Category Archives: media management
A 20-year story of employee ownership comes to an end
Twenty years ago, my family had a problem.
We were the sole and devoted owners of a successful stand-alone daily newspaper in Monroe, MI. But our principle shareholders — my father and his brother and sister — were advancing in years and had no solution in place to transfer ownership into my generation. It seemed we had two options. Read the rest of this entry
Visualize your new local marketing agency
When your comfortable, well-established business model is being disrupted, one of the toughest challenges is looking beyond your old business model to visualize what you must become.
In past posts on this blog, one by one, I’ve pointed out a host of new opportunities that are emerging in local media markets. In this post, I’m going to roll them up into a single new business entity we can visualize and work to develop. Read the rest of this entry
Direct access — a huge disruption of local media
For local news media, the most crippling disruption served up by the Internet isn’t in news — it’s in advertising.
And it’s not just other players getting the ad spending we used to get, although there’s plenty of that going on.
The more insidious advertising disruption is that local businesses need less and less advertising than they once did. Read the rest of this entry
How to make money on mobile
Sounds like a great session for a publishers’ conference, doesn’t it? It’s a big topic for local media businesses these days, as mobile web traffic surpasses desktop traffic for more and more newspapers, magazines and broadcast stations.
That’s why I spent an afternoon searching the Web recently. Read the rest of this entry
Local retailers need e-commerce, so let’s give it to ’em
A recent email from Internet Retailer grabbed my attention.
Its purpose was to plug their new annual Top 500 Guide — a huge directory packed with stats on who’s big in e-commerce, who’s growing market share and who’s not.
But what caught my eye was their take on what’s new in the data.
For years, it said, previous guides had shown big-box stores getting drubbed in e-commerce sales by web-only e-tailers.
“But,” the email said, “…that began changing in 2013, when the chains closed the gap by growing their online sales by 16.7%, taking market share away from manufacturers and catalogers…. Read the rest of this entry
The hardest part of saving news: Changing the definition
Lots of people understand that the traditional business model around news is breaking down. Far fewer realize it’s not just the business part — advertising — that’s broken. It’s also news itself.
Why is this so hard to understand?
A planet full of people is going from a daily diet of a newspaper and a couple of news broadcasts to constant access to almost everything there is to know. Inevitably, this is causing people today to want and expect different things from their time spent on content than people did 20 or 50 years ago.
But what we produce as news has hardly changed. Read the rest of this entry
Content marketing: Time to jump on the opportunity
Infinite bandwidth.
For those of us in traditional media, it’s the source of our problems, and it’s also the uncharted space of our new opportunities.
With bandwidth rising toward infinity and costs falling to near zero, it’s enabling all sorts of new content models to eat our lunch. “Free” digital bandwidth has enabled all of our disrupters, from early ones like Craigslist and Facebook and to newer ones like BuzzFeed, Instagram and SnapChat. And more will keep coming. Read the rest of this entry
The audience game is forever changed; will we change, too?
Media folks, can we all agree on this statement?
- We’re in the audience business.
If you disagree, we need to talk, and we’ll do that in a minute.
But first, here’s the nut graf:
As an audience business, we’re overdue for a drastic rethink of what we do. Too often, we’re still doing 20th-century audience thinking amid the starkly different realities of the 21st century. We’re getting pounded on the audience front, and we have to figure out what audience strategies will work in this new environment. Read the rest of this entry
Local media need to join the fight for in-store traffic
In the local media business, whatever hurts retailers hurts us, too. They’re feeling a big hurt right now, and we need to help them fight back.
That big hurt is a steady and continuous decline in store traffic. This means loss of sales, and that leads nowhere good for them — or for local media.
Three values crucial to your disrupted business
When your business is undergoing major disruption and must change direction, how do you get people on board? How do you win hearts and minds to the new strategies needed to survive and thrive?
MediaReset 