Rock Paper Scissors
(Media • )
Poor Rupert Murdoch (figuratively, I mean.)
Just a few years ago, it seemed, he had the world on a string. Acquired the largest social network web site in the United States. Nabbed the nation’s premier business newspaper. Perceived and filled the demand for an official right-wing media headquarters, as Neo-con popularity soared during George W. Bush’s first years.
Funny how the passage of time changes things. Today Rupert’s MySpace.com is a Facebook wanna-be that lost more than $140 million last year. Revenue at Rupert’s News Corp. newspaper division was down 18% for the company’s most recently reported fiscal quarter, and 13% at Rupert’s reconfigured Wall Street Journal despite all the money the company saved through layoffs.
And, whether due to audience contempt over an ultra-conservative movement that built us the foundation for today’s Great Recession or simply the bad effect it had on consumer purchasing power and advertising, operating income at Rupert’s television segment was down 54% in the quarter ended Sept. 30, compared to the previous year.
So when Murdoch declares that he’s going to erect a web site pay wall around the Journal and all his other digital news holdings, when he intimates he’ll strike an exclusive deal with Microsoft to allow only that company’s inferior search engine to index his web content, when he suggests he’ll hold NFL playoff games hostage unless you cough up more money in your monthly cable bill – well, now you can understand where he’s coming from.
News Corp. still is making a bundle from its film and cable divisions. But its newspapers and broadcast network are making giant sucking sounds. Murdoch blames it on the recession and a corresponding decline in advertising, but he’s not willing to wait for spending to rebound. No, he’s going to force new consumer spending, recession be damned – online behind a wall, or via pay-TV – in exchange for Glenn Beck and the rest of the wonderful content his papers and broadcast network pumps out.
Yes, there is a recession and average Americans aren’t spending like they used to. Yes, clearly, as a result many businesses have decided not advertising their existence is a darn good strategy for success.
But the recession just coincidentally occurred after a major wave of American broadband Internet penetration – about 228 million users now online, more than 74% of the population, according to Nielsen Online.
Here’s the thing that neither Murdoch nor the other captains of Industrial-Strength Media seem to have yet grasped: the Internet allows users to choose for themselves which “stories” or “pages” or “shows” they “watch” or cast aside. Unlike most of the media past, the audience no longer is captive.
That, in a nutshell, is why newspapers, then broadcast TV and then, probably, cable TV, are destined to die in their present forms.
As I believe I’ve adequately demonstrated here, we don’ need no stinkin’ newspaper to get the news. That goes for business news, too, Mr. M.
And it should go without saying that we don’t need Fox TV “reality” shows or slanty fake news to get stupid. Any broadcast TV crap or cable shopping channel can do the job with equal efficiency. It turns out (as I learned after the NFL allowed Art Model to kidnap the Cleveland Browns and spirit them out of Cleveland), you don’t even need professional football to enjoy a Sunday afternoon.
Truth be told, the media advertising model can work just fine, and likely will do so eventually on the web albeit on a scale that may not satisfy conglomerates – once advertisers learn how to pitch their goods and services without annoying prospective customers.
Meantime, as a wide variety of business segments already have learned, the Internet and the web are great levelers. They have a way of eliminating the need for entire layers of stuff related to distribution, sales middle-men, publishers. The musician also becomes the distributor. The manufacturer also is the retail sales outlet. The reporter is also the publisher. The movie production company has a free YouTube channel.
What I think this means is, ultimately more people than ever before will be employed in what could roughly be called media. But in little handfuls spread across thousands of tiny companies, instead of hundreds of thousands of people being employed by a handful of giant media conglomerates.
Rupert and the rest of the Old Media can become rocks if they so choose. But everyone else will be the river.
I think the results should be pretty entertaining.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 30, 2009, 09 13 am
Weather Dweebs
(Media • Climate)
Normally I would consider it silly providing you with a local weather forecast. But today everyone continues – as they have for the past two days – to pretend that we’re to have mostly sunny skies with highs in the lower 70s.
We aren’t. It’s overcast and 50 as of 1:45 p.m. Yet if you check with the National Weather Service, the local news experts at the Houston Chronicle or their counterparts at KHOU-TV, you’re still told that by gosh it’s Sunday afternoon, so you are enjoying a sunny day with a nice southern breeze and balmy 70-degree temps.
Earth to Texas weather dweebs: Someone stick your toe out the window. It’s a wind-blistered world we’re a-livin’ in.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 13, 2009, 02 07 pm
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They Shoot Editors, Don't They?
(Media • Verbatim)
But at the Dallas Morning News, they torture them first.
Yesterday the newspaper that once provided watchdog journalism across the state of Texas began turning supervision of what’s left of a decimated newsroom over to the advertising department.
Below, the Morning News editor outlines Reason #43, Why I Am Ecstatic I No Longer Work As A Newspaper Journalist:
From: Mong, Bob
Sent: Wednesday, December 02, 2009 4:41 PM
To: Everyone…
Subject: Memo from Bob Mong and Cyndy Carr…Colleagues:
Today we are launching a new business segment structure as the next step toward becoming the most comprehensive and trusted partner for local businesses in attracting and retaining customers and continuing to generate important, relevant content for our consumers.
To better align with our clients’ needs, we will be organized around eleven business and content segments with similar marketing and consumer profiles including: sports, health/education, entertainment, travel/luxury, automotive, real estate, communications, preprints/grocery, recruitment, retail/finance, and SMB/Interactive.
Each segment will be led by a General Manager (GM), a newly-defined role, each reporting to Cyndy Carr, charged with analyzing and growing the business by developing solutions that meet consumer needs and maximize results for our clients. Their responsibilities will include sales and business development. They will also be working closely with news leadership in product and content development.
In the Sports and Entertainment segments, the senior news editors will report directly to the GM while retaining a strong reporting relationship to the editor and managing editor. These collaborations will bring new products that consumers want to the market more rapidly. We are proceeding knowing and trusting each other’s distinct roles and responsibilities in the same way our News leadership and our Publisher have worked collaboratively for years.
This business/news integration is a progressive step and is strongly supported by the news leaders of both the Sports and Entertainment segments:
“As a segment, we have a lot of advantages usually associated with a start-up,” said Bob Yates, deputy managing editor and Executive Sports Editor. “We should be able to move much more quickly to take advantage of opportunities. That comes from having greater autonomy that gives us the freedom to develop both advertising and content solutions.”
“As a journalist who has participated in many new product launches, I’m excited about the idea of working with a business partner on an arts and entertainment segment,” added Lisa Kresl, deputy managing editor for Lifestyles. “Our high quality, credible content will reach new audiences in a variety of formats.”
The new segment leadership team is comprised of a very talented and accomplished group of business professionals:
Entertainment and Travel/Luxury Segments: Tracy Martin Taylor is the GM for the Entertainment and Travel/Luxury segments. As part of the new GM role, Tracy will be responsible for overseeing content. Tracy will continue her role as Quick Publisher and assume the role of FD Luxe Publisher. Prior to joining The News in July, she was in sales management at Clear Channel Radio and marketing at Wherehouse Music.
Sports and Health/Education Segments: Rich Alfano is the newest member of our management team. Rich worked for Times Mirror Magazines and served as President of Yachting, Saltwater Sportsman and Golf Magazine. He has most recently served as Senior Vice President/General Manager and SVP/Strategic Marketing for Practitioner’s Publishing Co./Thomson Reuters. His professional success and experience in several industries makes him ideally suited to lead two of our high-growth segments. …
As The Dallas Morning News approaches its 125th anniversary in 2010, our business stands at a critical crossroads. Our success depends on employing bold strategies to evolve our organization: our home delivery pricing strategy (on which Jim and John updated us on Monday), our continued dedication and investment in important and relevant journalism that makes a difference in our community and the ongoing development of our product portfolio have all played a role in changing our approach to how we do business.
This restructure and strategic integration with news, along with the many other strategies we’ve put into place this year to better serve our clients and consumers, position us for significant growth and stability as we head into the new year.
Cyndy Carr Bob Mong
SVP/Sales Editor
Uh-huh. The quotes above totally convince me that the Morning News sports and entertainment editors have been waiting their whole careers for the opportunity to have their every move second-guessed by a radio advertising sales manager.
Note that “clients’ needs” and “readers’ needs” are not even close to the same thing. As usual among big-newspaper executives, the perceived importance of readers’ needs is approximately that of a rat’s ass.
Boy, daily newsroom budget meetings probably will be a real blast when the new ad new bosses stand up and ask exactly how they’re supposed to “maximize results for our clients” given what the editors are mistaking for the day’s top news stories.
And you can bet really big money the Dallas Morning News will be doing way more investigative business reporting than ever before under this new organizational structure, especially if, say, an advertiser car dealership is caught in, say, major fraud.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 03, 2009, 08 44 pm
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The First Little Pig Built His Pay Wall Out Of Straw
(Media • Be Afraid)
Wow. I mean it.
Hearst Corp. finally did it today, rolling out the long-threatened bad-ass Houston Chronicle Pay Wall.
Yeah buddy, you can still read most of your chron-generated local news and sports online at chron.com, and continue photo-tracking the elite Houston drunks staggering around local clubs.
But from now on, or so it would appear, if you want the good stuff, you’re going to have to fork out $2-$5 a week, depending on how much soggy newsprint you feel like picking out of the ditch.
And exactly what exclusive content do subscribers get in exchange for the bucks?
Exactly one Rick Casey column on the Texas governor’s race, plus something labeled “Mexico” and bearing the headline “When hunters become hunted.”
Is that awesome or what?
In truth, this is so sad that it saps me of the will to pursue my natural inclination toward aiming numerous fat paragraphs of cruel and sarcastic satire at chron management. Almost.
In truth, Hearst has laid off so many journalists that they don’t have enough bricks left to build a pair of paperweights, let alone a paywall.
Although I would be remiss if I didn’t note that a few weeks back, chron fortified their collection of neighborhood “news” reports, by redesigning them as individual blogs under the heading “Ultimate” – not a bad move in at least a couple of ways. For one, they’re finally taking advantage of their sports data, providing local high school football coverage that few if any of their local news competitors provide.
On the other hand, chron has turned the keys over to the public in some portions of these sites, but they’ve apparently laid off too many people to afford a babysitter. At Ultimate Fort Bend and Ultimate Pearland, for instance, “Your News” has consisted for the past few days of lots of posts containing dozens of affiliate hot-links to hotels and tourist destinations all around the world – nice work for a spammer if he can get it. At Ultimate Katy, someone named “cephalexinmg” wants “to tall you about this cephalexin 500mg . my second post will be about this.”
But I digress. As for the far less-than-half-baked pay wall strategy on chron’s part, I find myself simply baffled. Adult business people all got together in a conference room and came to a consensus that this would produce desirable results?
In the meantime, I continue to hone my little recipe for obtaining a full measure of online Houston, national and world news without benefit of any Hearst product whatsoever. Feel free to give it a spin.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 22, 2009, 09 20 am
