| To make it a bit more fun to read, this edition of the Digital Deliverance newsletter is borrowing a content design technique borrowed from two of the most frequently read newspaper websites in the world: vg.no and dagbladet.no. Those of the competitors Verdens Gang and Dagbladet in Oslo, Norway, a nation often tied with Japan as having the world’s most avid readership of newspapers. While the average reader of a U.S. newspaper website might visit it once every week or so, the average reader of a Norwegian newspaper websites will visit it one or twice each daily. Such avid readership is a boon for any publication, yet what makes Scandinavian newspapers notable is that their websites are smart enough to realize that people use the same contents differently online than they do in print.People like printed newspapers to have the most important stories atop the front page, generally followed by separate pages for different categories of news (general news, business news, sport news, etc.) Most of the world’s newspapers transplant that content design philosophy into their websites: the top stories of the day are atop the Home Page, then lower on it separate sections listing the stories in each different category of news. However, most Scandinavian newspapers know better than to do that online. They do will place one or two of the day’s most important stories atop the Home Page, but beneath that they will intermingle–often in no apparent order of importance–stories from all different categories of news. You might think such a non-traditional and un-hierarchical design for content might frustrate the website’s readers. Instead, the reader, having to scroll down the entire Home Page (which in Scandinavia can seem to be the size of skyscrapers), serendipitously tend to find stories that they hadn’t expected to interest them. Data from these newspapers’ websites clearly indicates that their average reader is more engaged with the newspaper’s contents than is the case on websites with traditional, hierarchical layouts of contents. (Click to VG and Dagbladet to see for yourself. You needn’t know the Norwegian language to see what I mean). Of course, Verdens and Dagbladet each use multi-column Home Pages, though this is a single-column newsletter (a limit of the software I use). But let’s see if that design can work here. Rather than start this newsletter with a signature essay as I normally would, it being the longest part of the newsletter, I’m breaking that essay into sections and interspersing the sections among other contents. Let me know what you think Here is the first part of this edition’s signature essay… |
| When the News Industry Failed to See the Future |
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| The essay atop the previous Digital Deliverance newsletter was about why the daily newspaper industry is evaporating: it failed to recognize that, as the Informational Era is superseding Industrial Era, Individuated Media is superseding Mass Media as the predominant means by which people obtain news, entertainment, and other information. The question I am then most frequently asked is, what can the media industries do now to adapt and take advantage of this epochal change? Forgive a teaser, but I will answer that specific question in the next newsletter. In order to understand what needs to be done, we first must look at exactly when the media industries failed to perceive the future. The media industries ably adapted to how the global media environment changed during the 1990s, yet then essentially stopped adapting to new changes beyond circa 2004; which unfortunately for those industries has been the period of greatest change in the history of the media environment. That fault lay not with the executives of the media industries’ traditional operations (i.e., printed periodicals, over-the-air or cable or satellite broadcasts, etc.) but with these industries’ executives in charge of online and other new media (colloquially ‘digital’) operations. Many of the subscribers to this newsletter either are or were those executives in charge of online and other new media operations at their media companies. If that’s you and bothered by the last sentence of the paragraph above, hold onto your pension forms. I’ll continue this essay after we update some events that have occurred or gotten worse since the last edition of this newsletter… |
| Updating the Cataclysm Affecting the News Industry |
 Decades of Revenues Burning Away |
| “A Darwinian Moment”: The Coronavirus Is Blowing Up the Media LandscapeWWW.VANITYFAIR.COM – Vanity Fair magazine compared the COVID-19 pandemic to the media equivalent of the asteroid that collided with the Earth and destroyed the dinosaurs. It writes that although the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008-9 was “remembered as exceedingly dark days for the media business” in which “Roughly 20% of daily newspaper advertising quickly evaporated, never to return”, in “Just a little over a month into our national COVID-19 crisis … the ever-fragile news industry has been sucker-punched harder than, well, maybe any other time in the history of the news industry. As one executive put it, ‘This really is a Darwinian moment.’ ” |
| U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008WWW.PEWRESEARCH.ORG – Since 2008, Although there might be some other industries that could continue to function with such losses, the bottom line here is that a loss of 23,000 U.S. newspaper journalists means a loss of perhaps 20,000 news stories daily, stories about accidents, public events, investigations or scandals, or even school lunch menus. That’s a total of 7.3 million U.S. national, regional, and local news stories per year not seeing the light of day or brought to public attention. |
| Local newspapers are suffering, but they’re still (by far) the most significant journalism producers in their communitiesWWW.NIEMANLAB.ORG – “While local newspapers accounted for roughly 25 percent of the local media outlets in our sample, they accounted for nearly 50 percent of the original news stories in our database.” |
| Coronavirus continues to take its toll on the media industryWWW.CJR.ORG – The Columbia Journalism Review surveys the extent of the destruction in the news industry. And here quotes several traditional media executives and scholars about what perhaps could be done, most of whom don’t seem to have much clues to why their industry became so financially weak over time or what to do. |
| Nearly three quarters of US senators call on Trump administration to help local newsWWW.CNN.COM – The crisis has become so bad that 74 of the 100 U.S. senators, despite this very partisan time, have called on President Trump to use federal governmental agencies to help local news operations. |
| Why our newspapers might not survive the contagion of coronavirusAMP-THEGUARDIAN-COM.CDN.AMPPROJECT.ORG – Nor is this crisis confined to the U.S., as the Guardian of London reports. |
| The government is becoming U.K. news publishers’ most important clientDIGIDAY.COM – Indeed, Digiday reports that government advertising spending (such as for legal advertisements and announcements) has become one of U.K. news publishers’ most important sources of revenues. |
| Hit by sharp ad decline, India’s newspapers cut jobs and salariesIN.REUTERS.COM – Reuters reports that India, which had been one of the world’s only growing markets for printed newspapers, has seen sharp advertising declines at newspapers, resulting in cut jobs and salaries. |
| With print audiences and advertising plummeting, Indian publishers plan to pivotWWW.INMA.ORG – ShareThe result of that in India is that publishers are now wrestling with how to shift their production to online editions, the International News Marketing Association reports. |
| South China Morning Post to cut pay of top management and put staff on three weeks unpaid leave as part of cost-cutting measuresWWW.SCMP.COM – I’ve not yet seen any stories from the People’s Republic of China about a financial crisis in their newspaper industry (all Chinese television broadcasters are owned and operated by the government), except in autonomous Hong Kong where the English-language South China Morning Post is reporting its own furloughs and pay cuts.management |
| Don’t Waste Stimulus Money on NewspapersWWW.POLITICO.COM – In an opinion piece published on Politico.com, long-time media industry analyst Jack Shafer, who has witnessed the long-term decline of the newspaper industry, argues that the U.SA. government would be wasting taxpayers monies to prop-up a dying industry. |
| Sorry, Jack Shafer. You Got This One Wrong! – Editor & Publisher MagazineWWW.EDITORANDPUBLISHER.COM – Which prompted a knee-jerk and rosy reaction from Mike Blinder, who recently purchased Editor & Publisher, the trade journal of the U.S. newspaper industry. |
| Beer May Have Been a Better Bet Than NewspapersWWW.WIRED.COM – I think that Blinder could have made a much better investment with his money than purchasing the trade journal of the U.S. newspaper industry. As Wired magazine notes, ten years ago I wrote a column noting that investing in beer kegs had between 2000 and 2009 proved to be a better financial investment (no kidding) than newspaper stocks. Ask the nation’s largest daily newspaper publisher, the Gannett Company, whose stock was trading at $25 per share in 2015 compared to 86 cents now. |
| NPR Cuts Executive Pay as Corporate Sponsors’ Payments FallWWW.NYTIMES.COM – Even not-for-profit news media is in crisis. As The New York Times reports, National Public Radio is cutting its executives’ pay as its corporate sponsorship payments fall. |
| Journalism Relief Fund for coronavirus reportingBLOG.GOOGLE – One organization that is helping to fund some local news operations is Google, which is ironic first because it and Facebook have captured more than half of all local online advertising dollars spent on news in local communities, and second because its one of the Individuated Media companies that is replacing Mass Media such as newspapers as people’s predominant means of obtaining news nowadays. |
| Journalism Emergency Funds Around the World.WWW.LINKEDIN.COM – By the way, Vincent Peyrègne, the CEO of the World Association of newspapers, lists all the journalism emergency funds that have been created around the world to deal with this crisis |
| When the News Industry Failed to See the Future -2 |
| Why earlier in this newsletter did I cite 2004 as the approximate year after which the media industries stopping perceiving the epochal changes in the media environment? Because I often use examples from the United States, which is the world’s largest media market. Two thousand and four was the year during which the number of U.S. consumers who used the Internet via broadband access surpassed 50 percent. Prior to having any Internet access, consumers’ supply of news, entertainment, and other information, was limited to whatever periodicals and broadcasts were available locally from their home antenna, cable television system, and newsstands or any periodical deliveries to their postal mailbox or directly to their doorstep. When they gained basic Internet access, which involved connecting their home computers to their voice telephone landlines, it freed them from those local delivery constraints and gave them access online to all of the world’s periodical and broadcasts. However, the hallmark constraint with dial-up Internet access was that they usually had to be online for only periods of time lest it monopolize their voice telephone landline. Gaining broadband Internet access freed them from that constraint; it gave them ‘always on’, high-speed access to the Internet, allowing them to gorge themselves with contents if they so wished.The media industries’ executives in charge of ‘digital’ operations loved broadband because they thought consumers would access media companies’ websites more frequent, for longer, and much deeper than they ever had before. Those executives had fought arduous battles inside their companies to get those websites built and operational during the 1990s when online was still considered a sideshow to printed or broadcast traditional forms of media. These digital executives believed that the opening years of the 21st Century would be their golden era. What they failed to foresee was that consumers’ access to contents changing from relative scarcity to surplus would instead the traditional media industries’ packaging of contents—the content choices in published editions, the broadcast programs’ schedules, the choices of songs selected for musical albums, etc. , indeed, the very packages of contents that these digital operations executives were porting from print or broadcast into online –become obsolete. During the first decade of the new century, what became increasingly obvious was that consumers had begun using broadband in ways contrary to the rosy expectations of media companies’ digital operations executives. For example, the Nielsen media ratings company by 2007 was reporting that the average user of The New York Times’ website was visiting it only 4.05 times per month and during those visits spending an aggregate total of 20 minutes and 20 seconds visiting 27 webpages on the website. Nielsen also was reporting that this website had 13.8 million monthly (i.e., use it at least once per month) users who in aggregate viewed 370 million webpages per month. It was these latter figures that digital operations executives touted, monthly user figures 13 times larger than the circulation of the printed daily newspaper’s circulation. Yet those executives overlooked the facts that the average user of that website visited it less often than once per week (30-day month ÷ 4.05 visits is equal to once every 7.4 days ), spent only five minutes per visit, and saw fewer than 7 webpages per visit, usage that is less monthly than a reader of the printed edition makes daily. And usage data for the websites of newspapers of less renowned than The New York Times were worse. Although the website NYTimes.com nowadays has around 80 million monthly users, that website’s average user data are still approximately the same as then. When the average user of a website visits it infrequently, the website generates advertising revenues infrequently compared a website whose average user visits it daily or a printed edition read daily. Likewise, if the average user’s use of the website is not deep. Moreover, an average user who uses the website no more than approximately once per week, and even for only five minutes per visit, will likely be unwilling to pay at least $15 per month to do so. So, it’s not surprising that after eight years of limiting users to seeing only 10 stores per month (only five stories per month in recent years), The New York Times has been able to convince fewer than 4 percent of its websites’ user to pay a monthly subscription fee to access more online. From 2000 to 2010, the U.S. newspaper industry saw its online revenues climb to $2 billion per year, then level off at $3 billion in the decade since. During all that time, the U.S. newspaper industry’s revenues from printed edition declined from $44 billion to less than $19 billion as tens of millions of printed edition readers shift to accessing newspaper contents online. Now let’s pause momentarily for something completely unrelated … |
| Online Typography Beyond Plain Text |
| YayText: A text styling tool for Facebook, TwitterYAYTEXT.COM – ShareHave you ever wanted to b̵r̵a̵k̵e̵ ̵ break 🅣🅗🅔 🅑🅞🅤🅝🅓🅢 ⓞⓕ ⓤⓢⓘⓝⓖ 🆄🆂🅸🅽🅶 🅾🅽🅻🆈 plain text 𝒾𝓃 𝓅ℴ𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓃ℊ𝓈 𝓉ℴ 𝖙𝖔 𝖘𝖔𝖈𝖎𝖆𝖑 𝖒𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖆 𝖘𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖘, 𝕤𝕦𝕔𝕙 𝕒𝕤 𝔽𝕒𝕔𝕖𝕓𝕠𝕠𝕜, 𝕋𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣, 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕀𝕟𝕤𝕥𝕒𝕘𝕣𝕒𝕞? 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙝𝙖𝙥𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙚𝙢𝙥𝙝𝙖𝙨𝙞𝙨? Then first type your message into yaytext.com, then paste your message wherever you want. uʍop ǝpısdn ǝʇıɹʍ noʎ sʇǝן uǝʌǝ ʇI |
| When the News Industry Failed to See the Future -3 |
| Although consumers demonstrably use newspaper contents less frequently and less deeply when online than they did with those same contents in print, isn’t that simply because they use all contents that way. The answer is both no and yes. Nielsen and all other media ratings companies report that consumers online consume more media contents than they ever did before, more than they did with printed periodicals or over-the-air or cable television broadcasts. Yet the difference that they now use many more providers of content than before, and they use each less often and less deeply than that provider experience with the consumers of traditional (i.e., ‘non-digital’) media. Given broadband access to the websites of all the world’s publishers, broadcasters, corporations, universities, and governments, plus blogs and social media, each consumer is hunting and gathering the best mix of contents that match that individual’s own unique mix of needs, interests, tastes, and beliefs. Most consumers online first began doings by using search engines. Most media companies’ digital executives initially mistook search engines as merely library card catalogs of the Internet, the means by which those executives might obtain more online user traffic to their companies’ websites. They didn’t realize that search engines are effective means by which billions of consumers could obtain the individualized (i.e., individuated) mix of contents that same media companies weren’t giving each of those consumers. And starting in 2003, an entirely new species of media companies was founded with software applications to help those consumers hunt and gather for such individuated mixes of contents. Social Media allowed like-minded individuals to discover, share, and compare contents according to each user’s own unique mix of ‘Friend’s, ‘Likes’, ‘Follow’s, and ‘Share’s. Most media companies viewed social media as merely supplements to Mass Media, rather than integral parts of what was superseding Mass Media. In 2005, MySpace.com surpassed Google, the world’s most popular search engine, as the most visited website in the U.S., until during 2008 when it was surpassed by Facebook.com. Since then, social media companies have become the predominant means by which people under the age of 40 obtain news, entertainment, and other information. Each of Facebook’s 2.5 billion users, a mass audience beyond that of any Mass Media company, simultaneously sees a different mix of contents than every other of those users–a truly individuated feed. In addition to search engines and social media, other new species of Individuated Media have been arising. Companies such as Pandora, Flipboard, Spotify, and others, have been founded to give each consumer an individuated feed of music, news, or other specific categories of media contents. Individuated Media companies, such as those of the search engines, social media websites, and sector-specific ones, have experienced popular growth unprecedented by the Mass Media industries of the Industrial Era, even those of the last decade of the 20th Century. The fulminate rise of Individuated Media companies is a direct result of the consumers’ access to contents changing from relative scarcity to surplus during the past 20 years. In the fourth section of this essay, we’ll examine what the U.S. newspaper attempted to do online before companies such as Google, Facebook, CraigsList, Monster,com, Twitter, etc. , existed. But first, let’s examine a bit more of the conflagration underway now. |
| Advertising, Firebreaks, and Paywalls |
| Whenever this month a graduate student tells me that the COVID-19 quarantine is causing online newspaper subscriptions to increase, I remind them that pandemics aren’t sustainable media business modelsAdvertising has been the major source of most U.S. periodicals and broadcasters revenues. Because consumers are quarantined and not shopping in local stores, much of retail advertising has collapsed. |
| News Publishers Are Getting More Traffic, but Advertising CollapsesWWW.BARRONS.COM – News Publishers Get More Traffic but Little Benefit as Advertising Collapses |
| Increased Media Consumption During Pandemic May Not Translate to Ad Revenue GrowthCONTENT-NA1.EMARKETER.COM – With the coronavirus pandemic keeping most people worldwide at home, media consumption is up. But with an economic slowdown crashing markets and supply chains disrupted by the virus, many advertisers are pulling or pausing spend—meaning increases in media engagement aren’t translating into increased ad revenues. |
| Moreover, except for perhaps manufacturers of disinfectants, face masks, or hospital gloves, few advertisers that do still advertise want their ads associated with the pandemic. |
| Marketers Worry About Ads Near COVID-19 Content, but Consumers Are Less FazedCONTENT-NA1.EMARKETER.COM – Marketers Worry About Ads Near COVID-19 Content, but Consumers Are Less Fazed |
| Coronavirus climbs up keyword block lists, squeezing news publishers’ programmatic revenuesDIGIDAY.COM – Because the placements of most online ads have become managed by computer software programs, advertisers are requesting that those programs avoid placing their ads adjacent to COVID-19 stories, which are a large percentage of the stories being published or broadcast nowadays. Is it better to lower a news paywall as a public service or to keep it up . I disagree with the following advice from the Poynter Institute, a newspaper industry think tank. Why continue to thwart people who didn’t read newspaper but now might? That won’t be a successful way to gain new readers. |
| Removing paywalls on coronavirus coverage is noble. It also makes no sense.WWW.POYNTER.ORG – “Removing paywalls on coronavirus coverage is noble. It also makes no sense.” |
| ‘Value over volume’: The Economist tightens its paywallDIGIDAY.COM – The Economist has tightened its paywall so readers have access to five articles a month in order to nudge more registered users over into subscribing. |
| Meanwhile, The New York Times temporarily suspends its Travel and Sports sections because … well, there aren’t any travel or sports during the quarantine. |
| New York Times Halts Travel, Sports Sections In Sunday Print EditionWWW.FORBES.COM – Travel will be replaced by an ‘At Home’ special section, while Sports Sunday will be moved to the main paper. |
| The New York Times Renames Its Travel Section to Better Fit the TimesWWW.ADWEEK.COM – The New York Times Renames Its Travel Section to Better Fit the Times.So desperate is the U.S. newspaper industry to keep its existing audience–which nowadays is largely people older than 60, that one columnist thinks newspaper typography should be larger and stories focus more of senior citizens. Using this bad advice is the quickest way I know of to diminish U.S. newspapers’ remaining audience to age 90 very quickly: |
| Industry Insight: To Slow Decline, Newspaper Print Editions Should Act Their Age – Editor & PublisherWWW.EDITORANDPUBLISHER.COM – Industry Insight: To Slow Decline, Newspaper Print Editions Should Act Their Age.The following article by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab startled me when I first saw it, but that was largely because of where they obtained their photo of Walter Cronkite: |
| The constant shifts of the coronavirus pandemic may be making journalists more comfortable expressing uncertaintyWWW.NIEMANLAB.ORG – At a time of almost constantly changing news, what are the obligations of journalists to make it clear that their information is provisional? |
| SPH Magazines offers complimentary subscriptions to readers in lockdownWWW.INMA.ORG – Singapore Press Holdings is offers complimentary magazine subscriptions to readers in quarantine. It’s a fine marketing concept, but it does raise a similar question to that of newspapers’ survival: can printed magazines survive. The following is the opinion of one writer published in the Harvard Business School’s own magazine –an article published perhaps 20 years too late: |
| Can Magazines Survive the Internet? – Technology and Operations ManagementDIGITAL.HBS.EDU – Can Magazines Survive the Internet? |
| How COVID-19 Has Impacted Media Consumption, by GenerationWWW.VISUALCAPITALIST.COM – This visualization explores how each generation’s media consumption is changing during this period of pandemic-induced social isolation. |
| When the News Industry Failed to See the Future -4 |
| I’d mentioned that most consumers online are hunting & gathering throughout the Internet for items of interest to their needs, tastes, and beliefs; a wider and more precise selection than any newspapers or news magazine could give them. Most consumers first began doings by using search engines. Most media companies’ digital executives initially mistook search engines as merely library card catalogs of the Internet, the means by which those executives might obtain more online user traffic to their companies’ websites. They didn’t realize that search engines are effective means by which billions of consumers could obtain the individualized (i.e., individuated) mix of contents that same media companies weren’t giving each of those consumers. And starting in 2003, an entirely new species of media companies was founded with software applications to help those consumers hunt and gather for such individuated mixes of contents. Social Media allowed like-minded individuals to discover, share, and compare contents according to each user’s own unique mix of ‘Friend’s, ‘Likes’, ‘Follow’s, and ‘Share’s. Most media companies viewed social media as merely supplements to Mass Media, rather than integral parts of what was superseding Mass Media. In 2005, MySpace.com surpassed Google, the world’s most popular search engine, as the most visited website in the U.S., until during 2008 when it was surpassed by Facebook.com. Since then, social media companies have become the predominant means by which people under the age of 40 obtain news, entertainment, and other information. Each of Facebook’s 2.5 billion users, a mass audience beyond that of any Mass Media company, simultaneously sees a different mix of contents than every other of those users–a truly individuated feed. In addition to search engines and social media, other new species of Individuated Media have been arising. Companies such as Pandora, Flipboard, Spotify, and others, have been founded to give each consumer an individuated feed of music, news, or other specific categories of media contents. Individuated Media companies, such as those of the search engines, social media websites, and sector-specific ones, have experienced popular growth unprecedented by the Mass Media industries of the Industrial Era, even those of the last decade of the 20th Century. The fulminate rise of Individuated Media companies is a direct result of the consumers’ access to contents changing from relative scarcity to surplus during the past 20 years.There’s one more section of this essay, but let’s first pause for a few other topics |
| Video & Streaming |
| The one company unexpectedly benefiting the most from COVID-19 quarantines worldwide is Netflix.: |
| The Future That Hollywood Feared Is Happening NowWWW.NYTIMES.COM – The Future That Hollywood Feared Is Happening Now |
| US Netflix Viewers Estimate 2019-2020CONTENT-NA1.EMARKETER.COM –Despite a Slowdown in 2019, Netflix, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, saw an acceleration of its subscriber rolls in Q1 2020. |
| eMarketer US Netflix Viewers Estimate 2019-2020CONTENT-NA1.EMARKETER.COM – Netflix added 2.31 million net new paid subscribers in the US and Canada in Q1 2020, bringing the region’s total subscriber count to 69.97 million. That’s growth of about 5% year over year. The company attributed stronger worldwide growth to increased media consumption during quarantines. |
| Facebook declines, Netflix gains with US, European viewersWWW.RAPIDTVNEWS.COM – Research from Ampere Analysis has shown that while the YouTube juggernaut is driving on in the online video market, Netflix is growing strongly and outshining s… |
| Netflix Is the Most Intoxicating Portal to Planet EarthWWW.NYTIMES.COM – Instead of trying to sell American ideas to a foreign audience, it’s aiming to sell international ideas to a global audience. |
| Netflix will remain a blockbuster hit beyond the covid-19 eraWWW.ECONOMIST.COM – Netflix is minting money, the Economist says. |
| Netflix Becomes First Streamer to Join the Motion Picture Association of AmericaWWW.HOLLYWOODREPORTER.COM – Netflix has joined the membership ranks of the Motion Picture Association of America. |
| As for Streaming: How Much $$$ Can a bloggers Make? |
| This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 Viewed VideoONEZERO.MEDIUM.COM – Shelby Church reveals the finances of her business. |
| Remarkables |
| Google’s auto-complete for speech can cover up glitches in video calls | MIT Technology ReviewWWW.TECHNOLOGYREVIEW.COM – The news: With many of us now relying on video calls for face-to-face interaction, choppy connections are more frustrating than ever. An artificial intelligence that mimics an individual speaker’s way of talking can smooth over the cracks by filling in small gaps with snippets of generated speech. Developed by a team at Google, the technology… |
| Not Lost in Translation |
| Meet Jesse Appell (a/k/a/ Ai Jiexi) RISINGSTARSOFASIA.COM – Because I’ve frequently been traveling to universities in China since 2000 and during recent years my New Media Business course in upstate New York has become popular with Chinese graduate students who want to study media in the U.S., I’ve routinely found that humor is universal. Moreover, there now are even Chinese-born stand-up comedians working the in the U.S. and U.S.-born ones working in China. For an example of the latter, consider Fulbright scholar-turned-Chinese-comedian Jesse Apell, known in the Peoples Republic as Ai Jiexi. [Six-minute video in Mandarin with English subtitles]. |
| When the News Industry Failed to See the Future – final |
| During the late 1990s, before Google, CraigsList, Monster.com, MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter had been founded, the eight major companies in the U.S. daily newspaper industry founded a consortium to unite their online efforts and create a unified news and classified adverting system to offer U.S. consumers. The concept was that any daily newspaper that became a member of this consortium could offer to its local consumers any of the news stories the other daily newspapers had, in addition to any of the classified ads the others had. Their goal was to give the newspaper consumer online a better mix of contents to match his own needs, interests, tastes, and beliefs, than could any printed newspaper alone give him. Whether or not that consortium would have succeeded is unknown, because the newspaper companies that formed it, companies that have arch-competitors against each other for decades, fell apart only weeks after the consortium began offering its first services in 1998.From then on, U.S. newspaper companies’ each concentrated on operating their own websites, porting their printed editions’ increasingly obsolete packages of contents into online–a 1990s solution continued unchanged into the changed first two decades of the 21st Century. The industry’s digital operations executives, whose responsibility it was to see and adapt their companies to the transformation underway in that media environment, failed to predict or see the larger changes underway in the media environment after 1998- 2004. Subsequent calls for an emphasis on ‘Digital First’ might have been an appropriate rallying cry during the late 1990s, but were a decade out-of-date during the 2000s and derisibly so during the 2010s. Media companies digital operations executives the pages of their calendars into a new millennium in 2000 but did not themselves follow. |
| Tales of My Alumni |
| My congratulations to Andrea Jacob (class of 2011), Technical Solutions Consultant at LinkedIn in Manhattan; Hilary Ranucci (also ‘11 ), formerly Associate Producer of the Emmy award-winning medical talk show The Doctors and now Senior Paralegal at the Walt Disney Company in Las Angeles; Kevin Tully (’10), Director of Digital at Siete Family Foods in Austin; and Siyuan Yu(’14), Advertising Operations Supervisor for Large Customers at Criteo in Miami. |
| Stay Safe and Thank Your for Reading! |
| If there is anyone else you think might like to read this newsletter, please do feel free to forward it to them. |