Friday, August 12, 2005
The Influence Model
Writing is on the wall (or web) for business press
Interesting piece from South Africa's BusinessDay by Anton Harber on the decline of general business media, linked above.
Key grab: Someone tell radio and television producers, for heaven’s sake, that business people who care about numbers such as the platinum or R514 bond price will monitor them live from wherever they are in one electronic form or another. They do not wait for the 6pm radio news or 7pm television news.
Much of this is true of a lot of our print and magazine coverage as well. It simply does not add enough value to the flood of excessive information already drowning the business sector.
Most interesting is a reference to Philip Meyer's book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. Meyer has graphed out the sale of the last print copy of the last US newspaper to some time in the first quarter of 2043.
Read the piece to see a summary of Meyer's three possible strategies for newspapers (and media, I think, in general): harvesting, going electronic or building an influence model.
I think most newspaper companies are in the harvest mode, paying lip service to the electronic option.
grab: The option he argues for is to invest in what makes newspapers profitable: their influence and standing. In other words, invest in better quality products that the market cannot do without, and people will continue to want and need newspapers.
Chimeric? Maybe, but there's a big truth here. Must-have information, analysis and opinion is going to remain valuable regardless of format or delivery mechanism, and audiences will seek it however it is presented. Commodity information will be just that, and be delivered however the audience wants it to be presented.
UPDATE: see MediaLife's story on ad page declines among the US general business magazines.
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Interesting piece from South Africa's BusinessDay by Anton Harber on the decline of general business media, linked above.
Key grab: Someone tell radio and television producers, for heaven’s sake, that business people who care about numbers such as the platinum or R514 bond price will monitor them live from wherever they are in one electronic form or another. They do not wait for the 6pm radio news or 7pm television news.
Much of this is true of a lot of our print and magazine coverage as well. It simply does not add enough value to the flood of excessive information already drowning the business sector.
Most interesting is a reference to Philip Meyer's book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age. Meyer has graphed out the sale of the last print copy of the last US newspaper to some time in the first quarter of 2043.
Read the piece to see a summary of Meyer's three possible strategies for newspapers (and media, I think, in general): harvesting, going electronic or building an influence model.
I think most newspaper companies are in the harvest mode, paying lip service to the electronic option.
grab: The option he argues for is to invest in what makes newspapers profitable: their influence and standing. In other words, invest in better quality products that the market cannot do without, and people will continue to want and need newspapers.
Chimeric? Maybe, but there's a big truth here. Must-have information, analysis and opinion is going to remain valuable regardless of format or delivery mechanism, and audiences will seek it however it is presented. Commodity information will be just that, and be delivered however the audience wants it to be presented.
UPDATE: see MediaLife's story on ad page declines among the US general business magazines.
