The Mile Markers Keep Whizzing Past

Those of us in the business don't need reminders, but the disruption of the media industry by digital technology rolls on unabated even after a decade or more of churn. And the rate of change just keeps accelerating as legacy media firms remain in a perpetual struggle to keep their footing.

So just for the record, a couple more mile markers whizzed by this week:

Online streaming will surpass DVD's in movie consumption this year, but like the print vs. web advertising shift, at much smaller revenues.

Bloomberg's BusinessWeek reported on March 21st that Apple's iPad outsold Hewlett-Packard PC's in the fourth quarter of 2011. HP is the world's number one maker of Wintel PCs and BusinessWeek notes that if you consider the iPad a PC subsitute then "Apple...is the biggest PC maker in the world."

And while these latest developments are not immediately related to the graph below, the broader wake of this creative destruction certainly tells stories like those cited by Derek Thompson recently in The Atlantic. (As tough as these revenue numbers are the circulation figures are equally gruesome as Thompson notes.)

The Week: Back to the Future

Amidst the news of the NY Times latest “pay-per-view” scheme the same paper ran a fascinating piece on an upstart newsweekly called The Week that’s meeting surprising, if modest success at a time when periodicals and certainly general newsweeklies are in steep decline.

If you haven’t seen a copy, The Week is a tightly edited digest of what happened in the world the preceding week. It covers hard news, politics, culture and more; mostly by citing, mashing-up, and sometimes excerpting content from other sources. While their model works better in print than online, here’s an example of what they do: What happens if a Japan-sized earthquake hits California?, or this on business news: Is Groupon really worth $25 billion?

Intriguing about The Week is that it is in many ways a reprise of the publishing strategy envisioned by Henry Luce and his original partner Briton Haden for Time magazine in 1923. A story well told in The Publisher by Alan Brinkley.

As access to news and information explode The Week is finding, as Time did in its day, that readers value both the utility and art that sharp editors bring to netting out the stuff they’re interested in.

Technology Giveth, Taketh and Perhaps Giveth Again?

This week Apple’s IPad goes on sale and it got me thinking back to the debut of the original Macintosh computer in January 1984. I can’t remember what teams played in the Superbowl that year but I vividly recall the jaw dropping “1984” Apple ad that aired early in the game. At the time I was in the startup days of a small publishing firm. We were producing regional magazines the old fashion way with clunky typesetting machines, hot wax, pica poles and Xacto knives. Apple’s new computer got my attention.

It took a few years but before long the Macintosh revolutionized our company and the entire publishing industry, drastically driving down production costs and exponentially increasing creative capacity. The Mac ushered in something close to a renaissance in publishing and I don’t think firms like mine would have been able to grow and thrive without the revolutionary technologies that eventually came out of that new machine.

Well technology has no emotional attachments and hasn’t been kind to the publishing world in the last decade. Some debate if the newspaper or magazine will even survive.

In this context the release of the IPad and the next generation of tablet devices is a big deal. While it’s too early to say for sure, my bet is that devices like the IPad and the new software and apps they’ll usher in are laying the foundation for the next renaissance in publishing.

To get a sense of this check out this recent item from Paid Content that does of quick round up of 15 publishers and how they are re-thinking the magazine. Very cool stuff; especially the clips from Wired and Sports Illustrated.

Media in the Middle

In a recent interview with Naomi Reiter of eMedia Vitals I talked about the need for B2B media companies to increasingly focus on building and sustaining professional communities. Certainly the need for a media firm to be a trusted source for credible and relevant news and analysis remains vital. But the future of this business requires much more:

eMV: In what direction do you see the industry moving?

McKenna: The entire nature of B2B media is changing. In the past, it was largely built around a model of “informing” markets or readers. Magazines and events were largely built around disseminating information, and “social networks” were a secondary consideration. But the Web has made information a commodity. News distribution and analysis is not, in itself, a competitive advantage any longer.

The future of the business is more about “communitizing” markets. I’m not talking about social media, but using all elements of a media platform—both high tech and high touch—to effectively engage with audiences to help them solve their business and professional challenges.

eMV: Can you give an example?

McKenna: e.Republic has launched several very narrowly focused “gated communities” of government IT professionals. These communities address specific business challenges faced by their members. Our role is to facilitate this community of professionals through a number of different services, including conducting specific research on topics of concern to them, providing expert analysis and hosting both online and in-person forums or leadership networks. By building these communities in a way that dynamically engages both readers and advertisers, we’ve been able to effectively monetize these efforts.

Yes, publishing information remains important, but the future of business media centers on being much more engaged with our audience and delivering greater practical value to them. Media comes from the Latin word for “middle”. I like to say that the new model is about “media in the middle,” meaning that the role of media brands should focus on building and sustaining professional communities. Successful media companies have always done this to some degree; however, it is central to our mission going forward.

eMV: Has the paradigm shifted permanently?

McKenna: No question. A media company can’t just assume that it is delivering value to its audience. All the discussion over what or if readers will pay for content is evidence of this. What is the real value my media company brings to the market? It’s a tough question to ask. A media firm needs to have a clear-eyed view of what value it’s delivering to both readers and advertisers. Once you start down the road in answering this question, you’re looking at entirely new business models.

The entire interview can be found here.

Bring the Love Back... Will Advertising Survive?

Its not just old school media that's feeling the evolutionary pressures these days. The advertising industry is fraying at the edges and struggling to find its way in a world of new media.

I saw this clip at a recent American Business Media conference. As they say, picture is worth a thousand words.

Watch this - its great!

Can Great Design Save Print?

Came across this insightful presentation from European newspaper designer Jacek Utko. He's doing amazing stuff and taking a fresh look at an old media. If you love print it's worth a look.

Snapshots From The (Media) Revolution

Whether intentional or not, the Business Day section of each Monday’s New York Times has become a great collection of snapshots on the conflicted landscape of old and new media.

This was especially true this week and is worth a quick review if you missed it:

An article by Ashlee Vance details a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud which hooks vanity publishing up with cloud computing. The service allows content creators to plug into a network of high speed, high quality digital printers and produce their own short run glossy magazines. Similar technology can also be used for short run book publishing. The Long Tail comes to print.

The MagCloud piece was opposite an item detailing the troubles that may soon see shuttering of the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost 30 percent of its circulation between 2003 – 2008, while another article details how daily papers in Europe are allegedly doing a better job than their U.S. brethren in weathering the internet storm.

Struggling to maintain a hold on eyeballs isn’t just limited to newspapers. Media analyst David Carr has a column on what he calls the “hyperbolic rhythms” of cable news as they try to retain viewership numbers after the flush of November’s TV-friendly election campaign.

Next to Carr’s is a feature entitled “Why Pay For Cable?” which outlines how rapid gains in online viewing of television programming is shifting the ground beneath cable and network TV operators...

where have all my subscribers gone?... Uh, check Hulu and Boxee... (Can we cut a deal with those guys?).

There’s an article by Matt Richtel on how the video game industry (one of the $$$ bright spots of the media world) is under assault from the proliferation of free or low cost games on the web and the explosion of new hand-held devices. “The model as it exists today is dying,” says one video game industry exec.

But wait, there’s more: An article about how Skype, the internet calling service is moving aggressively to bring cheap calls to mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Another on the chatter on how microblogging wonder-site Twitter might monetize and an Associated Press story on a Huffington Post initiative to fund investigative journalism on the nation’s economy. There’s also, a short item on a big deal between Sony and AMC Entertainment to bring digital projectors to movie theaters; this means that movie houses will soon down load movies direct from satellites or the cloud and goodbye film. Such a move has the potential to reshape the traditional movie theater.

Someone said that newspapers are the first draft of history. When it comes to the evolution of the media world NYT's business section has been doing a lively job of late. This is (advertising subsidized) content I would (an do) pay for and would much rather read on newsprint while having breakfast. Keeps crumbs off the keyboard.

A Most Perfect Invention

As newspapers, television and periodicals are under continued assault by the digitization of almost everything, I sometimes wonder about the future of one of mankind’s most perfect inventions: the book.

While devices like the Kindle are useful but niched riffs on the real thing the book (whether hardback, paper or pocket) has a great future.

I’m biased. I generally adore them and enjoy their company.

For a recent birthday I received a copy of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion. An excellent read that spills over with gems.

Here’s Churchill on books:

“If you cannot read all of your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, your will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”

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.