Media Business Day [Linky]
Local Media in a Post Modern World: Failure at the Top is one of the best articles I’ve ever read. It breaks down why newspapers, TV and radio are all losing money left and right. They think they’re in the newspaper or TV or radio business, they’re not, they’re in the advertising business. Every media executive should read it.
In many ways, it’s almost too late to be saying this, but if you run a television station, a radio station, a newspaper or any other form of local media company, your online competition is Google, not the guys you’ve been competing against all these years. That is a simple fact. We may not like it, but to deny it is to ignore the heavily-armed battalions slowly surrounding your position.
In order to compete with Google, local media need to develop a local advertising system that is better than Google’s. There’s your magic bullet.
Rob Curley over at the Las Vegas Sun has a tremendous post detailing how they got their own sports show on local television. Curley is someone in charge who gets it. It’s innovation and new products that are going to save newspapers not layoffs. It’s attitudes like these that are needed to move forward.
Things like “All In” aren’t strategies that are likely going to pay off over the next three months. If you’re doing this as a big payoff for the next fiscal quarter, I would tell you stay as far away from doing something like this as possible.
I’ll be the first to admit that what we’re doing might not work — just like it’s completely obvious to most folks that the current system/economics for print newspapers no longer works.
Whether “All In” ends up working — from both a financial perspective and a brand-marketing perspective — I can guarantee that it won’t be the last chance we take at Greenspun Interactive. And if it does fail, I can guarantee it won’t be our last failure.
This type of entrepreneurial attitude in upper management is what’s going to move media forward.
And lastly I can’t not mention Canwest’s recent woes. It’s now a penny stock, trading at $0.88.
That’s from a 52 week high of $8. However I wouldn’t worry too much about Canwest folding in the next little while. Large portions of it’s $3.7 billion debt are due until 2011.
With Canada’s largest English language newspaper publisher and largest television company trading at such levels it kinda punctures the whole convergence thing idea that was so popular awhile ago. Convergence hasn’t protected Canwest from the credit crisis or declining ad revenues.
I’m not much of a business analyst so you should definitely check out these other articles on the subject.
Advice to Publishers: Go Private
How does Canwest survive the credit storm?