The Media Value Equation

David Carr had a good column in the NYT this Monday on the impact the economic crisis is having on the business press.

Among a number of great insights Carr writes:

"There are several technical reasons underlying the collapse — and that’s what it is — of business journalism. Business wisdom that is imprisoned in printed pages, already locked in the past, increasingly seems like a curio. Who cares what happened yesterday or last week, when the fortunes of a stock can change in millisecond? Most business people already know what happened today, and what they really care about is tomorrow."

News, like all kinds of information today is hyper-commoditized. Not long ago news of any depth or specialty came in a magazine delivered to your mailbox or newspaper tossed on the font lawn. Most people had limited and dependable sources for news on topics from business and politics to art and culture.

Those days are long gone. For example, this week, elections where held in states around the country. I was able to get results from scores of sources near instantaneously, even on obscure races and ballot measures.

As someone who runs a media business, the ubiquity of information is a big concern. Fairly specialized, it used to be our publications were the only place you could easily get the kind of news and information we provided. So, while the business press have their own unique problems, this commoditization of information challenges all of us in media.

Taking this a bit further I recently came across a 1999 Atlantic article by Peter Drucker in which he compares developments between the Industrial and Information Revolutions. Drucker notes:

“…The Industrial Revolution in its first half century only mechanized the production of goods that had been in existence all along. It tremendously increased output and tremendously decreased costs. “

That was some hundred years ago with things like textile and agricultural products. Today the web is doing this same thing to content creation. The Internet has become the Wal-Mart of media, expanding distribution and driving down costs, creating major headaches for publishers and those who work for them.

All this comes back to Carr’s artilce. What do readers really care about? That’s a question of VALUE and getting a clear sense of that with respect to readers. Our aim at e.Republic, far from fully realized as yet, is to continually refine our value, aiming to be relevant, career critical and at our best, truly indispensable to our audience.

BtoB Media and the Hypercommoditization of Information

This is a reprint of an article I wrote in March of 2008 for BtoB Media Business. While the focus of the piece is largely on the work we do at e.Republic, the challenge of the hypercommoditization of information confronts the entire media industry these days. I was reminded of this while reading Michael Kinsley's spot-on essay this am in the NYT: "You Can't Sell News by the Slice". More to say on this topic down the road.

Business Information and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Like many b-to-b media firms, e.Republic spent a fair amount of time over the last few years working to understand and exploit the disruptive dynamics unleashed on our industry by the webification of just about everything.

And while we aggressively move ahead in areas like Web 2.0 and broadband video, our most rewarding work to date has been in the development of business information or market intelligence offerings. It is here that we have been able to launch our most successful new ventures and, more important, build higher-value relationships with new and existing clients.

What precisely is business information? You can get as many definitions as there are publishers discussing the topic. American Business Media defines business information as “public and proprietary information gathered and linked in order to create valuable business intelligence which can be sold to customers for analytical, business development and operational purposes.”

It's an area that holds untapped potential for many media firms but is exploited by only a few.

Our foray into business information began several years back, when the Web's hypercommoditization of information was tearing up industries from travel to finance to daily newspapers. We were concerned that this trend posed a serious challenge to our firm as a traditional b-to-b “infomediary.” However, as we looked more closely at the characteristics of our market, what we originally saw as a threat was, in fact, a larger opportunity.

It was our view that the same technologies that were supercommoditizing data also made it possible to make information hyperrelevant in ways that were physically or financially impractical just a few years earlier. After taking a deeper look at the information ecosystem that existed between the buyers and sellers in our market, it was clear to us that the Web could be used to cost-effectively deliver sophisticated, high-value information to our customers—for which they would pay a premium.

E.Republic primarily serves the public-sector market. Our sellers are largely targeting buyers who work for government or educational institutions. This makes the sellers' marketing/sales lifecycle complex, fragmented and (due to competitive procurement) information-intensive and time-critical.

By aggregating both public information—such as published government bids, jurisdictional budget data and agency procurement procedures—and supplementing this with our own proprietary data harvested from our existing content streams and new research, we were able to create a high-value, premium information product for our commercial customers that we sell on an annual subscription basis.

Launched more than five years ago, the service has been through several iterations as we've learned more about which data sets our clients consider most useful. Additionally, developments in Web technology have enhanced our means of delivery, and we have been able to develop a set of solid add-on offerings, such as custom research for clients who require a more detailed look at a particular market area.

But aside from the services themselves, what is surprising about our journey into business information is how it is driving the evolution of relationships between us and our clients. We are finding that, as we understand more about the business information needs of our commercial customers, we develop better insights into the strategic and tactical challenges they face in how they market and sell to the buyers in our marketplace.

Call it the law of unintended consequences, but our move into business information is shifting our role with clients beyond a relationship weighted toward traditional branding and lead-generation services (advertising and events) to that of a high-value partner more closely attuned to a customer's entire marketing/sales lifecycle. Our role as a market intelligence partner is making us a more integral element in a client's “go-to-market” work flow, specifically helping them to more efficiently target and complete sales transactions and build deeper relationships with their customers. The essence of this role was echoed by Mike Reilly, CEO of Randall-Reilly Publishing, which runs its own $13 million premium information business. He wrote in a recent article: “We think that our business is to help our clients find and keep customers.”

From our vantage point, incorporating business information into our product platform demonstrates a subtle but powerful shift in the role a media firm can play in today's b-to-b market. It is a shift that provides the perfect counterpoint to hypercommoditization: hyperrelevancy.

That Rowdy New Media

“Not knowledge but libel and foolishness…No wisdom…just much posturing and gossip” is how NYT writer Edward Rothstein summarizes the point of view of Henry Peacham, an early critic of the new media.

Only thing - Peacham was making those observations in 1641 when print media was the next new thing.

Rothstein’s article is a review of an exhibition at the Foldger Shakespeare Library in Washington that I’d love to see, “Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper.” The review describes the exhibit as a “chronicle of chronicles, an account of how information about the wider world in 16th- and 17th-century England, including reports of wonders and horrors, wars and troop movements, murders and merchandise, gradually made its way from private journals or letters reporting on events witnessed, to publicly sold broadsheets and pamphlets.”

Like today, but more so, the emergence of a new media was part of a collision of factors that reshaped society. As Rothstein writes in his review, the “… story of how journalism became a public enterprise in Renaissance England is actually the history of how a public itself took shape; how out of a monarchical society in which great poverty and great wealth cohabited, another kind of identity evolved. It was based on slowly increasing literacy and impassioned written argument; it included curiosity about gossip and a taste for exotic tales; and it developed alongside a new commercial world in which written advertising, like the news it accompanied, helped shape taste and expectations."

As new technology disrupts the media world in the 21t century its good to hear from the ink-stained pioneers from the 1600’s.