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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

  • 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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« Say It Ain't So: Tony Ridder's Astounding Surprise | Main | 10 Questions for Gary Pruitt »

March 21, 2006

Don't-Miss Links to Pressing Futures

Sometimes the news comes at us too quickly.  After a weekend of Florida baseball (watch out for the Twins and Justin Morneau), here's a catch-up of recent links worth stopping and paying attention to:

In Philly, they always do things a little differently and don't take slights lightly.  People in and around the two dailies, the Inquirer and the Daily News, knew that they might me in for more trouble when Knight Ridder put itself for sale in November. When McClatchy bought and then announced it was selling 12 of its new children, including the Philadelphia papers, asap, the news got worse.

The Inquirer, once the flagship Pulitzer winner of KR, has sustained ongoing newsroom cuts. Its cousin, the sprightly, tenacious Daily News tab not only has sustained its own cuts and bruises, but has always seemed one step away from the graveyard.  Marginally profitable at best, its survival has been based on the shaky proposition that it was better for KR to own its own competition (to the Inquirer) than have a real competitor shake things up. Now that protection appears lost.

Will Bunch (with the brother-can-you-spare-a-dime cup) Will_bunch_2, a Daily News columnist and blogger, is one of many in Philly who hasn't given up hope, even in a time of  corporate chessboard games and multiple newspaper struggles. His optimism about the new kinds of journalism that can be created and paid for is a breath of fresh air. It led to a new group and now an unconference, trying to find force light into the darkness.  Check out the candle.

In San Jose, Mercury News staffers felt similarly stunned by being placed back on the sales block. There, given the culture, a Save the Merc community staff/group community group is forming and trying to find its legs.

Pertinent to these discussions of, in part, do-it-ourselves media (DIO?) is how media distribution now works. We're in this weird 1.5 world in which old systems and old money is challenged, and new systems and new money are being created, but oh-so-fitfully. To that end and others, anyone who wants to get the word out -- their own, or their communities, or even think about what news distribution broadly means today -- should check out David Scott's new ebook. David is a friend, who taught me a bit about the joys of Typepad (should have gotten a commission, for enabling this blog).  The new free download ebook  lays out well the new rules of the p.r. game, giving us all some practical tips about how to work the new distribution systems and cycles.

Jay Rosen has stamina. He is a  NYU journalism prof and friend, who helped us design and implement some print public journalism projects at the Saint Paul Pioneer Press (yes, too on the chopping block anew) in the '90s. Public journalism predated the web, engaging the community through forums, letters-to-the-editor, etc around such issues as real public safety and intergenerational responsibility.  Jay's PressThink blog is always worth checking in on, delving deeply into the press/democracy/citizen involvement issues/survival of real reporting issues that underlay this all. He recently released a study of newspaper-mediated blogging, well-worth studying.  How newspapers and other media like NPR come to grips with citizen-generated content will determine much of the next stage. It's what I've called the Blews, the merging of blogs and news in all kinds of intriguing ways.

Lee Rainie's initiative on the Internet and American life has a knack for asking so many of the right questions. You can access its  reports for free (thanks to the legacy Big Oil money that funded Pew). One of my favorite recent tidbits from Deborah Fallows' Internet usage report: "Nearly a third of Internet users go online on a typical day for no particular reason, just for fun or to pass the time."  Check out the wealth of what's available, and get the latest scoop on Internet dating from its most recent report. Or for you save-the-press types,  check out just-out research from Pew Research overall on the challenged state of news media, and especially of  deep reporting.

 

March 21, 2006 |

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