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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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July 30, 2007

Bridgin': Taking the NYT Private, Pegasus News Sold, Impact of Twin Cities Layoffs

Putting the Times in a Lockbox: Protect the Times by taking it private says Business Week's Jon Fine in a column. He figures assets sale of about a billion could defray a $5 billion cost of doing so. Take a look and run your own numbers here.

Pegasus News Sold: Busy summer. In the midst of Murdoch Madness, I missed the sale of Mike Orren's Pegasus News, which I mentioned in this morning's post to TV-station owner Fisher, of Seattle. Well-covered here by Peter Krasilovsky's Local Onliner, here. I've been picking up many signals that local broadcasters are amping up their web efforts -- going competitive for the same advertisers and readers that local newspaper sites thought they could "own". At this point, broadcasters get about 2% of their revenue from online, about a quarter of what local newspapers are getting -- but that gap could close within a couple of years. Taking the Pegasus News approach -- and platform -- is one more step in that direction. (Addendum: More from Pegasus on sale here.)

Twin Cities Layoffs Give Peek in Staff Cutbacks: As the names of those who took the Pioneer Press buyout become public, some have pointed out an interesting phenomenon. While early buyouts took out some of the most senior staff, the new ones also take out younger, though highly experienced people. In addition, librarian positions are becoming obsolescent. While Gannett's turning librarians into database managers -- focused on find and displaying publicly available community data -- most papers' are just buying out or laying off the librarians, an uneconomical "nice to have".

Anyone keeping a total of the number of years of journalistic experience lost this year in buyouts?

In addition, here's further numbers on the decline of reporting strength in the Cities. The Pioneer Press newsroom, which will be down to about 160, post buyouts/layoffs, for now, hit its peak in 2000 at 243.1 FTEs. Even in 1987, the paper had 210 FTEs in the newsroom

July 30, 2007 in Bridgin', Community ,Citizen, User-Gen, Participatory and Conversational (!) Content, Daily Newspaper Companies, Innovation, News and Democracy |

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