News expert Ken Doctor of
Content Bridges focused initially in his talk on the debuting Apple tablet and its promise, which is, in a nutshell, its big advertising potential with its better reading experience. Ken sees some potential for the Apple tablet to support news operations better, but he also noted that there is 40 percent less newsprint than there was a year ago and 20 percent less newsroom staff. The tablet looks great, but where is the content going to come from? A lot of it has, of course, migrated to the Web, oftentimes to startup operations founded by journalists laid off by traditional news operations. Scrappy operations such as these with highly affordable publishing infrastructure and simply implemented ad revenues will be the focus of may eyeballs that major news organizations would like to capture. Ken noted Outsell research shows that 57 percent of consumers go to the Web already in the U.S. for news, with 25 percent using the Web sites of broadcast news sites daily. Ten percent say that they would pay for news - which correlates nicely with Gordon Crovitz' seat-of-the-pants number that he's been using to promote his Journalism Online initiative with Steve Brill. I think that this is a good industry heuristic for consumer-oriented online content at this point, presuming that you have a strong online brand.
But Ken also pointed out that many companies are spending heavily on self-marketeing; in other words, what is traditional media when your advertisers know how to "do" media themselves? Ken noted that he believes that 12 or 15 large news companies will continue to dominate, but with due respect, I think that in five years we will see far closer to five large news players worldwide, with the remaining properties being either gone or relaunched by people who care about their local news markets as independent brands that are web-scaled, lean and mean, and able to gain good audiences through search engines and social media links instead of having to rely on services such as AP and large media companies to broaden the appeal of their content. I agree with Ken that major companies can become virtual aggregators themselves via licensing to use other outlets' content to build the reach of other content properties, but this is a technique that any publisher of any scale can use. Automated content licensing will accelerate this process to the most effective outlets, which may or may not be Ken's "digital dozen."
At the same time, Ken notes that News Corporation is an example of a diversified media company that is using revenues from entertainment properties such as the $2-billion hit movie "Avatar" to fuel their operations. That will work for some time as a scaling issue, but Ken noted that the cost structure for many of these conglomerates' operations will not sustain them on a reliable basis. Beats me how this math will work for long, especially when, as Ken points out, the Bit.ly link referral is processing two billion link referrals a month. Value each of those links at a dollar, which is not too far off the mark given online ad rates, then you have an "Avatar"'s worth of ad revenues being generated by
Content Nation every day via social media.
Will the tablet be the convergence of social, mobile and video that many in the media industry hope that it will be? Well, I am sure that the tablet will be impressive, but given that we've had color screens staring us in our living rooms for fifty years and PC screens for thirty years, I am not sure what it is about Steve Jobs that will overcome decades of media company failure to learn how to tailor mass media to interactive content markets. The gains of online video services such as Hulu are impressive, but are dwarfed by Content Nation's production on services such as YouTube. Aggregating social media and traditional media will be the key to the emerging model of success in this environment, as Ken highlighted in a Seattle effort to aggregate area blogs and other content sources.
I do think that local aggregation efforts such as Ken's Seattle example are now feasible on a cost-effective scale and will represent one of the most exciting stories for news production in 2010. For a great example of this, I refer you to the emerging
Patch local news service sponsored by AOL, which resembles a business plan that I floated for local news about ten years ago just prior to the dot-com crash in 2000. Ten years later, technologies, ad networks and pervasive social media are combining to make a combination of professional and citizen-generated content economically viable.
The other side of the news equation that Ken touched on is the transformation of advertising into contextual content placement, in which journalists find themselves increasingly working for the advertisers to generate content instead of the news outlets. It's cheap content, often, and far from high quality at times, but thinking of newspapers filled with lightly retouched press releases passed off as journalism and the fawning of media for leads and coverage that throws objectivity under the bus too often, it's a matter of the name of the master sometimes and not the evil.
At the end of the day, the issue is revenues. "There's not enough revenue to do what we used to do," notes Ken, and chasing what Ken calls "interim technology." There are no magic technology bullets that will return an era that no longer exists, but there are strategies to move forward. Ken suggests:
- Make it social
- Approach the "digital dozen"
- Gather other people's content
- Drive your publishing business with data
All good recommendations, though ones that any Web publishers can apply also, including enterprises reaching their markets directly via the Web. News is a great business, perhaps closer to its original roots today than it's been in many years, but it's not the "Mad Men" business that some yearn for even today. Great presentation, Ken, enjoyed it.
Labels: internet, media, news, web
