Technology companies are launching big advertising campaigns as they wager on a pickup in business spending and jockey to have their products stand apart in an environment where new customers are hard to find and competition is intensifying.
On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.
One of the proverbial axioms of the “publishing world” is that sex sells. Pornography, in particular, is a massively popular business. Indeed, where porn goes, so goes technology. At least this is the oft-repeated claim. So what does it mean for the universe of print publishing when porn mags are having problems?
Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print–the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital.
If you’re a tree, you’re probably feeling pretty good right now. We’ve long known that the traditional newspaper–a hard-copy compendium of the previous day’s events, printed on an obscene amount of wood byproduct–was terminally ill. But two of 2008’s big media developments–the Christian Science Monitor’s plan to kill its daily print edition outright, and the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press’s decision to radically scale back their print operations and refocus online–suggests that the traditional newspaper’s death will come sooner than anyone imagined.
I’ve got a few questions for American magazine publishers: Are you in or are you out? Do you still believe in the very act, the very business, of publishing? And do you still believe in presenting carefully selected words and pictures–expertly produced information–for a targeted audience?
The January 2009 issue of PC Magazine will mark a monumental transition for the publication. It is the last printed edition of this venerable publication. Of course, as with any technology-related enterprise, this is not the end, but the beginning of something exciting and new.
Between now and 2010, UBS analyst Matthieu Coppett sees a perfect storm brewing for the ad spending market–a 4.8 percent drop in TV advertising, a six percent drop for radio, 5.3 percent for magazines, 1.4 percent for outdoor, and 8.8 percent for newspapers. In fact, the the only area of growth he sees is the Internet, and that’s still down three percent from his old target of 13.4 percent.
The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day.
It’s funny how things change. Five years ago I wouldn’t have given second thought to producing print material with digital printing. No, only offset printing. The thought of a brochure, annual report or catalog printed as if it had come out of Kinko’s–excuse me, FedEx Office–was just unbearable, and even the much-hyped and pushed feature [...]
Oh joy, another high-profile prognosticator predicting the demise of the American newspaper–and this time the soothsayer is no less than Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. … Well, if Steve Ballmer can so cavalierly predict the end of an industry, so can we. By 2018, there will be no more Microsoft.
I’m a noise junkie. I used to be a news junkie, but I’ve hung out with the world’s top journalists enough now to see that the good ones are noise junkies. They are the types that head into a crowded party and listen to pitch after pitch (noise) and drunken story after drunken story (noise) to find something that their audiences will find interesting (news).
Three centuries after the appearance of Franklin’s Courant, it no longer requires a dystopic imagination to wonder who will have the dubious distinction of publishing America’s last genuine newspaper. Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.
In 1991, Stewart Alsop, the editor of InfoWorld and a thoughtful observer of industry trends, predicted that the last mainframe computer would be unplugged by 1996. Last month, IBM introduced the latest version of its mainframe, the aged yet remarkably resilient warhorse of computing. The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. … A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.
1. Get out of the newspaper business. Culturally, you can’t look and define your business as the delivery mechanism. The business is truly content and distribution across all pipes. The asset is journalists and the brand. A print-based property is just one of the many ways to distribute the digital bits. Most newspapers have in charge of their leadership “newspaper men.” They should turn over the reins to young execs, women and people with diverse backgrounds, who are Web-based and consumer savvy and will NOT be wed and enamored with the print-based delivery system of the past.
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