Tribune newspaper executives exit
    "What we're seeing is the systematic dismantling of one of the nation's top newspaper companies....The idea of bringing in new blood to the newspaper industry isn't a bad one, because I think in a number of ways it does have old ways of thinking. But when you bring in new blood, those people have to bring in new strategies. Cutting pages and jobs isn't a strategy. It's just a way to cut costs, which all newspaper companies are doing."
  • KCRW: Newspapers in Big Trouble, Should Americans Care
    Appearance on program with L.A. Times editors, others.
  • Reuters: Number of Newspaper Analysts Dwindles
    In the absence of critical analysis from Wall Street, bloggers and industry executives have grown in importance. Outsell Inc's Ken Doctor and Alan Mutter, a venture capitalist and former newspaper editor who runs the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur, are two well-read commentators.
  • Fox Business Network: Bad Times for Newspapers
    “What happens in five years if it looks like more of the recruitment is coming through Yahoo’s Hotjobs,’’ said Outsell’s Doctor. The company may wonder if it can get a better deal going directly to Yahoo and cutting out the middleman, which in this case would be the newspaper. “That’s the huge question in this.” Still Doctor said that given Newspaper companies are skilled at selling advertisements they may be able to prove their worth to the likes of Yahoo by building bigger and better sales forces. “The core strength of a newspaper is its sales staff and its relationship to the advertiser,’’ said Doctor. “If they can keep that relationship it doesn’t matter what they are selling.”
  • Marketwatch: Cablevision to acquire Newsday for $650 million
    "The synergies are real here. If you put together the list of advertising clients Cablevision has with the list of accounts Newsday has -- and the combined contacts the sales teams have -- that's significant."
  • NYT: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them,” said Ken Doctor, lead analyst with Outsell. “It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”
  • Bloomberg: McClatchy Plans to Cut 1,400 Jobs, 10% of Workforc
    "This is a permanent downsizing of newspaper companies,'' said Ken Doctor. "They're not using the word `permanent,' but it's a recognition that they will get much smaller as they try to find their way in a digital world."
  • Chicago Reader Blogs: Off a Cliff
    With Rupert Murdoch, who's 77, now predicting he'll outlive the print press has another 20 years or so and Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft, giving it maybe ten, the scriveners who populate the nation's despondent newsrooms are willing to concede that -- in the words of industry analyst Ken Doctor -- "It's the end of the world as we know it." All those scriveners -- the ones who know they don't know enough to negotiate a path from this world to the next on their own -- ask at this point is that they be led forward by people who do. Which is why it's so troubling to the hundreds of journalists at the Tribune Company when their new leader sounds like a nincompoop....The following observations about the news-ad ratio owe a big debt to Doctor, who's just addressed the subject on an Editor & Publisher podcast and in his own blog.
  • Bloomberg: GM, Motorola, NY Times Burn Cash Flow, Keep Dividends
    Dividend increases by newspaper companies are ``a core strategy'' to retain shareholders, said Ken Doctor. The Times is cutting 100 jobs this year, or 7.5 percent of its newsroom employees. ``They did that even before cutting their dividend, which I think surprised a lot of people,'' Doctor said.
  • NY Times: Cablevision Is Winner of Newsday
    “I’ve been skeptical, but this really is a tremendous opportunity for them. It’s just awfully hard to pull off.”

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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March 25, 2006

10 Questions for Gary Pruitt

McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt has his head and hands full buying and sellng papers, as he figures out what it means to be the country's second-biggest newspaper company. A few questions for him as he moves forward (and 10 additional very web-specific ones added):

  1. Was it coincidence that 8 of the 12 KR properties you immediately put on the sales block were Newspaper Guild operations, making your chances of achieving significant cost savings more difficult? 
  1. Were  you surprised that Tony Ridder was surprised that you were going to re-sell 12 of his papers, including his hometown Merc? 
  1. Is the sale of the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times to Dean Singleton’s Media News all-but-a-done-deal, as many suspect?
  1. If you succeed in taking K’s stake in the T(ribune) K(nightrider) G(annett) investments in Career Builder and Classified Ventures, will you push to get some of McClatchy’s local market penetration tricks of the trades adopted? 
  1. Will you push TMG (TGM?) for new collective investments, for instance, in buying an ad matching company, like Quigo or Context Web, so that the news industry’s reliance on Google and Yahoo for paid search/contextual revenue can be reduced? 
  1. Will you make McClatchy more of a player overall in the ventures game, looking for technologies, lead gen companies and other complements to the online businesses? 
  1. Can you figure out a more strategic way to purpose TKG’s 75% stake in Topix to advantage local search and traffic re-circulation on local newspaper sites? 
  1. Can you convince a skeptical Wall Street, which is punishing your purchase daily, that you’ll be getting better-than-expected prices for the Dirty Dozen, defraying the cost of the deal? 

    9 .  Will you give the Yucaipa/Guild bid a wide open shot?

  1. How likely are PCM, Harris and Southeastern to stick with the deal if the McClatchy share price keeps dropping, reducing the “collar-less” purchase price below 62 or 63?

March 25, 2006 in 9 Questions |

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Sitting inside one of the orphaned 12, it's questions 3 and 9 that are of particular interest to me.

If McClatchy has any back door deal with Singleton that disadvantages the other bidders, I would hope the shareholders would be up in arms, and that cosmic justice would find Bruce Sherman at the front of the crowd.

Yucaipa's deep pockets and reported patience with its investments seem to make it the best candidate to preserve the quality of journalism in the affected communities. Even setting aside questions of monopoly ownership that arise with Singleton's ownership of the north California papers, his debt service to do the deal would probably spell more cutbacks at the properties than would Yucaipa's ownership.

Posted by:Jack Fischer | March 27, 2006 at 09:23 AM

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