Video via PaidContent of Arianna Huffington and Mathias Dopfner, CEO of German media giant Axel Springer, moderated by Christine Ockrent, CEO of the government-funded France 24 TV channel, was pitching it to be.
From NY Post via Business Insider:
Ny Times CEO Arthur Sulzberger thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”
Okay, so let us get this straight. The publisher of the New York Times is saying that getting into print journalism is like getting on the Titanic?
“We are trying to convert shipping companies to airplane companies,” said Sulzberger. “Same business: transporting people safely across long distances. Different cost structure, different way of doing business, but the same core business. There is still a very vibrant business in shipping. It’s just not taking masses of people across the Atlantic. It’s now taking families around the Seychelles, or something like that. There will still be passenger ships, but they’re not going to be in the same business. So print will still be here, I believe, decades from now. But will it be the driving force? No.”
I am hoping President Obama was just being diplomatic and polite… a newspaper bill? Let’s first save typewriters.
“The social networks have really never made us money,” said Wells, the paper’s ad, marketing, circ and operations VP. He added that, at times, Bakotopia appears close to profitability, “but never quite makes it.”
The sound of ad dollars evaporating:
The US media has lost more than USD10bn in advertising revenue during the first half of 2009, bringing the industry total down to USD56.9bn. Research group Nielsen says this shows a year-on-year decline in US ad revenues of 15.4% - the largest drop in the decade.
Some of the heaviest drops were in newspaper and magazine advertising with national publications declining 22.8% and 21.2% respectively, attributed to the migration of classified advertising to the web. The Newspaper Association of America recently reported that newspapers had suffered a total loss of 30% of ad revenues in Q2 2009 compared to the previous year.
So-called “spot” advertising - scheduled at short notice - fell by 17.4% in the top 100 local TV markets and even internet advertising, from which Nielsen excludes search engine spending, slipped 1%.
Apparently, long form journalism doesn’t work online, according to venerable Time magazine, says Josh Tyrangiel, Managing Editor of TIME.com.
Read more on Beet.tv. Does the same apply to videos?
TV’s troubles outlined on SAI and in the presentation below:
I think it is quite clear that TV is where newspapers were a decade ago. The future won’t be any different. I’ve touched on this in the past, but it’s nice to see other perspetives.
Rupert Murdoch points out the obvious:
“If you look at the Tribune Company, their big papers—the LA Times, Chicago Tribune—I bet you they’re still making money individually. But they can’t pay their interest bills. Bankruptcy doesn’t mean the end of a newspaper. It just means that someone’s goi
Via PaidContent.org, watch it all here:
Google’s (and Craigslist’s) onslaught of newspapers’ monopolistic revenue streams can be described as nothing less than a barrage of whacks by a multitude of sticks. Sure, it’s not that Google and Craigslist should be blamed for newspapers accelerated slide into obsolescence - they really only have themselves to blame for that - but the fact that Google and Craigslist have developed such profitable - and more efficient - ventures doesn’t help.
If that market assault represents the stick, then the lure that one day Google might buy newspapers - only to say it won’t - is no doubt the carrot, so to speak.
While newspaper executives like to occasionally get up and say some rather novel things about the way online media, publishing and advertising works, and in fact, threaten Google with lawsuits, they do love to think that Google.com is in fact Google.org and will one day buy them out or offer their wretched industry some kind of remedy.
Memo to newspaper executives and owner families: stop dreaming.
I just finished reading biographies on Rupert Murdoch and William Hearst, two of the more formidable entrepreneurs and businessmen in the history of media and publishing, and allow me to paraphrase Warren Buffett:
If Mr Guttenberg had come up with the internet instead of movable type back in the late 15th century and for 400 years we had used the internet for news and all types of entertainment and all kinds of everything else and I came along one day and said I have got this wonderful idea we are going to chop down some trees up in Canada and ship them to a paper mill which will cost us a fortune to run through and deliver newsprint and then we’ll ship that down to some newspaper and we’ll have a whole bunch of people staying up all night writing up things and then we’ll send a bunch of kids out the next day all over town delivering this thing and we are going to really wipe out the internet with this… it ain’t going to happen.
In other words, if Messers Murdoch and Hearst wanted to started a successful publishing venture today, they would be venturing into print, would they? So why on earth would Google - who wants nothing of content let alone print content - do something so backwards.
Google is wisely using this trump card as a “step off” measure so that newspaper executives don’t push their friends in politics to harm Google at newspapers’ expense.
PLAY
