All Things Cahill

The Worm Turns for Big Media

There have been two big events in the media world in the past couple days, and to some extent, I think both have gone largely unnoticed.  The first is that the 2008 Olympics have become a real social media event, such to the extent that it’s been written about almost as much as Misty May’s tattoo or Michael Phelp’s speedo.  From the NY Times (pointer via Churbuck.com) article by David Carr:

“On Friday, NBC spent the day trying to plug online leaks of the splashy opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in order to protect its taped prime-time broadcast 12 hours later. There was a profound change in roles here: a network trying to delay broadcasting a live event, more or less TiVo-ing its own content.”

(Read Churbuck’s commentary on this here…)

It’s true.  I’m running YouTube videos from Beijing on Cycling.com and reading all manner of blogs, tweets, etc. about the festities.  If you want a good look at what Web 2.0 can do for you, look at what Lenovo’s accomplished.  Their SummerGames.Lenovo.com site has 100 athlete bloggers taking us right inside the story.  How cool is it to see video and pics of the opening ceremony *from the inside looking out* or to hear someone like Robert Gesink from Denmark discuss the strategy he employed in the Men’s Road Race (cycling).

Lenovo didn’t stop there, they have a twitter account (Lenovo2008) which has kind of taken the next step from “getting the converstation started” to “keeping the dialogue going” (beware, they do tweet results - and they tend to come 6-10 hours before NBC shows the events).  Then you’ve got their Interactive Podium - which has become my first go to site for Olympics info

So yes, the way that we’re getting our info is changing dramatically - and I’d urge anyone that’s not reading David Churbuck’s blog to do so right now - he’s posting from Beijing and covering the proceedings in a way that is truly unique and utterly motivating.

And meanwhile, back in mainstream media..via Valleywag

That which the newspapermen had been warning us about has finally happened.  Last Friday when the Russia went into Georgia (actually South Ossetia, a mountainous region with around 128,00 70,000 inhabitants - note that Worcester, MA has more than twice as many residents at 175,000) , we were treated to a Google page on the war, with a pin in the map over Georgia.  Savannah, Georgia, in fact.

We’ve been told by mainstream news that if we allow Google to be our newsource, our news is only going to be as good as their algorithm, and in this case, it put Georgia on the opposite side of the world.

The point is that as we push away from the main stream, this is exactly what we lose.  When the story is machine made, rather than vetted by a surly old copy editor, it’s going to get gamed, and it will sometimes be wrong.  In this case, it’s *REALLY* wrong.

On another note, I suggest we all take a look at some foreign news sources today to find out what they think about the Russia/Georgia war - I think we will find their take wholly contrary to that which we are getting from AP which has almost been a single source for US news reporting on the issue.  (Here’s a good bit from Reuters…)

Tags: 2008 olympics, business media, couple days, Google News Error, lenovo, michael phelp, misty may, nytimes, olympics, Ossetia, speedo, Valleywag

One is the Loneliest Number…Community Building 101

Technically, building a community platform is easy: you just get a fist full of developers, hand them a spec, give them a blank server and turn them loose.  At some point in the not so distant future you have your new community site ready for testing.   Soon there after, you’re ready to welcome the real users.

The problem is, you quickly find, even if you’ve got a premium domain, that the world isn’t sitting around waiting for you to open your new site.  It’s time for the real building work to begin; and if you’re in the position most of us end up, there’s probably little or no budget for the community development.

It’s time to go guerrilla!

I’ve decided to take a site with great potential and adopt it as my own for the purposes of proving the guerrilla community building tactics I’m about to share with you - so this article will actually come in a series of installments; think of it as a lab experiment.

The site I’m using is Cycling.com which I’ve chosen as it’s a likely candidate for a bump from the Olymics.  You’d expect that you’d be able to discuss cycling events at a site like cycling.com, right?

First, an overview:

Cycling was relaunched on a new platform, vs. the old park page that had inhabited the site, sometime in late February, and since has had little or no attention from either the site editors, or anyone that could be considered a community builder.  It is built on a hybrid platform of Wordpress and BBPress, with pretty much all of the community functions you’d expect to see:

• Forum
• Personal profile page
• User generated content, including articles, videos, photos, blogs, etc.
• Groups - which also leverage the ability to create private group articles, photos, videos, etc.
• Friend capabilities - add a friend, see friends activities, personal messages, etc.

For the Olympics, we’ve added an RSS feed of the Lenovo Bloggers that gives us access to the cyclists who are blogging.  Very cool (big thanks to David Churbuck at Lenovo).  This gives us a steady flow of new content, which I don’t have to write.  I’ll also be putting up summary articles of the cycling action as the events unfold.  This evening, I’ll be writing up both the men’s and women’s road race events.

Where we are now:

We’ve got the classic problem: no one wants to be the first, and there hasn’t been enough forum traffic to get any gravitas going.  Yes, we get traffic, but it’s almost all unique, meaning that we’re not getting the return traffic. In short, it isn’t working.

Guerilla Community Building 101:

At random, here are some of the techniques I will be using to try to jump start the discussions:

• I’ll be posting on the forum under a couple of different user names, so that it doesn’t seem that anyone is “the first” to join the community.
• I’m looking to enlist some friends who are avid riders to get things going.  I may resort to bribery by making it a condition of my sponsoring them for the Pan Mass Challenge (benefit for cancer) although they all know I’ll contribute no matter what.
• I’ve added a tag line to my email sig as well as the sig I use on my established, successful sites.”Join me on Cycling.com for 2008 Olympics Cycling News, Videos, Athlete Blogs, and Discussions”
• I’ll keep the discussion going by adding new content daily.
• I’ll have an email sent whenever anyone posts, and will make sure that any question is answered within a reasonable time period (to me, that means within 2 hours during the work week and 24 on weekends, but I will aim to be better.
• Graft - I’ll have some gimmee stuff done up to hand out, and put a bounty on best post of the week (once I have some posts).
• Stickers - I’m getting some bumper stickers to both hand out and put on my own vehicles.
• If I were truly an expert, I’d be participating on other cycling sites, acting as the expert, answering questions, and I’d have my url in my sig.
• I’ll be commenting on cycling blogs and you can bet I’ll be using my own url.
• I’ll enlist help wherever I can get it -  Within the company I know there are some pretty serious riders.  I similarly have friends who are riders and I will ask all to give me a couple posts a week for while.
• Early adopters will be cherished - I will find ways to make them feel special and to show them they are truly appreciated.

As such, I’m also asking for *YOUR* help!  If you’re a cyclist, join the site and let’s start talking.  Since you’re coming from this blog and this post, you then no doubt have some community building skills to add, and I’ll be happy to have you on board!

I’ll be reporting back on what’s working and what isn’t.  Of course, as with anything in community development, your mileage may vary.

Tags: community platform, cyclists, lab experiment, olymics, online community development, social media

Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks

Traffic stats - the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy.  This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening.

The truth is that the only true measure is cash.  The cold, hard green stuff, the only thing that slays the monthly mortgage beast, or allows us to consume fossil fuels with reckless abandon.

Now the stats for this blog have got me completely befuddled.  Yes, I can see what is happening, and I see that all too clearly.  The problem is that I have little notion of how I should react.

From the top:

• I notice from from MyBlogLog Stats that I’m getting 300 or so readers a week, up from 50 or so a couple months ago.  Google confirms this.
• The primary referer for those users is Google Images, specifically if you search for “sharks” which will show an image from one of my posts from June in the #2 spot.
• My “One and Done” rate is (the site bounce rate) is threw the roof.  I have lots of traffic that simply isn’t engaged.  They’re coming to the wrong site and leaving.
• That image is in danger of being hot linked all over the web.  Google images is the place people generally go to find image for use on their blog, and frankly, it’s where I found the image in the first place.  I am worried someone will live link, and I’ll end up getting a huge bill for bandwidth (this site is setup to withstand a visit to the Digg homepage or slashdotting).

Eugene and Tom, tell me I should be flattered.  I’m not so sure.  Perhaps it’s experience, perhaps its just my inbred belief that things tend to go from bad to worse, not good to better.  So what are my options:

• Do nothing - my wife’s beliefs aside, this is not my strong point.  I hate inaction…
• Throw in an htaccess rule protecting the images, then sending an adverisement for my site to anyone who links live.  Nice idea, but frankly it’s hypocritical.  I live link…a lot.  I know it’s bad, but darn it, I like having images.
• Go with Tom’s suggestion: start doing more shark content.  Darn it, if they’re coming for sharks, then sharks they’ll get.  I guess this is a good one, except for the fact that I have little access to shark content.  Even though I once was almost shark food…and wear a mako shark tooth around my neck, and have a set of mako jaws on my wall above this very computer, that was caught on my boat while I was captaining, by my father.
• Delete the image and wait for it to drop from Google.

Sadly, here is what I see:

• Writing about sharks = actually making something out of this blog.
• Writing about Social Media = sending lots of smoke up the chimney, and getting readers who’d never, in a million years, click on an advertisement
• Writing about the Death of Print Media = talking to myself - its a dead issue, and no one is reading my posts about it anymore.

I guess if I really thought I wanted to monetize this blog, I’d start writing posts like “Top Ten List of Apple IPhone Apps used by Lindsey Lohan and Paris Hilton while they were Eaten By Sharks.”  Then wait for the diggs to roll in…

That, I think I might be able to do…and for the record, I miss the days when I used to get paid to write stuff like this (and paid well, I might add…)

Tags: airline magazine, digg, google, google images, red headed step child, sharks, traffic stats, web strategy

Social Media - Participation Rates Much Lower Than We Thought…

Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester has a great post up entitled ” Why Some Don’t Need to Join the Conversation“. The basic premise is that even though social media has been so very hot in the past year or two, actual participation by users remains at a relatively low percentage of overall visitors.

To prove my point, let’s start with data: In most markets, (even youth) there are no bars that span 100% for creators. In fact, 18-24 year olds in United States only are creators 39% of the time. 45-54 year olds in UK only create online content a paltry 6%, although they are critics 11% of the time.

So what does this tell us? Not everyone is part of the online dialog exchange. Not everyone will ever be part of the online conversation.

This point has really been driven home lately to me as I’ve become more directly involved in the Reel-Time Community again. In discourse with a few readers, I’ve mentioned “well, you’ve only been a member for the past two years,” only to be told that they were actually lurkers back well into the last decade. In two distinct cases, that means they waited at least 8 years before registering or posting on a site they use almost daily.

So what’s it all mean? My feeling now is that you’ve got to assume that the active participants on your site are the tip of the iceberg. They’re responsible for helping to make the experience rich and vibrant, but you’ve got to realize that many of your dedicated users may actually never really contribute.

New information? Not hardly…we’ve been discussing the lurker factor on online bulletin boards since pre-internet days.

Tags: bulletin boards, forrester, jeremiah owyang, lurkers, participation rates, social media

Media Deathwatch: Tampa Tribune

Jessica DaSilva posted last week right after the Tampa Tribune Editor in Chief Janet Coats announced a major round of layoffs, and their embarkation for a trip in an entirely new direction:

Then she dropped the reality bomb:

“People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” she said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

(Bold added for effect)

The questions from much of the newsroom apparently were the same old saws: “how will this affect profits” and “How will we compete with the other local paper” (quotes not verbatim, I wasn’t there, but are true to what Jessica posts).

I’m glad to hear they got it. Stop chasing a model that obviously isn’t working anymore. Instead of trying to support print as the end all and be all, with it’s incredibly costly delivery mechanism, start thinking about yourselves as content development. Find *all the delivery streams* that can make you money and optimize them. Forget about the ones that don’t make you money.

More from DaSilva’s post:

Janet believes in the news industry. She believes in holding government, media and the public accountable. And she knows there is not another job that makes such a huge difference and weilds such power. News organizations offer society so much, and that is why she cannot take another job - because journalism is her calling, and she knows there is nothing else she could ever imagine herself doing.

“It’s worth fighting for,” Janet said.

Out of all her quoteable moments, those were the words that stuck with me. It was that powerful statement that conveyed the hope, faith and prayers of all journalists worldwide. That maybe this industry can’t be demolished because of its importance and that maybe our love and passion for it could be enough to keep it running.

It’s going to be tough, and no, passion is not enough to keep things running in a broken model. If you combine passion with a willingness to change, to innovate and revolutionize (is that even a word?), you’ve got a much better chance.

To keep on doing what they were doing would be insane. To quote the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo:

They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way

My best wishes to the Tampa Tribune staff, DaSilva and Coats that they can weather the storm.

Tags: content development, dasilva, delivery mechanism, journalism, layoffs, new direction, newsroom, tampa tribune

Twitter, FriendFeed and Overexposure of the Personal Brand

I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee.

That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with.

I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling), Plurk, etc. I’m sure many have convinced themselves that a lot of what they are doing is “creating social media brand awareness” for their products. The truth is that Twitter is more about branding for the personal brand, and as such I find in most cases, it creates a level of over exposure that’s downright harmful to your personal brand.

Think about Jason Calacanis, who was for a while offering all kinds of contests, giveaways, etc. via Twitter, trying to increase the awareness of the Majalo Search Engine (disclosure: I signed up to contribute when it first started, but honestly never did produce any results for them). For a time, it seemed that the Twitter stream I was getting was all Jason, all the time. “I’m going to have lunch with xxx here. Burritos, yum” or something like that. The signal to noise ratio was so high that I really began to dislike what Calacanis was doing. I didn’t even know him and I was starting to develop a strong dislike.

Jason mentioned on the This Week in Tech podcast this week that he has a lot of people who can’t stand his online persona, but actually become good friends when he meets them. And for the record, I really enjoy hearing Calacanis on podcasts, and I’m sure I’d like him if we were to sit down for a beer sometime. However the Twitterati Calacanis was, for a time, utterly annoying.

Similarly Jeremiah Owyang - he’s been a perennial link in my posts, but when Forrester did their conference in March this year, I had to un-follow him for the time being, I just didn’t need to know whenever anyone decided to go to the bathroom at the conference, or what specific CEO he was talking to.

On the other side, I see a lot of the Twitterati catering to prurient interests to build their following. Yes, sex sells, for the most part, you’re selling yourself here. Do you really want the interest that brings? If you’re even thinking about that, you might want to talk to Ariel Waldman, community manager at Pownce, who’s now got her own stalker, with all the fun that brings. Oh joy!

The problem we have is that so many of us are making the mistake off blending our personal and our professional lives. In business, I prefer not to be known for my ability to consume Mojitos…although personally I really like them. Yet, I blend my Twitter posts with a weird mix of both professional and personal information (yeah, do as I say, not as I do).

I think too many of the Twitterati are making the fundamental mistake of overexposing their personal brand via social networking, to their personal and professional detriment. Your thoughts?

Tags: ariel waldman, blogging tools, brand awareness, crossing the line, jason calacanis, jeremiah owyang, personal brand, signal to noise ratio, twitter

Reel-Time.com Acquired By NameMedia

In what has become an utterly bizarre turn of the tables, NameMedia Inc. has bought Reel-time.com - the site I have been working with since 1995 or 1996 as managing editor, head geek and general do-what-needs-to-be-done guy, is now owned by my current employer.

It’s a great thing for Thorne Sparkman, who is now able to repay the investors in the site. David Churbuck (he blogs on this story here)  and I had been almost completely disengaged and had no financial stake in the final buy out. The big winner is honestly the community which now will actually move forward, vs. being in a holding pattern.

Last September, when I posted my final Fishwire Report for the Boston Region (a report of what’s going on for saltwater fly fishermen) I swore it would be the last. Yesterday, I wrote two of them…handling both Boston and Cape Cod. The good news is that I was for the first time able to write them during normal working hours, instead of getting up at 4 in the morning.

Reel-Time.com was a niche online community before anyone had any idea that such a thing could exist. In a lot of ways we invented, identified or were afflicted by, just about anything you now hear about termed as “Social Networking” or “Social Media.”

So as things change, in many ways they stay the same for me.  I’m now back where I began, at Reel-Time.com and after 13 years, I couldn’t be happier.  Now if I can just get some fishing time in.

Tags: david churbuck, reel-time.com, social media, Social Networking, thorne sparkman

Newspaper Deathwatch: OC Register Tests Outsourcing Editing to India

When Reuters did this 6 years ago, we all laughed at them. “Want curry with that?” Now respected American daily The Orange County Register has begun a test using a New Delhi firm for editing tasks. From BusinessWeek:

Orange County Register Communications Inc. will begin a one-month trial with Mindworks Global Media at the end of June, said John Fabris, a deputy editor at the Register.

Mindworks’ Web site says the company is based outside New Delhi and provides “high-quality editorial and design services to global media firms … using top-end journalistic and design talent in India.”

So what’s it mean? In the short term, nothing. In the long term its just one more bit of evidence that the print publishing model for newspapers isn’t going to work forever. In fact just minutes ago The Washington Post posted this:

…We wonder and worry, too. Anxiety has intensified this year with an accelerating decline in newspaper advertising, and it has hit home for us in a particularly painful way this spring, first with the early retirements of scores of colleagues and then, this week, with Len Downie’s announcement that he’ll step down Sept. 8 after 17 years as executive editor.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg last week noted that The New York Times has seen it’s biggest Ad Revenue drop of the year during May.

Ad sales at the News Media Group, including the New York Times and Boston Globe, fell to $130 million, the company said in a statement today. Total sales declined 6.6 percent to $227.5 million as increased circulation revenue couldn’t offset drops in national, retail and classified ads.

The deterioration in May advertising mirrors drops at other U.S. newspaper publishers. Gannett Co., the owner of USA Today, reported yesterday that newspaper ad sales fell 14 percent in May. Those declines follow the industry’s worst quarter on record in the three months through March, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

“Expectations were that 2008 would be similar to 2007, but clearly things have gotten worse,” John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst in Silver Spring, Maryland, said in an interview. “Classified is in a tailspin, and there’s no hope for newspaper advertising until they win back some of that revenue.”

Meanwhile, in the This Week In Media Podcast this week, Alec Lindsey suggested that 2010 was the year that the model would break for the broadcast television market, stating that it would probably be the first year in which a revenue decline would be seen in the Upfronts. So, Mr. Television, your time is coming…

The real message here is that the traditional media model is utterly broken, and while it may be too late for print, television might still have time. My money is on the new online media providers and the networks slowly cutting their affiliates and the cable outlets out of the loop.

Tags: businessweek, decline, downie, executive editor, global media, new delhi, newspaper advertising, orange county register, print publishing, quality editorial, retirements, reuters, washington post

The Shine is off Social Networking

Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark.  I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site.

But it goes far beyond that.  Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting piece showing that social networking may have flattened out, or even may be decreasing. He notes:

Today there are numbers out from comScore that indicate plateauing growth for the big two — MySpace and Facebook — in the U.S. Last week, Revision3 canceled “SocialBrew,” an online video show dedicated to social networking. Meanwhile, Monster killed its Tickle social networking service (first reported in April by TechCrunch), following closely on the heels of CondeNast’s shuttering of Flip and Verizon’s decision to close up its virtually unknown network, which had managed to garner a mere 18,000 members. (Verizon has shifted its community to Facebook.)

And these just might be the tip of the iceberg, for there are way too many me-too networks out there failing to find the traction, and hence the volume, needed to grow their revenues. The lack of monetization will only accelerate this process.

I’ve also been detecting a subtle change in the “conversations” on Twitter lately, with some brave few actually taking a stand against the social networking Kool-Aid.  In one telling argument, it came down to a final comment from the prime Kool-Aid drinker that “You just never got Social Networking,” reminding my of my favorite line from a movie I dearly love, The Duellists, in which the lead character, D’Hubert, (a Napoleonic era officer who has served from Spain to Russia and back) is condemned with the single statement “You never loved the Emperor.”  Indeed, one might as easily be condemned for “Not being Politically Correct,” or whatever the actual flavor of the moment is.

Also, I find the current “Proactive Customer Support” wherein companies monitor social networking apps to create a two tier service network, in which the middle to upper income have a vastly different support experience than the lower middle to poor do.  Think about “Comcast Cares” on Twitter, a Comcast rep, who actively searches out support issues to help fix them.  I’ll bet he’s finding most of the problems are centered in Bel Aire, not in Compton.

Social Networking wasn’t invented by the current crop of Powerpoint wielding wannabes, and it’s been around a lot longer than most would suggest.  Honestly, I see it actually predating the internet, going back to the days of computer bulletin board services (Do you remember them?).  Most of the basic fundementals of Social Networking were really polished in online forums, on IRC, and in the first Instant Messaging Apps.  It’s not utterly new, in most cases, this is just a better presentation.

Some general Social Networking notes:

• “Join the Conversation” - I’m growing tired of hearing this.  If you already aren’t talking to your customers, then maybe there’s a reason.
• Just because Facebook says we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I will loan you money…
• Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

What is new, is that there is now a widespread understanding of Social Networking and it’s overall importance in both web design in particular and marketing in general.  I realize many readers may be rather upset at my saying the Emperor has no clothes, but indeed, that is not what I am saying. I am saying it’s a waste of time to talk about the clothes, rather than the more substantive issues about the Emperor, like taxes, etc.  When the medium is the subject of the message, there is a problem with that medium.

I’ve said it before, I say it again here.  Social Networking and Social Media are not ends unto themselves.  They are aspects of good web design, and should be employed as such.  To use Social Media for Social Media’s sake is a waste of time.  There is a limit to the number of Social Networks I want to be a part of, and I personally would prefer to have more in common with my fellow users than simple ownership of a computer.  Niche communities are the way to go…as Om so brilliantly notes.

Tags: comscore, condenast, facebook, kool aid drinker, social networking service, social networking site, techcrunch, twitter, waste management

The Newspaper Decline - The Side We Don’t See

We’re generally quite happy to say it’s the online revolution that’s killing print media. Sure, it’s had it’s effect, but the truth is that there’s (as there generally is with all things) more to the story.

You see the downturn for print also came at a time when big print publishers (aka “newspapers”) were starting to get a whole lot more information to deal with. They had invested in systems that allowed them to get into some very extensive data modeling which allowed them for probably the first time to get a real picture of their subscriber base (readers) and that understanding caused them to do what any prudent business owner would do, prune out the non-profitable distribution means and concentrate on the most profitable areas.

What happened was that the papers realized that the increased cost of distribution for outlying areas wasn’t worth it, due to the fact that these areas tended to have a much higher cost of reader acquisition (the cost the paper incurs getting you to sign up) and a much higher Churn Rate (the rate at which customers drop subscriptions).

There’s been a lot of mastication on this issue around Blogykistan, but I can tell you this as a point of fact: newspaper system vendors put a lot of time and money into developing newspaper circulation business intelligence systems, and they did play a roll, no matter what anyone says to the contrary. I was a witness while I worked at Atex. It was the grand plan to “high grade” the readership and “treat your best customers best.”

Deep inside this is the real motivator: as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for newspapers to make a profit delivering papers. Fuel costs rise, unions push for more money and slowly, it becomes economically unfeasible to to deliver to more and more areas. Meanwhile, they have pressure from the web where there aren’t the same costs. If gas costs go up, they have a more subtle effect, via energy costs (and believe me, data centers use energy) as well as the pressure for employee cost of living raises.

As Ken Doctor notes in his blog, the newspapers he dealt with:

offered the “cutback to quality circ” argument and said they’d cycle through that within a year or so. In Year Four, it seems like less compelling a reason. Just how much how low-quality circ is out there, anyway, or is the definition of it a rolling phenomenon?

Welcome to the brave new world, the newspapers are going to be riding that horse into the ground. You see, once you start making decisions based upon certain metrics, it becomes incredibly hard to stop.

So really, it isn’t just online that’s managed to hurt newspapers, its a confluence of many factors. Think of it as a “Perfect Sh*t Storm.”

One place it looks like they’ve actually made the transition is at IDG, where their trade magazines have made the transition from print to online. From the NY Times:

Across the company, the remaining print publications still typically play a vital role, but a lesser one — physically smaller and financially diminished. In 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from I.D.G.’s publications came from print and 14 percent online. These days, 52 percent of the revenue is from online ads, while 48 percent is from the print side.

Last year, print and online publications accounted for 70 percent of I.D.G.’s $3 billion in revenue, with the rest coming from its conference business and its technology research firm, I.D.C.

Of course, numbers can be made to lie, and the statements they don’t make leave an awfully big whole in the story.

1. Has overall media revenue increased, decreased, remained the same?
2. What’s the comparision of Ebita for the past few years?
3. What’s the net affect on employment - more or less jobs (I’m guessing less…)?
4. In short, is I.D.G. really doing better now than they were in say 2002?

I don’t mean to sound snarky - I am really and truly hoping this is working as well as the NYT would have us believe. Yet, it doesn’t offer a complete roadmap for newspapers, as I.D.G. is really in the tech news sector, and let’s face it, none of us are willing to wait over 30 days for a full print cycle to get our tech news. We want to get it now, and that’s why they’ve got to deliver online.

David Churbuck has a good take on what’s going on at I.D.G. on his blog.

What I saw was a company in the throes of a difficult transition from decades of print excellence to the more ephemeral but pressing world of online news. Print and online dichotomies were tough, but in the end it was the red ink that pushed the print legacy to one side (InfoWorld went online only) and broke down the old artificial barriers between print and online editorial staffs.

(Disclosure: I was webmaster for Atex, a leading system supplier for the print industry for 7 years where I worked with top minds in circulation and data modeling like Nettie Angotti, Betsy Hofflin and Arnie Korshin, and did contract work for I.D.G. subsidiary CXO Media)

Tags: business intelligence systems, data modeling, newspaper circulation, print publishers, subscriber base, system vendors