My Photo

About

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"

Recent Comments

Add me to your TypePad People list
Blog powered by TypePad

March 2010

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
  1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31      

BlogBurst

« Taking a Snickers Moment to Consider "Content" | Main | Shrink-Wrapped Ads? Behavioral Tracking May Soon Look So Yesterday »

February 12, 2007

Pinch Played for Pugnacious Prognostication

You gotta love the headlines --  "Arthur Sulzberger's End Times" (Gawker) and "HELL FREEZES OVER AT THE NEW YORK TIMES" (The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid).

The publisher of the New York Times sure woke up lots of people in an otherwise sleepy week in the news publishing world (waiting for the second, or is it the fifth (?) Tribune shoe to drop). What did he say? The obvious, many of us think (other than his five-year-timeline), but he sounded like he had a bit of fight in him.

"I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either," he told Israel daily Haaretz at Davos in January. "Internet is a wonderful place to be and we’re leading there."

Some of the numbers seem positive. 1.1 million print subscribers and 1.5 million readers online each day. Average age in print: 42. Average age online: 37. It's great to hear the optimism. Read the interview though and you'll see it's short on any specifics of how a company that still has about 90% of its revenue coming from print is going to make the transformation to mainly digital revenue-driven operation.

That's the problem we keep coming back to. Sure, you can capture some of the many readers moving to wholesale to web reading, but the revenues may well be more than five years of penciling out. Use the numbers from Ann Moore, Time, Inc CEO, who recently told an SIIA NYC assemblage that each Sports Illustrated subscriber is worth $118 per year, but that SI.com visitors only provide $5. That's a wide gulf.

Newspaper revenue metrics are too depressingly similar.

Further the Times has to deal with the red ink tumbling down from Boston and Worcester (remember those who wondered why the Times wasn't bidding for the Philadelphia Inquirer -- now we can clearly see why). That's not Red Sox fans showing off their pride, but a harbinger of the near-future. Yes, near-monopoly dailies can fail to make a profit. (For experience with that, just check in on the recent history of the San Francisco Chronicle, losing a mill a week or so for several years.)

Yes, the next five years may tough ones. And those economics are enough to leave away long into the night. Or in the conjecture of Valleywag, likely to encase you in a velvet cubicle, as the site snarkily speculates on NYT Digital head Martin Nisenholtz's career dilemma.

Why does Martin stay? What does it matter what Pinch says? Because it's the Times.

As one large regional daily after another reduces national and international coverage, we're all increasingly dependent on the Times for coverage, for finding out what's happening. So good for Pinch, good that he said it. Like the disappearance of such legends as Knight Ridder and maybe Tribune, it's now imaginable to have a world without a print New York Times -- as long as we have its journalism.

February 12, 2007 in Daily Newspaper Companies, News and Democracy |

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c12869e200d83573ae9469e2

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Pinch Played for Pugnacious Prognostication:

Comments

Feed You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

The comments to this entry are closed.