Mar
6
The Media Regeneration Game
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
The last two days at Digital Media Strategies (Kings Place, London, 4-5 March 2014) have been amongst the best that I have spent in a conference hall in a decade. And I have wide experience to call upon! But Neil Thackray and Rory Brown and their team at the Media Briefing company pulled out all the stops to advance the game on their inaugural effort last year, and in the process pulled over 340 delegates and some first class “big names” and an even better class of “previously unknowns” from this diverse industry. And they really set me thinking: where were all these newspaper bosses and magazine tycoons during the long years when “it will never happen here” was the rule. Some still looked a bit nervous – Simon Fox, CEO of Trinity Mirror, caught in the headlights of a tigerish interrogation from Thackray, looked as if he were about to confess to war crimes at HMV and indecent assault on “The People”, but most of his colleagues were self-assured to the point of near-arrogance.
That at least could be an explanation of Mike Darcey, the News Corp CEO and his decision to spend 8 minutes of his own allotted time taking apart what he fancied to be the strategy of the next speaker, Andrew Miller, CEO, The Guardian Media Group. At least this precluded further dwelling upon the comparative failure of paywalls and the comparative lack of impact of digital advertising. And it enabled everyone to say that they were faithfully following the user experience. Yet it had the odd effect of making News Corp into a sort of John the Baptist warm up act for the Guardian, to which one felt that Andrew Miller responded by indicating that he had a better plan, but not revealing fully what he had up his sleeve. To those in the audience inured to the media having no plan at all, this was a tonic. At the moment the Guardian seems to be a connectivity junkie, rightly glorying in its content re-use and the amount of referral traffic it gets, celebrating its brand positioning as a global voice of liberal values and trying to draw the advertising it can get on this pitch. But I get an underlying feeling that they know that advertising is not the answer, and the room sat up when the topic turned to Guardian Membership.
Clearly if the Guardian can monetize its community effectively then it may be possible to get millions of people to subscribe to its values and buy into aspects of its content feed. Andrew Miller showed a picture of C P Scott and laid tributes before the lares and penates of great journalism, as indeed he should (and neither he nor I care that Edward Snowden appears to be a right wing Republican with a wholly eighteenth century view of the rights of the individual). However, if you have large populations of like-minded people with a strong community ethic then you can create – Guardian (Eye)witness. I well remember, while chairing Fish4, the frustration of the regional press competing with Mr Miller as he distributed free AutoTrader software to every used car dealer, enabling them to organize their inventory and upload easily – to AutoTrader. As a Guardian Member will I get the equivalent, thus broadening the scope (and reducing the cost?) of Great Journalism. Too early to say it yet, perhaps ? The editors would be talking quality control and the journos would be talking to the National Union of Journalists, but…
But at least we are all talking now. As a digital participant from 1980 and an internet – watcher from 1993, I am interested by how much of the industry response was fear and loathing. Hearst, at this conference a great example of digital thinking, spent the early years of the internet buying medical databases and B2B applications. Brilliant purchases, but what did they say about management’s view of their existing media futures? In the same terms, DMGT has turned itself in these time periods from being a newspaper company into a B2B player. No harm in that, but could earlier action have preserved the original structures. Or maybe the media is best re-invented not by its current practitioners but buy complete outsiders – great examples in this conference from Buzzfeed and from Business Insider? And then, what do we make of what seems to be a very European trend at present – letting the staff who know the markets create and test the ideas for recreating media and beyond media services.
I had heard a little about Sanoma’s regenerative Accelerator programmes before, and so was full of anticipation when Lassi Kurkijarvi covered the stage with energy and enthusiasm. With both internal and external venture activity he had a lot to cover. It is now fairly common for media players to invest in start-ups and develop incubators (Reed Elsevier have been venture capital investors for a decade; Holtzbrinck have their seed corn funding and efforts like Macmillan Digital Science and Digital Education; Gruner und Jahr spoke of their activities here) but getting 150 employees into a boot camp and encouraging ideation? Only for the Finns? Not at all, said Lassi. Here was a a planned process of open innovation starting with a mass kick off meeting, a webinar-based process, staff making quick pitches to get support for ideas, an initial selection of 20, crowd sourced selection of 5 for a boot camp experience and the result is 3 ideas which the company is now developing. So look out for Spot-a-shop, Huge or ClipScool – they did not come from Silicon Valley or Tech City, Old Street, but they may be none the less valuable as they express the knowledge of customers built up within a diversified media conglomerate like Sanoma.
So what does this mean? That media corporations can be regenerated from within? What would we have given to know that in 1993!
Jan
26
…And there is nothing in the Newspapers either…
Filed Under Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Now, I don’t want to sound cynical, though with the waters rising in winter England, it feels like the time to rail at the Gods or start building the Ark. Not that I was at Stonehenge for the winter solstice last week, but from the press coverage the event received you would be forgiven for thinking that the Government had resigned and been replaced by a Druidic theocracy. Then again, would we notice?
Not if we were reading the newspapers, would be one appropriate answer. As the network impact becomes ever clearer, the verdict on Britain’s press – and many other peoples as well, may well be “too little, too late, too irrelevant, too hard to manage”. In other words, they have lost their original position in the cycle of societal reporting, commentary and opinion-forming and failed to find another. Yet every news programme on television and radio has an anachronistic “what the papers say” slot, and our pollsters and politicians still use them as a measure of success or failure. For goodness sake, Why? It is about as useful as consulting the Delphic Oracle and about as relevant. Since 90% of the UK press support the party currently in power, with only the Guardian and the Independent (and the Mirror at elections) outside the Tory huddle, they form an unchosen gallery to whom politicians play, despite the fact that the newspaper reading population has been falling annually for a generation, and now represents less than 5% of the population.
These thoughts are a preamble to what was intended to be a look at where the newspaper industry is on the path to accord with a networked society. It comes from someone who has just changed smartphones – and has loaded the apps for Twitter, LinkedIn, Breaking News, the BBC – but stopped short of a newspaper. I have the FT and the Guardian on the iPad – but increasingly regard them as leisure reading. So I was fascinated to see that Trinity Mirror had withdrawn its daily tablet edition after seven months. When this was launched, initially as a business edition of the Birmingham Post, we were told that it would ” re-invent business journalism within the regional press”. One comment, probably from a staff member, resonated for me on the www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk website. “Enough is enough, Coventry” wrote: “It was a stupid idea from the start. We were told by the powers-that-be that this would be the future and that it was going to be the prototype for new platforms across the whole of Trinity Mirror. But yet again the bosses have proved we have little or no idea of what we are doing in the digital world. Our digital strategy is as old and tired as the people dictating it to us”.
This tirade was still swilling around in my mind when Tony Gallagher got fired or resigned, or just abdicated (its really hard to tell from the press coverage). For those just joining, Mr Gallagher, who seems to be a good journalist, editor of the Daily Telegraph, and an honest and upright soul, fell out with the powers-that-be over digital strategy. He went, without having quarrelled with either his boss or with the Chief Content Officer, Jason Seiken (pronounced Psychen, apparently) who came from saving PBS to save the Telegraph. Mr Seiken, also apparently, sees the future of the Telegraph as a lifestyle video company and reporters (“Telegraphs got Talent!”) are interviewing as presenters. But didn’t the previous Editor-in-Chief, Will Lewis, think video is the future of the Torygraph? That’s right, he is the one who also got fired and has now replaced Lex Fenwick, who resigned, as commander-in-chief of Murdoch’s bewildered Dow Jones division. Somehow British executives who cannot understand market needs here (pace ex-BBC boss, Mark Thomson, now at the New York Times) get even bigger jobs in the US. Could “Enough is Enough, Coventry” be right?
So much is apparent, so much is unreal. Like the Guardian at long last selling its 50.1% stake in AutoTrader. The deal, announced this week, is said to be worth over £600 m, and will provide the Scott Trust, the owners of the Guardian, with further funds to offset the Guardian’s losses. The buyer is Apax, the private equity owner of the balance of the equity. Watch out for an IPO here with a £2 billion price tag. AutoTrader (not to be confused with the US operation of the same name) got it right in terms of digital transformation – they created a new platform replete with things that people who buy cars want to do, and they made it cover the full transaction activity so that it was a solution, not an advertising medium. The man who ran it, Andrew Miller, is now CEO at the Guardian (but could be in line to run the Washington Post, at this rate). But still, despite its apparent success online, the Guardian is not a networked citizen, though it tries harder than most. Mr Miller’s preoccupations will include how on earth he turns EMAP, also co-owned with Apax, into an additional bulwark for the Scott Trust: the Guardian is still losing money.
The beginning of the networked world for the former newspaper people is not simply a matter of a competitive rush to a digital market, throwing everything at experimental services. One can agree that iterative experimentation is vital. But even experiments have to start somewhere. The attractive part of the Seiken story is that the Chief Content Officer is described everywhere as “reclusive”. Maybe that is what we need: some good quality thinking about things that need to happen in our networked lives that concern the way we use “news” or any other content to speak to each other. Could be video, could be Vice, could be Buzzfeed, but it means starting again. Let print hold out as long as owners can afford it, but we really do have to get serious now about inventing the future – or buying it from someone who has done it already.
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