Media business

Video: Gerd Leonhard on the future of content

In introducing the video, futurist Gerd Leonhard writes on his blog:

…this is mostly about media and the future of content: distribution is no longer the core business for media companies. Why open licensing platforms are so important. The move from selling copies to selling access – how will that be monetized? How will content be curated, recommended and then… monetized by the Creators?

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Video: Saving the Silverton Standard

Saving the Silverton Standard - Click to watch video

John Temple mentioned this wonderful story a couple of weeks ago on his blog, and I thought it was well worth sharing.

The town of Silverton, Colorado has saved its weekly newspaper in an innovative way. Read John’s post, or better yet watch the video above to get the story.

Talk about being a jack-of-all-trades! In the video, Mark Esper runs down the list of jobs he holds in the one-person operation. And that doesn’t even include running the Silverton Standard’s website.

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‘Future of Media’ discussion September 24 in Toronto

From digitaljournal.com:

Citizen media news outlet DigitalJournal.com is proud to announce it will be hosting a unique panel discussion featuring some of the most influential leaders in Canadian media. Dubbed “The Future of Media,” the live panel discussion will explore how the mainstream media are implementing user-generated content and what challenges news organizations face in the changing news economy today.

The event will take place Thursday September 24 at the Drake Hotel Underground (1150 Queen Street West) at 8 p.m. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and admission is free and open to the public. Seating is limited and will be on a first-come, first-serve basis. The event will also be filmed and streamed live online, as well as broadcast after the event.

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Charging for online news? ‘That horse has left the barn,’ says Globe & Mail

Phillip Crawley - Click to play video

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch may be keen to build paywalls around his websites, but Canada’s Globe & Mail is not looking to charge for access to online news.

“I think that horse has left the barn,” Globe publisher Phillip Crawley tells the Canadian Marketing Association.

The Globe does, however, see a good business in continuing to charge for online financial information carried by its Globe Investor Gold website.

Watch the 5-minute interview by clicking on the image above.

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This newspaper owner is doing OK

Calixe in Toronto

Times may be tough for some newspaper owners, but Santa Barbara News-Press co-publisher Wendy McCaw appears to be getting by just fine.

Her helicopter-toting 193-foot motoryacht Calixe is in Toronto, drawing plenty of admiring looks.

Ms McCaw and her fiancé, Arthur von Wiesenberger, are co-publishers of the News-Press, a newspaper she purchased in 2000 from the New York Times company.

She is divorced from cellular telephone tycoon Craig McCaw and has been a controversial newspaper owner.

In 2007, a National Labor Relations Board judge ordered the News-Press to reinstate eight employees it had fired for union organizing.

In 2006, six editors quit the paper over editorial ethics, an issue highlighted in the film Citizen McCaw.

Calixe’s helicopter

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Five trends in the reinvention of news

The Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound website this month features essays on the future of journalism.

Clay Shirky kicked things off on Monday reiterating a theme on which he blogged a few months ago – that this is a time of upheaval for traditional news media, with no single clear path to future sustainability.

Today, another journalism professor, Philip Meyer of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, responds with five trends he sees emerging from the current chaos. It’s worth reading his full article but, to summarize, the five trends are:

  1. The marketplace is calling for ever more specialized information. This trend was well established in the second half of the 20th century, and the Internet greatly accelerated it.
  2. The need for processing is increasing at two levels: in the production stage where analysis and interpretation help readers or listeners make sense of the oversupply of data, and in the transmission stage where information is packaged for ready retrieval by the specialized subsets of the audiences that want it.
  3. We are starting to place more value on evidence-based versus source-based journalism.
  4. Dividing journalism into subcategories of specialists has already started a fourth trend: increasing the number of certification programs for journalists.
  5. The leverage for motivations other than profit is growing rather than shrinking. The low entry costs of the Internet guarantee that.

The series is scheduled to continue with contributions from Paul Starr on July 17 and Steve Yelvington on July 20.

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Delivering value to brand advertisers online

Joe Marchese at MediaPost explains why it’s so hard to get brand advertising onto websites at prices that will appeal to publishers.

…the issue with bringing branding online isn’t with the marketers and agencies, it is with the publisher side, maybe with some help from the marketers, of course ;-). Publishers can create “impressions” simply by adding ad units, but adding ad units don’t magically increase the amount of consumer attention in the world, or even on a given page. What publishers have that is of value to brand advertisers is consumer attention. In order to prove valuable to brand advertisers, publisher must find a way to share their audience’s limited attention with marketers in a FAIR exchange of value.

The question, of course, is how can online publishers increase advertising rates to make up for a reduction in impressions.

The marketer’s role in this is twofold: 1. Don’t force publishers’ hands by arguing both sides. Marketers can’t claim they value the opportunity to guarantee the delivery of a message to consumers, then when presented with such an opportunity, cite the lowest ad network CPM rate they have been quoted for negotiation purposes. 2. Build creative that is meant to be a contained brand experience/engagement. Engagements are not traffic generators. People don’t necessarily want to visit a brand’s website at the drop of a hat…

Marchese argues that publishers and ad networks need to do a better job of defining and delivering value for brand advertisers.

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