For anyone who wonders what the future of media looks like, spend 1:30 to watch this video. If involves a cute baby, and if you project forward to when that baby is an adult, it tells you everything you need to know.
Posts Tagged ‘media’
A magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work
Thursday, October 13th, 2011Took the words right out of my mouth
Monday, January 11th, 2010Advertisers are becoming the new publishers, and media executives still don’t get it.
There isn’t a single assertion in this piece on the future of media and advertising that I disagree with. It’s worth reading.
Terry Heaton’s “Local Media in a Post Modern World” in AR&D (Audience Research & Development).
R.I.P. E&P
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
Add another surprise that’s not a surprise to the long list of publications that died in 2009: Editor & Publisher, the No. 1 title serving the newspaper industry itself, is folding at year-end.
E&P was such an institution – it’s been around since 1901, but existed under a different title since 1884 – that it’s hard to imagine a media world in which it doesn’t exist. That’s why it’s closing is so surprising.
On the other hand, The Nielson Co. had been trying to sell its media publications group, including E&P, Adweek, Brandweek, Mediaweek, Backstage, Billboard, Film Journal International and The Hollywood Reporter. Most of the group was just sold; E&P was not included in the deal.
I don’t know anything about E&P’s finances, but you don’t need an MBA to understand what that means.
Trade books that cover the media industry are chronically short on advertisers. They all live a subsistence existence. E&P’s folio has been razor thin since I first saw it in the early ’80s.
If E&P ever made good money (high margins), it never made big money. And in times of recession, small-money magazines do worst in the effort to maintain their margins.
I’m sure E&P is in the red, and that any forecast in which it could become proftable again doesn’t deliver enough earnings to justify the turnaround project.
And with the dire condition of many newspapers, E&P’s expiration is a symbolic event that was probably inevitable.
In that context, that E&P should die broke and alone isn’t a surprise at all.
I’m sorry to see it go, and feel for everyone on the staff. It was a great institution right up until the end.
Dallas Morning News restructures, Armageddon begins
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009If this were April 1, I’d write it off as a joke. But this close to Christmas, it might be a sign of the Second Coming.
The Dallas Morning News has reorganized; the people who generate editorial now report to people who sell ads.
Under the plan, editors of sports, real estate, entertainment, auto and travel now report to sales managers – who have been given a new title: General Manager.
In The Dallas Observer, a news blog, the extensive report includes an interview with Editor Bob Mong – who has been given a new title: Pimp.
In that interview, he told The Dallas Observer: “There’s no journalist in our organization who will allow a business person to cross the line. It just won’t happen. I’m not going to allow it to happen. [Managing editor] George [Rodrigue] isn’t. [Executive sports editor] Bob Yates or [Lifestyles deputy managing editor] Lisa Kresl won’t. But I think it’s an attempt to go to market in a different way.”
Look, I know t
imes are tough for newspapers; I’ve written about little else since I started this blog. And coming from the B2B world, where editors are expected to be as rigid as Silly Putty, I know it’s possible to operate on the up-and-up without a huge barrier between sales and edit.
But perception is reality. And it’s already near-impossible for newspapers to operate without the perception that their coverage has been bought. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t strengthen the paper’s case when editors get their annual reviews from sales managers. The reality is that journalists have always had the dominant voice in newspaper decisions. That needs to change; the voices of journalists and advertising folks need to be heard together. In a 167-year-old institution, I don’t think you can achieve that by simply turning it upside-down and saying, “OK, the ad guys are in charge.”
If advertisers think there’s a chance they can influence editorial decisions, then that’s what they’ll try to do. And when a news executive puts himself in the position of saying, George Rodrigue would never let anything like that happen, he’s one unforeseen circumstance away from becoming a liar. It’s an untenable position.
Further, I don’t believe this kind of change addresses the real problem that newspapers are having. They aren’t losing ad revenue because advertisers have suddenly decided there’s something wrong with the product. They’re losing it because advertisers have decided there’s something wrong with the medium.
You can’t directly measure the full response to a print ad, and advertisers now live in a culture where everything can and must be measured. They’re spending more money online, and the funding for those initiatives has to come from somehwere. It comes from print.
If anybody should know this already, it would be the DMN’s advertising staff, which is in constant contact with its customers. But instead of taking on the real issue of delivering advertising response, they’re going to try to satisfy advertisers through more interaction with the content side of the business. So they, just like the journalists, are in denial. They’re going to fix the wrong thing, and I suspect they’re going to do it poorly.
It’s true: Newspapers have to reinvent themselves. But this isn’t reinvention. It’s not innovative. It’s not courageous. And it’s not the prelude to a long and prosperous future. It’s rolling over and submitting. It’s giving up.
Here’s how BusinessInsider.com reported it:
More on AOL: It’s new content strategy is dead wrong
Monday, November 30th, 2009A week ago, I wrote about the futility of AOL’s rebranding unless it figures out how to become more relevant to its audience.
This week I have to write about the futility of AOL’s effort to become more relevant to its audience.
The centerpiece of that effort, according to PaidContent.org, is a three-pronged approach to generating new content:
1.
Hire lots of journalists. It’s good news that AOL is trying to generate original content, and I’m pleased that it’s using trained content professionals – of which there are plenty available. It has a staff of 3,000 journalists, according to PaidContent, which puts it into the top tier of U.S. news-gathering organizations.
2.
Use algorithms to predict what stories people want to read, and then assign these to the journalists. The objective is clear. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong hopes that by giving people content they want, AOL will become the content place to go.
He’s wrong. This is the kind of thinking that puts Jon and Kate Gosselin in our faces day after day, week after week, month after tawdry month. It takes variety out of the news cycle, just as Wal-Mart’s unceasing desire to stock only the best-selling SKUs limits the variety of what you can buy at the world’s largest retailer.
When someone says, “I want more stories like the one about Jon and Kate,” they aren’t really saying they want to hear more about the Gosselin family. They’re saying they want information that makes them feel the same way they did when they heard it (for better or worse), and that makes them feel as informed as they did when they talked about it at work the next day.
People can tell you what was important to them yesterday, but they don’t know what’s going to be important to them tomorrow. Media have not succeeded until now, nor will they in the future, by giving people what they want so much as by giving people what’s new, important and interesting.
The real function AOL’s journalists could serve is to present information that is new, important and interesting. AOL has hired the journalists but it’s about to screw up in deploying them.
3.
Get advertisers more involved with content. This isn’t unique and it isn’t new. It’s just one more effort to help marketers bludgeon their target audiences into submission. Hey, I’m a marketer and I still can’t stand the thought of this. Everybody on one side of the equation is doing this, and everybody on the other side of the equation is trying to tune it out. Creating more and more advertorial microsites – no matter how well intentioned some of them will inevitably be – is not the big-internet business model of the future.
In fact, this is the very reason why social media is so hot right now: because social media lets users find the information they want. AOL’s model is to deliver the information, fire-hose style, right down the user’s gullet. It may generate some short-term revenue, but it won’t make AOL relevant or desirable.
It will do the opposite.
None of this is to say that AOL’s plan is evil or particularly dreadful. I think it’s pretty typical. But that’s why it won’t work. AOL is trying to distinguish itself by doing what every other large media company is trying to do. For a company in trouble, that’s a formula for failure.
