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Media Roil Call

These are perilous times for traditional media.

Things are changing so rapidly that Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone predicts “there won’t be any newspapers in two years,” according to BusinessWeek magazine (Poynter.org, 4/27/10).  Never one to resist a dig at rivals, the cantankerous Redstone says his rival Rupert Murdoch “lives in ink, and I live in movies and television. Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.”

If one thing is clear, however, there’s no such thing as forever when it comes to technology.

Consider that some 800,000 U.S. households cut the cord to cable and satellite TV in favor of such alternatives as Hulu, Netflix, broadcaster Websites, or Apple’s iTunes in the past two years, according to the Convergence Consulting Group, which predicts the number to reach 1.6 million by the end of 2011. [TechCrunch, 4/13/10, http://tcrn.ch/cordcutters]

Last year, 12 percent of the total weekly viewing audience watched at least one or two episodes of a full-length TV show online; this year the number is 17 percent and next year it’s expected to be 21 percent. There are clearly changes in store for the $84 billion cable/satellite TV access industry, although there are forces at work to slow the progression of programming to the web (such as the $34 billion that cable companies paid last year in programming fees).

Meanwhile, newsprint, as Redstone gleefully noted, is fast dissolving into memory. Newspaper companies are falling into bankruptcy (13 major ones at last count), while commentators of all stripes welcome the destruction of old media fortresses; leftists slam them for their “reactionary” institutional and corporate bias and right-wingers for the perceived “liberalism” of their staff. The more politically agnostic simply feel newspapers just don’t “get it” — that is, they don’t know how to price their products correctly and stay ahead of technology. The current consensus of the technorati seems to be that online newspapers should be either free or, if they go to the paywall model, unbundle their content – following the Internet or Apple’s revolutionizing the music business.

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ADDENDUM: Happy to see that the NY Times paywall seems to be working … it would seem that some people ARE indeed willing to pay something for that priceless (yet costly to produce) product called journalism.

Music Marketing Mayhem

“For the first time in 50 years characters in rock and roll really don’t stand for anything. Music has become more manufactured than a Ford Focus. The biggest movement out of youth culture today is the campaign against drinking bottled water. That’s a sign of a society that has too much free time. Or maybe too much water.” – Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, in Forbes online (5/03/10)

Guccione’s Spin

The controversial founder of Spin magazine says most magazines today are “garbage” and the business is in the midst of a “Darwinian culling.”

“They are generic, lifeless, gutless titles embracing mindless voyeurism of vapid celebrity lifestyles,” Bob Guccione Jr., told Dirk Smillie of Forbes (5/03/10). He believes magazines aren’t attracting ads because their journalism isn’t risky enough. “What’s the point of media if you’re not rocking the boat?”

He doesn’t have much respect for the digital side either. “Most blogs are produced at a sixth-grade writing level,” he opines. “There are no Mark Twains out there.”

Publishers should focus on risk taking and reader loyalty, he thinks. “There’s too much obsessing about Web traffic,” he says. “Who cares if a website has 3 million monthly uniques if people aren’t engaged with the site? I’ll bet you Wine Spectator hasn’t grown that much over the years, but who wouldn’t want to own it? By doing this, we condition people to feel that fidelity is unimportant on the Web.

“In magazines, loyalty is a natural by-product. It becomes part of the identity of the magazine. I don’t feel that on the Web. I like the New York Times online, for example, but as much as I’m a fan, I’m not loyal to it in that medium. If they start charging for it, I’ll look elsewhere.”

Making Content Pay

What do the following have in common — The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and ESPN?

They are among the news organizations (now called “content creators”) that are successfully charging folks to read their content online. That is, they have walled off their valuable content so that readers have to pay to enter.

Their success in this endeavor is studied with great interest by hundreds of other media outlets starved for funds and perplexed how — in this information-wants-to-be-free era — they will ever get back paying subscribers and the advertisers that go with them.

Will people pay for local news coverage? Mike Klingensmith publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune more than hopes so. He’s planning on it.

“It’s not an inexpensive process to create the proprietary content we create,” he explains, “and we have to be compensated for it in the future. As I believe almost all content providers will have to be.” [See the original interview by David Brauer in full: http://bit.ly/StarTribInterview]

He favors a web-based product that with all-inclusive, as opposed to a la carte, pricing – with free samples available via as many links as possible. Content that is completely free vs. partially free (a sample) might depend on the reader’s location or story source (such as AP or staff).

His team is not just redesigning the news organization’s website, but rebuilding it into a platform, to act as more of a “content tent” that embraces staff-generated news, vendor-generated services and user-generated content.

The content has to display on whatever type of device consumers use. “We’re going to follow our consumers in that regard,” says the man with deep experience in magazine journalism, which is generally more advanced in consumer marketing. “It’s not for us to dictate; it’s for them to tell us.”

The Power of Brevity

Here’s an interesting counterpoint to my recent posts on the peril of overly relying on PowerPoint to communicate clearly and thoroughly:

“[Business schools] should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with 10-slide PowerPoint presentations,” Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki tells the New York Times’ Adam Bryant (3/19/10). “If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off.”

No one wants to read “War and Peace” e-mails. Ditto for 40 info-impacted PowerPoint slides. The more you explain, the more points you try to impart, the more overwritten your language, the more you’re likely to be ignored or, ironically, misunderstood. Little to nothing stands out — except, perhaps, little bits here and there that can be taken out of context and used against you later. (You know how some workplaces can be…)

Lesson: If you can’t say it in a few lines, have a face-to-face and follow up on that conversation with a memo of understanding. Okay, I’ll stop now.