Posts tagged ‘Business Models’

The maturation of the digital news business hasn’t been kind to the Associated Press. In addition to fighting a pointless battle with Google over the distribution of AP articles in its news channel and taking potshots at aggregators, the iconic news association has been dumped by CNN, as the network pushes its own newswire offering. On top of those strategic missteps it’s obvious the world has passed by a service that, not long ago, was indispensable to journalism.

In 2010, it’s pretty clear that the real associated press is comprised of thousands of strong credible voices breaking news and doing sharp analysis on any topic you can name — not a vast network of expensive reporters churning generic content and a revenue model based on overcharging for the privilege of distributing that content. Finally, there’s a service out there that recognizes that fact and is set to help get those voices more eyeballs, especially those eyeballs that are still glued to the proverbial fish wrapper, all while reducing costs for newspaper publisher.

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The media business, you may have heard somewhere, is in upheaval. Anyone with a stake in the production of content needs smart dissection of business models, careful parsing of data and, of course, pointed investigations that cut through the hype that always accompanies technological change. Too bad strong acts of journalism are few and far between, with most media writers chasing their own tails.

There have, however, been a few standout pieces of reportage and analysis of late, a few of which we’ve assembled below for your convenience.
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I recently spoke at the annual conference of the Canadian Media Directors Council in Toronto. It was a good event as these things go, with an impressive speaker lineup (Bill Buxton, Microsoft’s principal researcher, was particularly fascinating), and the only reason I squeaked onto the agenda was that when they asked me if I’d do it, I was the editor of Ad Age – a job I left at the end of 2009 to come here to Breaking Media – and had just written a column on the future of media companies that someone at the CMDC found interesting.

As it turned out, the audience of 700 senior media agency and media owner executives had to listen to the manager of a small, startup digital media company that is still taking its first few tottering steps, telling them how they should prepare their considerably larger businesses for the future. I guess I’m lucky that they were Canadians – too polite to tell the presumptuous little British bloke to pipe down.

The main point I tried to get across (and I think it sort of worked), is that advertising-dependent media companies need to think of themselves as being in the business of providing marketing solutions. Don’t get me wrong. We here at Breaking Media love ads. They help pay our bills and we believe we deliver  an effective suite of advertising services to a growing set of clients who love our highly-engaged, loyal and affluent audience. But a problem arises when the end-all and be-all of a company’s revenue stream is ad sales.

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