What really happened that caused traditional media to shrink so much over the past decade – and why are so many still struggling to come back?
That’s the subject of this presentation, which I’ve given several times over the past few years.
Posts Tagged ‘e-media’
Names make news (2.0)
Friday, September 7th, 2012
Photo courtesy FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Two years out of college, as a young reporter for a business weekly in Upstate New York, I met the crusty old publisher of the Pacific Business News – a business journal in Honolulu. I didn’t like him much. I was idealistic and ready to change the world. I was living in the snow belt and learning how businesses work. I was reporting on Michael Milken (a Master of the Universe, the junk-bond king, deal-maker supreme) and leveraged buyouts. I was writing about how empires were made, how old cities were rebuilt, how capitalism made the world turn.
This old guy, meanwhile, was living in paradise and frustratingly pragmatic. Standing before a room full of wide-eyed people like me, he was asked to dispense some advice to us young guns. After something like 50 years in business, you know what he came up with?
“Names make news,” he said. That was it.
To look at his newspaper was to understand how this pedestrian philosophy played out in the real world. While it has been updated over the past 25 years to get ahead of changing times, the product I saw that day was gray and cheap. Articles were short, reading as if written by flacks and hacks. Every person’s name that was mentioned – there were a lot of them – was bold-faced. Some articles seemed concocted for the specific purpose of highlighting a large roster of names.
I was unimpressed. I promptly forgot that old publisher’s name and promised myself I’d forget his tired old advice too.
What I discounted was his experience. He’d been running the same publication for something like 50 years. It’s possible, I now realize, he had learned and discarded many other truths along the way – distilling his success into one rule of thumb that fostered success for his product in his market at his time.
Names make news.
I never did manage to forget that advice, and while it’s not the only rule I’ve lived by over the years, it has never failed me.
It came back in a rush this morning when Seth Godin’s most recent blog post came through my e-mail. Seth is a marketing guru; he dispenses more good advice in a week than many of us dispense in a lifetime.
Seth’s advice on the subject doesn’t come across like that of a crusty old publisher marking time in Hawaii. It’s contemporary, directed at social media marketers, online journalists, bloggers – would-be masters of the new digital universe.
But it’s equally concise and to the point. When people look at photo albums, he says, they go directly to pictures of themselves.
He writes:
Knowing that, the question is: how often are you featuring the photo, name, needs or wants of your customers where everyone (or at least the person you’re catering to) can see them?
So listen up Internet 2.0ers. Your self-indulgent rants, your complex business models, your highly-designed user experiences are all well and good. But as media change, some things don’t. Names make news. They always have and they always will.
Image courtesy of graur razvan ionut; FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The royal engagement and authenticity in the media
Sunday, November 21st, 2010Why do the breathless reports of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton have such a negative impact on me?
I have no ill will toward the couple; they are charming, attractive and – considering the circumstances – appear humble and likeable. In England, where the royal family is some kind of national treasure, I might understand such over-the-top, second-to-second pursuit of each detail as they proceed toward a royal wedding.
But here in America, Will and Kate are not our own; interest in their nuptials strikes me as being borne of respect for our longstanding relationship with England as a friend and ally. Does it require sending squads of journalists to stand outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to get weepy and about the storybook nature of their love?
Simply: No. It doesn’t have the same meaning in England and America. There it’s a fairy tale; here it’s a pleasant news item. The mass media’s effort to transport the fairy tale aspect of it across the ocean and across cultures is not reporting; it’s editorializing.
It’s not journalism; it’s distortion. And it’s part of that problematic blurring between news and entertainment that seems to have infected all for-profit media.
How big is mobile computing? Really big.
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley made the following presentation at a recent meeting of technology wizards and gurus. (Notably she got the name of the event wrong; it’s the CN Summit.)
There’s a breadth of information here, ranging from adoption of mobile technologies to the potential for mobile advertising to the investment outlook for companies in the business.
The big takeaway for me is how it underscores the increasingly reasonable-sounding claims that mobile computing will change how we think about computing; and, no less, how important it is for media companies of all sizes to recapture their audiences on the small screen.
Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research
View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.
ABC audit bureau dives into digital head first
Monday, April 26th, 2010
For those – and there are many – who say the iPad won’t save publishing, here is evidence that the Little Tablet that Could might be more powerful than they expected.
ABC, the leading auditor of consumer and paid periodical circulation, has built a service that allows media to count readership across multiple electronic platforms: apps, e-readers and mobile browsers.
Ordinarily slower than honey from the fridge, the audit bureau’s speed to provide meaningful data across the fast-emerging new-media platforms speaks to the urgency of its customers. The data means media will be able to sell advertising for new online formats almost as fast as they develop. That alone will hasten the already hurried development of unique offerings for smart phones, mobile websites and the iPad (as well as the fleet of act-alike products that others will inevitably produce).
It’s important because it’s a stay of execution for the advertising-based business model on which virtually all media rely but which has so far resisted the digital transition.
Why give the iPad credit for this? Since its introduction just a month ago, the conversation about mobile media has changed dramatically – as have reader habits. Powered by the app, consumers are suddenly willing to buy subscriptions for online content, Google has been declared a declining power in big media’s pursuit of traffic, and at least one of the major audit bureaus has been shaken to innovate. All because iPad provides a different user experience than any previous device.
I’m not ready to declare that the iPad is going to save publishing-as-we-know-it. But I’m pretty sure it will be right in the middle of publishing-as-it-comes-to-be.
Outside the marketers’ echo chamber, print lives
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010According to B2B magazine, ABM, the trade association for the business-to-business trade press, held a series of panel discussions recently in which participants declared that print isn’t dead.
Wouldn’t we expect them to say that? Of the four pro-print souls mentioned in the article, three of them still make their living by running, editing or selling for print magazines.
I’m not arguing their point either; I believe print is a vitally important communications vehicle and somehow will remain so in the future.
What’s notable in this discussion is the reasoning offered by the fourth panelist, Bob Drake, who runs Drake Creative agency. He said that a recent ad campaign that included a print component succeeded. He’s quoted by B2B as saying, “It goes against everything we’re hearing, but we can engage people for a long period of time (in print) and they stay engaged.”
I don’t know Bob Drake, and I don’t mean to pick on him. But if he’s hearing that print doesn’t work, then he’s talking to other marketers and not to marketees.
Marketers are abandoning print because it’s harder to measure as a marketing vehicle than Internet-based technologies. This is undeniably true. But at some point, that legitimate objection got simplified to the assumption that print is broken, which has been simplified even further to the notion that print is dead.
But if you ask readers, that’s not even close to the truth. The same article cited a poll by Roads & Bridges magazine (conducted by Internet, ironically enough) that indicated a strong preference among its audience for getting information via print. This is consistent with every bit of research and opinion I’ve ever seen. People prefer reading words on paper – especially glossy paper with charts and pictures.
The point? Like everyone else, marketers are susceptible to the echo-chamber effect. Print isn’t in trouble because it doesn’t work; it’s in trouble because shorthand communications of marketers obscure the nuance that is the truth.
