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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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May 12, 2008

Bloomberg's Next Push: Consumer, Advertising and Global

If you've seen a bit of Bloomberg TV or heard Bloomberg Radio or been in front of one of its terminals, you may have recently wondered: Why isn't it doing more with what it has?

Its reporters are some of the fastest moving on the web, and know data better than most covering the news industry.

So what might today's announcement that news industry veteran Norm Pearlstine is becoming "chief content officer" of Bloomberg mean?

My quick take:

    * Right now, Bloomberg derives almost all its revenues from Corporate markets. With Pearlstine at the hub, it plainly will look at leveraging its assets beyond Corporate, most directly to B2C markets. I hear that has made recent forays into Legal markets as well, competing with Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters' West Publishing.
    * Key question is one familiar to all legacy news companies. Can it keep its grip on stable (in this case, installed terminal) revenue, while competing in markets new to it. It faces risk of commoditizing its core business, unless it executes a Free Web B2C strategy smartly.
    * Business advertising draws among the highest CPM rates, more than $100 CPM for business news video and above $50 CPM for graphical ads, for high-branded content. But the overall pie of online business news ad revenue is still small -- that's why News Corp decided against eliminating wsj.com subscription wall. There's simply not enough money in web business news advertising to make up its online sub revenue loss.
    * Pearlstine's experience tells us that this is all about leveraging the content assets across all modern media platforms. So expect Bloomberg to go where the growth is -- advertising. Web advertising is still growing around a 20 per cent rate, and Bloomberg should cash in there.
    * The new Bloomberg view should be more global. According to Outsell research numbers, it drives 47% of its revenues from the US, 38% from EMEA and only 10% from Asia. Asia should be bigger. So look for Bloomberg to become a more global player, both through acquisition and greater use of partner distribution channels.

In sum, I think there are three words that define the Pearlstine announcement:
---Consumer
---Advertising
---Global

Bloomberg sees a similar opportunity as Rupert Murdoch saw in buying Dow Jones -- the global business news opportunity leveraged over all platforms. Today's announcement means more competition for Dow Jones -- and Time Warner's business magazines, McGraw Hill's Business Week, Forbes, the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Let the new business games begin.

May 12, 2008 in Advertising , Business News Coverage |

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