Sink or Swim Panel con't
Let me just say that Safari is an awful browser for blogging.
A back-and-forth between Wolff and Shah - and Kevin English says "If you look at the newest generation of media consumers, they're used to getting their content for free" - how do you make money at that? He taps Oakleigh, who says, "I avoid consumer media like the plague." On to Bob Merry - how does your model differ from the free media model and how do you compete? Through subscriptions. Derive close to 80% of CQ revenue through circ - but they have advertising revenue as well. Shah: "It's usual for us to cast the debate between print vs digital" but what if we reframe it as "brand marketing vs other types?" Clickthrough rates are low. Advertisers thus think that internet ads are ineffective.
Wolff: "If the internet is largely a direct medium, it doesn't have the margins to create content." Extending this means that the value of content has consistently gone down. You have to create products in which the content costs less and less and less - probably via technology as a tool to create a cheaper content and to provide cheaper content.
Oakleigh: "National news is a commodity but local news is not." Smaller newspapers in smaller communities. Merry: "When the web came along it practically killed my business, and it killed my competitor. Information is commoditized. We had to fight that by increasing the value of the content."
And now it's question time. To Wolff: "Who's paying for foreign correspondents if all the news is free?" Wolff: "The answer is probably no one. The foreign bureau as we know it goes away - and it already has. We actually have MORE info from foreign markets than we ever did before. We have instant access to information sources - newspapers and otherwise - in exactly those areas where once we were dependent on the NYT or Time magazine for what we knew about the news coming out of wherever." And "you cannot just assume that because change has come, we can't do it the way we did before, that we'll do it worse."
Shah: "The brands you all know, that you come to trust, are the brands you're visiting online. Time has 26 million people a month visiting billions of pages. But you need voice, personality, a byline that people recognize."
Merry: Papers used to be partisan, and consumers knew it. English: How is that different from Fox and CNN? Panel: vigorous agreement.
Oakleigh (I know that's not his last name but his first name is too cool not to use): Newsrooms carried a lot of dead weight.
Shah: "We've talked about all the losers - who's the winner?" Merry: "Me, actually." DC is trendy now, and there are trillions of dollars in the budget.
English: "The winner is arguably the consumer" - more media from more locations more cheaply than ever before. (Snore) And we're back to the original question - how do you take this new environment and translate that into a new business? "There's probably no single right model or right answer." 45 minutes spent chasing our rhetorical tails.
What I offer:
