A couple of recent news bites regarding New Media trends:

Study: Half Of Realtors To Cut Newspaper Ads In Favor Of Free Websites
From MediaNewsDaily
Wednesday, Aug 30, 2006 8:01 AM ET
MORE THAN HALF (51 PERCENT) of real estate agents are utilizing free online classified sites such as Craigslist and Google Base and plan to cut their newspaper advertising budgets because they no longer deem it necessary, according to a survey of an undisclosed number of agents released Wednesday by Classified Intelligence. The survey, part of a new "Real Estate Advertising 2006" report, which analyzes spending by Realtors in print niche publications and newspapers; direct marketing; local newspaper Web sites, and national and local real estate sites.

Toronto Star launches downloadable paper:
From journalist.co.uk

Posted: 30 August 2006 By: Oliver Luft
The Toronto Star is launching what it claims is North America's first downloadable afternoon newspaper.

Star PM will be available for download at 3.30pm every weekday from September 5, with a final update at 4.15pm.

The free eight-page paper will be available as an A4 PDF, for ease of printing, and will cover the traditional elements of breaking news, sports, and features from Canada's largest daily newspaper.

Four additional special-interest pages will also be available for download, focusing on sports, people, lifestyle and youth culture.

Star PM seems to be similar to the Guardian's G24. In June, the Guardian became the first major UK newspaper to launch an afternoon downloadable edition.

G24 is five PDF sheets that are updated every 15 minutes throughout the day and can also be printed by readers.

Envisioning a future and investing in it

Tim Porter in his First Draft blog has an interesting entry titled: Right-Sizing the Newspaper.

Newspapers must begin learning and using the tools of competitive enterprises:
- Where do we want to go? (Vision).
- What steps must we take to get there? (Goals and Priorities).
- What skills must we have to get there? (Capacity).
- Do we have enough staff with the right skills in the right places? (Resource allocation).
- How will we know if it's working? (Measurement).

Newspapers need to envision a future and invest in it.

New Media Indicators

Collection of snippets that indicate the direction of new media:

6/9/06: Topix.net, the news aggregator, starts offering free classifieds like Craigslist.

6/5/06:
"U.S. Internet advertising surged 38 percent to a record $3.9 billion in the first quarter as marketers moved additional dollars to the Web." - Internet Advertising Bureau

"The internet will overtake national newspapers in the battle for advertising spending in the UK by the end of the year." - The Guardian

5/16/06: Gannett buys local search vendor Planet Discover

4/06: The Bakersfield Californian stopped running AP stories online last November. (source: Editor & Publisher)

4/13/06: NEWSPAPERS WILL BECOME PRIMARILY ONLINE products at varying paces over the next decade, according to Ken Doctor, a lead analyst with Outsell Inc.

4/10/06: Starting May 1, fans can go to ABC.com to watch each of the season's final four episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, Commander in Chief and Alias on the morning after the episodes air on network TV.

4/8/06: Headlines are being optimized for Google and other spiders: "Part of the craft of journalism for more than a century has been to think up clever titles and headlines, and Google comes along and says, 'The heck with that,' " observed Ed Canale, vice president for strategy and new media at The Sacramento Bee.

Comments on the newspaper industry by Lauren Rich Fine

From comments made by media analyst Lauren Rich Fine at the Akron Roundtable.
(source: Daily Clips)

U.S. newspapers will make less money than in the past, but they'll remain viable if they can adapt to the changing needs of advertisers and readers.

The Internet, which has been on the scene for about 12 years, has dramatically increased competition for all ad dollars and readers or viewers, Fine said.

``It's directly competitive with every single medium out there,'' she said.
Newspapers are losing their most profitable accounts -- classified advertisers -- to the Internet.

And even when newspapers sell classified ads on their Web sites, they get about 30 cents for every $1 they got for print classified ads, Fine said.

Newspapers are not picking up new readers. Traditionally, people subscribed when they took out their first mortgage, Fine said.

People younger than 30 are turning to the Internet and electronic media, she said.

Newspaper readership has skewed even more toward older and more affluent people, and ``it doesn't look like it's ever going younger again,'' she said.

As a result, Fine said, she predicts the industry's profitability will shrink from last year's average of 21.5 percent to about 16 percent in 2011.

Newspapers ``still make a ton of money,'' she said, but they clearly are not generating enough profits to grow.

Layoffs and downsizing are not the answer, she said. ``You cannot cost-cut your way to profitability in this business,'' Fine said.

Local content and the ability to deliver professionally edited stories will keep newspapers alive.

``You don't have to be everything to everyone,'' she said. Papers the size of the Beacon Journal need to rethink their mission and may have to forgo some national and international news, she said.
The Beacon Journal has shifted its focus to local news, she said. ``My sense is that

Competing for the Future (book review)

Competing for the Future
by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad

From the "Learning to Forget" chapter of this book:

To get to the future, a company must be willing to jettison, at least in part, it's past. Someone once remarked that "God created the world in six days, but He didn't have an installed base."
What part of our past can we use as a "pivot" to get to the future, and what part of our past represents excess baggage?

The best way to ensure that one is not at risk from more imaginative competitors is to be the first to conceive of alternate value delivery mechanisms, the first to cannibalize one's own producst and services, and the first to get to the future, even when that future undermines past success. As Andy Groves at Intel puts it, "You have to be your own toughest competitor."

The authors pay tribute to the influence of Peter Drucker in the preface of the book.

Some interesting sections of the book:

Could we sustain a debate for a full day about the implications of a trend that has the potential to transform our industry?

On getting to the future: Imagine having a foot on each of two parallel ladders - on called investment, the other industry foresight. The goal in competing for the future is to make sure each foot never gets more than a rung or two above the other. As additional insight into the best route to the opportunity is gained, investment commitments are escalated. If the foot on the investment ladder gets many rungs higher than the foot on the insight ladder, a fall is as likely (misdirected investment) as it would be if the foot on an understanding ladder got to far ahead of the foot on the commitment ladder (being preempted by a competitor).

On Stretch: defining leadership more appropriate to our fast-changing industry to provide employees with a new stretching ambition. Stretch gives birth to the motive for resource leverage.

2006 Webby Awards - Newspaper

This year's webby award winners in the Newspaper category:

WEBBY AWARD WINNER
AGENCY/CREDITED ORGANIZATION
Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Ltd
http://www.guardian.co.uk

PEOPLE'S VOICE WINNER

washingtonpost.com washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com

NOMINEES

Guardian Unlimited Guardian Newspapers Ltd
http://www.guardian.co.uk

The Chronicle of Higher Education The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/

The Village Voice The Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com

The Wall Street Journal Online The Wall Street Journal Online
http://wsj.com

washingtonpost.com washingtonpost.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence in web design, creativity, usability and functionality. For more info you can visit their web site: http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=10

wsj.com has success with "open house"

From Mediapost article by by Wendy Davis on Tuesday, May 2, 2006 6:00 AM EST

HOPING TO ENTICE CONSUMERS TO pony up for access, the online edition of The Wall Street Journal Monday dropped its paid subscriber wall until May 10.

The initiative marks the third time in its 10-year history that Dow Jones has held a WSJ.com "open house," making the site available for free and without registration. The previous two efforts--last October and in October 2004--resulted in more than 10,000 subscribers, L. Gordon Crovitz, president of Dow Jones consumer media group, told reporters in New York Monday morning.

For the complete article click here...

NEWSPAPER CHAINS FACE TOUGH FINANCIAL CHALLENGES

From PBS's web site:

NEWSPAPER CHAINS FACE TOUGH FINANCIAL CHALLENGES

"If I'm a journalist, trying to cover news in the Boston area, and all of a sudden -- you know, I have been working for 15 years, and my audience in print has been declining at 1 -- you know, 1 percent, a point each year, the Internet comes along, and my audience has suddenly expanded again.

And, if you take "The Boston Globe," for example, their Web site, Boston.com, has four or five times the reach that "The Boston Globe" does. And, so, as a journalist, my potential to have an impact and knit a -- knit a community together should have gone up. "

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june06/paper_3-9.html

CNN launches new design

CNN has launched a new home page design. www.cnn.com

Here is their article about it:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/26/cnn.com.homepage/

and here is a link to their old page design in case you want to compare:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:XBvJ7pr5NuMJ:www.cnn.com

Is the printed word dead (1978)?

Among other things, Peter Drucker analyzed newspaper and magazine operations as a consultant. The following was written by him in 1978!:


It is not true that the printed word is dead. What is dead is the mail carried word. What matters to editor and reader is the message, not the carrier. Putting ink on heavy paper and then carrying that paper over long distances is about a hundred times more expensive and a thousand times slower than sending the same symbols electronically to have them imprinted inklessly on some sort of light-sensitive plastic or paper in the subscriber's home and at his command. To ship three pounds of paper in order to deliver one-tenth of an ounce of ink makes little economic sense and could only be justified as long as there was no other way.

Technically all the elements for electronic graphics exist, including the technology for color images. The electronic magazine is bound to become reality. Even if postal transmission were not extremely labor-intensive, not even counting the hideous cost of door-to-door delivery, electronic transmission would offer enormous economic advantages and equally enormous advantages in flexibility, diversity and editorial individuality.

Paraphrased from Peter F. Drucker's autobiography: "Adventures of a Bystander".

Remarkably prescient, don't you think?

Say yes strategically

I had been thinking about how important it is to find ways to accomplish something instead of finding reasons not to do it, when I came upon this quote from Keith Hammonds:

"The person who says yes strategically, who says yes in service of the business, is so much more powerful then the guy who says no all the time".

Keith Hammonds, Editor at Fast Company

Change happens brick by brick

Change happens brick by brick

“Here’s the problem with gradual: It’s chronic, insidious and subtle. Half of all Americans are overweight? I can tell you how we got that way: one french fry at a time.We didn’t foul the Love Canal in a week. That took a generation of dumping chemicals.Your company didn’t hire 30 or 100 or 1,000 noncontributing employees all at once. That took years.

“The problem with gradual is that we don’t notice the damage until the damage is extreme. And what happens when we finally do notice? Panic sets in. We put all our efforts into finding the quick fix.

“But here’s the point of gradual. You don’t win an Olympic gold medal with a few weeks of intensive train­ing. There’s no such thing as an overnight opera sensation. Every great company, every great brand, and every great career has been built in exactly the same way: bit by bit, step by step. If every element of an organization gets a lit­tle bit better every day, then the organization will become unstoppable.”

–Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the Ideavirus

Book Review: On the Profession of Management

Another excellent Peter Drucker book, this one is a collection of some of his most important articles previously published in the Harvard Business Review.

Here are some paraphrased noteworthy quotes from the book:

"A decision without an action is just a good intention"

"Build the execution of the decision into the decision itself" pg. 30

"The future can be shaped by purposeful action" pg. 43

"Direct resources and efforts towards opportunities for economically significant results" pg. 67

"Resources tend to be erroneously allocated by transaction instead of results, by what is difficult instead of productive, by yesterday's problems rather than by today's and tomorrow's opportunities" pg. 69-70

In a previous post reviewing the book Confronting Reality, I mentioned that I had noticed parallels between Drucker's business model related to confronting reality and the model presented by the Confronting Reality authors. I happened to read these two books back to back and it struck me how similar the basic premise of the models was. This led me to wonder how much on the topic of business models is original and how much has been inspired by Peter Drucker's writings on the subject.

Drucker's calls his model a Theory of Business and it's composed of 4 specifications:
1. The assumptions about environment, mission, and core competencies must fit reality (sound familiar?)
2. The assumptions in all the areas have to fit one another
3. The theory of the business must be known and understood throughout the organization
4. The theory of the business has to be tested constantly

Next, I'm working on his autobiography, "Adventures of a Bystander"!

Steve Outing has left Poynter

Holy Cow! Steve Outing has left the Poynter Institute to form his own company. Read More...

Here is a link to his new blog:
http://www.steveouting.com/

Confronting Reality (book review)

Book Review: Confronting Reality by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan

This book proposes a business model that focuses on the need to understand the realities facing your company before you can actually execute a strategic plan that makes sense. (The authors have another bestseller titled: Execution)

I liked the examples they presented of companies that were either successful or not, in interpreting the realities they were facing.

I relate this to New Media because part of what I'm trying to figure out is, what are the realities that we face?

I was very interested to see in an interview with the two authors they referred to Peter Drucker's "The Practice of Management". I found parallels between Drucker's business model related to confronting reality and the author's model found in this book. (more on this in an upcoming post...)

The authors define a three-part business model composed of external environment, internal operations and financial targets. This model guides an organization to ask itself these three basic questions:

1) What's the nature of the game we're in?
2) Where is it going?
3) How do we make money in it?

Some quotes from the authors:

In order to execute, you have to have a clear perception of reality. Maybe that sounds obvious, but it's painfully clear that a lot of leaders don't. --Bossidy and Charan

You can't take anything for granted, especially success and time-proven solutions. You can't rest on your laurels; you have to be skeptical enough to accept that what lies ahead may be very different from what you're used to. --Ram Charan

Newspaper advertising. A destination, not a distraction.

NAA has recently launched a $50 million dollar advertising campaign targeting advertisers with it's 'Multi-media' offering:

Independent consumer research shows that newspaper advertising is a destination for most consumers, not a distraction to be avoided. For them, advertising is a desired part of the content. In a way, it’s the original form of branded content. In the language of the Internet, it’s opt-in advertising in an opt-out world.

Click here for the press release

Click here for the campaign's web site including materials you can use

Checkout TV

Your client on TV at the local Wal-Mart:

Ads are interspersed with news and other content on flat screens placed by checkout counters at Wal-Mart stores. Customers are targeted as they wait in line to check out, with a focus on items that are available near by and are typically considered impulse buys.

Community-specific content is customized at the store level through a partnership with local newspapers, Bindelglass says. The newspaper’s logo is on the screen during broadcast of the content they’ve provided.

Link to full article on Medialife:
http://medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_1256.asp

Cool flash ad

This was on the Software Development Magazine web site.

If you look on the top right corner you see the edge of the page begging to be clicked on (see image on the left). When you do, you get the advertisement that is "behind" the page (see the image on the right).

Identifying the future

They say that most artists only become famous after they die. For me that's what happened in relation to Peter Drucker, one of the wisest of business philosophers. It wasn't until after he died that I became interested in his writings due to all the exposure his death got in magazines and newspapers.

Here is a paraphrased extract of some of his writings on Innovation:
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The most important work of the executive is to identify the "future that has already happened", and to develop a methodology for identifying and analyzing these changes.

The important challenge is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities.
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Highly appropriate for the field of New Media, don't you think?

Reading this has motivated me to start this blog so I can keep track of:

1. The trends I'll be identifying and analyzing
2. The learning process I'm going through as a "new" New Media Director
3. Other management, business and technology topics I enjoy reading about

Victor...