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  • Available for public speaking around media transformation and opportunity. Please inquire for schedule and rates.

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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"

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February 26, 2009

Paid Newsday? Parsing What It Means...and Those 4.5 Minutes

Okay, at this late evening time, there's growing questions about what Cablevision COO Tom Rutledge meant when he apparently said: 

“We plan to end the distribution of free Web content. Our goal was and is to use our electronic network assets and subscriber relationships to transform the way news is distributed.”

Maybe a Cablevision Newsday channel. Maybe some other flavor of that. Maybe no Little Rock-like direct charge for online access. Cablevision, though, has yet to tell us what they did mean. (I love it when the press -- and Cablevision, you are now the press, refuse to talk to the press). So we'll have to wait and see.

In my post ("Paid Newsday Site? What's 4 1/2 Minutes Worth to You), I emphasized how woeful the site's time-on-site is, lowest of the top 30 websites. 

Those four-and-a-half minutes are a problem for Cablevision however it plans to use Newsday content online. It must master the metaphor of the web, and its stats tell you how far away from mastery it is.

An e-mail from a Newsday reporter greatly helps explain why:

"Read your post re: newsday.com, and as a Newsday reporter who has continuously banged his head against our digitally-backwards ways, I think you're missing the salient reason why this effort isn't going to work. It's not because we don't have enough local/Long Island content. Virtually all of our non-sports original content is Long Island-centric. It's that the Web is seen, still, as an accessory to the dead-tree edition. There's no emphasis from the newsroom editors on getting content online quickly, on blogging, etc.

The other problem is that Newsday has been cut and chopped to the point that it's probably dispensable for most of our audience. If you don't care about local politics or crime -- and most crime stories don't really affect the vast majority of our readers anyway -- you can probably do without newsday.com and certainly wouldn't pay for it. I suspect the Dolans will link the paper's Web site with subscribing to Cablevision, but that certainly remains to be seen".

Well-said, and a story unfortunately not found only on Long Island.

February 26, 2009 in Daily Newspaper Companies, Innovation |

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Edward Barrera

Ken,
Newsday is my hometown paper, and I, an avid newspaper reader, rarely pick it up. While it recently won a well-deserved award, it has been gutted.
But this might be an opportunity for online news sites on Long Island to flourish. Once the readers flee and local advertisers find it too expensive, they both will be searching for other sites to provide content and advertising possibilities.

Posted by: Edward Barrera | February 27, 2009 at 07:34 AM

Greg andrew

That is a problem. However, in Newsday's unique position, I think this is a strategy that can work. They have to improve the product for it to work, though.

Posted by: Greg andrew | February 27, 2009 at 07:30 AM

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