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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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July 19, 2007

What Dow Jones' Report Means to News Corp.

The 2Q earnings numbers reported today by Dow Jones are certainly no surprise to News Corp. It has conducted much due diligence about the state of the DJ business. Besides all the same trend lines affecting Dow Jones consumer business afflict News Corp's own newspaper business. Flat is the new growth, and publishers desperately hope to see flat again soon, as they struggle to find words to express their exasperation. DJ CEO Rich Zannino today: "choppy and challenging."

So what do we make of the report?

Yes, the net is down 26% for the quarter, but a closer look at the numbers reveals several points:

---The most familiar is the universal one, hurting Dow Jones as it hurts all companies whose main income is print. As Dow Jones transitions as furiously as it can to the digital future, the print ad decline (6.8% for the print Journal) is now swamping digital advances.
---Most worrisome is that the areas like technology and financial advertising in print, which had been maintaining, are now seeing decline. This development shows the maturation of the interactive ad industry as it more confidently moves dollars from print to more efficient, more measurable online ads. While the Journal is capturing some of this business, it's just not capturing enough, at a high enough price point, to offset the print declines. The Journal is seeing good increases from such areas as video, where it recently raised rates to $90 cpms, but again it hasn't found ways to generate enough revenue off from enough customers to offset print declines. This is emblematic of the industry as a whole.
---All the growth is in the Enterprise division growth. Given that News Corps's announced play in the acquisition is Consumer -- Fox Business News Channel+ -- this raises further question as to whether News Corp would grasp the B2B play and become a player in an area in which it now doesn't much play or whether it would sell the fastest-growth, highest-margin part of the business and concentrate on B2C. Dow Jones bought the half of Factiva it didn't own from Reuters in October of last year for $170 million. Might a whole, now-more-slimmed-down and efficient Factiva fetch closer to $400 million to today's market? Rupert's premium for the acquisition is about $1.5 billion. A sale of Factiva could quickly recoup a third of that -- but remove the growth part of the business from the portfolio.
---With the report and hard times to come, is Rupert's premium really 65% or is it more? Would DJ stock have further fallen, like its peers, if not for bid? What are News Corp shareholders to think of the real value of the asset they've almost bought?

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July 19, 2007 in Advertising , Daily Newspaper Companies, News Corp/Dow Jones |

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