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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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February 15, 2007

Paid Circ That Seems.....Free

Paid print circulation still pays the bills. I keep coming back to the numbers recently laid out by Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore: Each Sports Illustrated paid reader is worth $118 a year,Time_mag_1 mainly in advertising, while each SI.com visitor fetches a measly $5. That differential explains why prestigious, long-standing, paid circ vehicles like Time Magazine are just about giving away their product......while calling it paid. Anything to keep those print readers and that print rate base as high as possible, 'til that $5 zooms into double digits and beyond.

The offer I got today:

  • 56 weeks of Time at the "Welcome Back" rate of $19. (Yes, given my overflowing NetVibes RSS reader, it's hard to find time to read Time.) 19 bucks against a cover price of $252.45 for the same 56 issues! That's a 92.5% discount.

But that's not all:

  • FREE GIFT: The ULTRASONIC Laser Level
  • BONUS: 6 Additional Months of TIME (when you pay now)
  • TIME  Archive at www.Timearchive.com, featuring 80 years of coverage, for free.

I suppose I can use the level to measure the tectonic changes shaking the publishing industry.

I should note the offer is labeled: "For Senior Citizen Use Only."  Like an AARP pitch. I'm flattered but the MSN Life Expectancy calculator gives me another 42 years of life expectancy.

It's an offer that's hard to resist, and I won't. That archive can come in mighty handy for research.

February 15, 2007 in Advertising , Magazines, News Archives Business |

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I received a similar offer via snail mail today, almost pitched it in the trash with all the other junk mail, offers. etc. But something made me open it, I think it was the "do not bend" stamp on it, the plain envelope with the timeless (no pun intended) "TIME" logo. I thought to myself, what is TIME hawking that you can't bend the envelope? We're not doing punch cards anymore, what's in this envelope? So after tossing the local grocery store circular, a couple of credit card offers (after ripping them to shreds), I popped open the envelope, did the speed read, looked at the glossy "FREE GIFT" promo card, and again, almost tossed it. But the first line of the "offer" caught my eye, 56 issues of TIME and a one-year subscription to Fortune - all for $20. Now, those are 2 premier magazines. My boss gets Time and Fortune at the office, and I really respect the guy, from another country, self-made millionaire. That alone got me reading the promo letter, plus the promise of this laser level gizmo for free. My mind is free-associating at this point, I'm worried about the laser device and the old reports of terrorists using cheap pen lasers to mess with airline pilots, and why are these things free with your paid subscription, yadayadayada. But then there's the bold type BONUS block: "Pay now and get 6 more months of TIME as well as the 25 bi-weekly issues of Fortune - all for only $20!" Plus the laser thing. $20, that's two day's lunch money at the office; the laser doo-dad, I'm no do-it-yourselfer, but I figure it ought to be good for a few laughs driving my cat crazy. She wheels around the house chasing the spot from a pen flashlight, this thing ought to be good. A year-and-a-half of Time, a year of Fortune, and a cat toy for 20 bucks? Heck yeah, sign me up. Strange though, best deal is "with your paid subscription," but no layout for credit card info, looks like you've got to go old school and scratch a check. I'm OK with that, it goes out in tomorrow's mail, in the postage-paid TIME envelope. But it got me thinking immediately, that's really the whole reason for this post, what's going on with print media? I go out on my front lawn now at 5:30 a.m. to get the local Houston paper, there are no other papers on my neighbors' lawns. Are newspapers and magazines going the way of the 8-track? All things change, and I'm getting older by the day. But nonetheless, I'm not missing out on this giveway. If you get a TIME offer letter in your mailbox, give it a look. Shoot, I've paid more than $20 for cat toys and catnip in the past, magazines notwhithstanding. This looks like a good thing for me, but does make me question the desperation of print media marketing.

Posted by: Erik Brown | February 08, 2008 at 05:09 PM

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