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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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August 14, 2007

Par Transcripts: What Passes for This Summer's Reading

The Par Ridder trial in Saint Paul is both is a journalist's nightmare and a dream: You can't make this stuff up.

In case you missed, Editor and Publisher got a hold of the transcripts and has been wisely parceling them out daily -- old-fashioned serialization.

The trial, which began on June 25, and corralled some of the highest-priced legal talent in the Twin Cities is good reading. In total, you can read the comments of Par, his father Tony Ridder, MediaNews Group head Dean Singleton, McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt and analyst John Morton, among others.

Start here, with day one.

A few choice tidbits, until you have an hour or so:


Avista's Founding Partner Questioned:


Q During the course of your conversation with Mr. Ridder, did he ask you whether or not he should shred the noncompete agreement?

A On March 2nd?

Q Yes.

A I don't know if he said "Should I shred them." I don't -- I don't know if he said that. He might have said "What should I do with" -- he wasn't sure if he should take them home, if he should let his secretary take them, if he should let his secretary even keep them because he wasn't sure what she might do with it. And what I remember saying is, "Obviously I can't tell you to shred the documents and I'm telling you you can't shred them. You need to call your lawyer and get advice on what, if anything, you should do about this." And that was -- that's all I wanted to convey to him.

Former Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder:

Q So, do you know whether Mary Jean Connors believed it was a good idea to have employees sign noncompetes?

A I don't know. I have to believe if we thought it was a good idea that somebody would have suggested it somewhere along the line.

Q You don't recall any conversation --

A I don't remember any conversation along that line. And if somebody had, I'm sure we would have decided not to do it. Because we certainly could have done it, you know, all across the board, in Fort Worth and San Jose and all those other places. If we had wanted to, but we didn't -- as I said we didn't believe in them.

Star Tribune CFO Michael Riggs, who left the paper for another job recently:

Q Now, how did Mr. Ridder come to send you those spreadsheets in the first place, Mr. Riggs?

A Sometime in the first week of Par's joining the paper, he'd indicated to me that he was going to be forwarding to me a series of spreadsheets that he wanted me to populate with Star Tribune data. And he indicated that these spreadsheets were spreadsheets that he'd used at other newspapers that he had worked at and that they were going to be something that he wanted generated on a monthly basis.

Q Did Mr. Ridder say anything about how you should treat those spreadsheets?

A Yes. He asked me to make sure the information in those spreadsheets did not get out.

Q Did Mr. Ridder send you the spreadsheets as he mentioned he would?

A Yes, he did.

Q And did those spreadsheets contain proprietary Pioneer Press information?

A Yes, they did.

August 14, 2007 in Daily Newspaper Companies, Knight Ridder |

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