Blog Archives

Four keys to leadership in times of change

When your organization needs large-scale change (and what disrupted media organization doesn’t?), how do you get it done?

Leader heading the team. Lead by example concept.Terabytes have been written about the strategies and tactics that legacy media organizations need. I’ve written my share, too, here at MediaReset.com. But I’ve seen precious little written about how to lead and manage effective change to carry out these strategies.

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After media disruption: ‘The Age of Knowing Everything’

Let’s look beyond the waves of media disruption we’re experiencing these days. Let’s try to imagine the end state, when media disruption gets done.

Wait … will it ever get done? Yes, I think so — at the time when virtually everyone on the planet, during every waking moment, has instant access at will to virtually the entire body of human knowledge. (Maybe in sleeping moments, too.) Read the rest of this entry

Desperately needed: More innovation on the audience side

Just how disrupted is the old newspaper business model — the model that’s centered on providing news to a geographic market?

A lot more disrupted than many people in the news media think.

The local media industry is scrambling to innovate around sales. This is seen, for example, in the race to create new digital sales teams and agencies selling digital marketing solutions to small and medium businesses. And the industry is innovating around costs by consolidating, outsourcing and otherwise whacking at the high costs of producing and distributing its products.

But I don’t see a lot of innovation happening around the content model that’s been the basis of the newspaper business for the last 100 — even 200 — years. Read the rest of this entry

Price hikes on content — and then what?

As more and more newspaper companies charge more and more for their content, it’s important to ask — how are they using the money?

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Explore ‘adjacencies’ to discover new business models

Breaking out of the mindsets of traditional business models is one of the toughest challenges for any disrupted industry. And it’s one of the most important, because the old mindsets keep us from seeing new opportunities that are staring us in the face.

In the newspaper and magazine industries, we definitely need new ways to see opportunities. At last May’s World Congress of the International News Media Association, James T. McQuivey of Forrester Research presented a good one: Adjacencies.

We’re putting it to use in a practical process at Morris Read the rest of this entry

50x current information = lots more disruption

If you’re involved in traditional media and your mind wasn’t boggled by last month’s IDC report, “The Digital Universe in 2020,” it must be that you didn’t see it.

So let’s take a look, and then let’s consider the implications.

Each year, IDC — a division of EMC — attempts to estimate the amount of digital data created, replicated and consumed that year, and to project the growth likely in the “digital universe” by the end of the decade. Read the rest of this entry

Doubling down on digital at Morris — Part II

In Part I, I described how Morris Publishing Group came to be committed to creating a separate digital sales division in our markets. But at that point, we still had big questions. Exactly what would we sell, and how would we sell it?

To figure out the answers, Read the rest of this entry

Doubling down on digital at Morris — Part I

You’ve probably heard this before: If you want to have a shot at holding and gaining digital market share in your local market, you need a separate digital sales force.

But “separate” can have a wide range of meanings. Read the rest of this entry