Jon Fine starts the predict-the-next-year-ball rolling with a column in Business Week on what he anticipates in media in the time ahead. Among the ideas: 1. It gets worse before it gets better. 2. Online advertising comes down to earth. 3. More media consolidation. 4. Time Warner buys something. 5. TV networks whacked hard by ad slowdown. 6. Rupert Murdoch buys and disappoints. 7. Magazine circulation gets new calculation. 8. Radio rolls out hipster format. 9. New York Times sells About.com to buy time. 10. New companies formed by the pink-slipped.
An oasis in the challenges for North American and European papers is the strengthening German market. In short, Business Week concludes, it's this: 1. Embrace the Web. 2. Partner with a telecom. 3. Get into the mobile space. 4. Enjoy risk. 5. Love competition. Rule three is a challenge in North America, but the other four are on the table.
Just caught up with Jon Fine's latest contribution to Business Week and his look at Daylife, the news aggregator that has been employed by large organizations to create subject-specific sites on just about anything. Now Daylife plans a more accessible (that is, affordable) version that will permit organizations to build and mount these sites on their own. There isn't a clear plan yet on how to share in the revenue, but the plan has very interesting applications for smaller media looking for a way to harness the Internet's vast supply of content.
Those charged with the task of shifting journalism into the digital space are typically alarmed at the spartan, otherworldly business environment upon arrival. Financing journalism in that new environment is made possible typically through several other initiatives that don't necessarily adjoin the world of reporting --- digital entities and utilities that gain revenue through search or other ways, and not the direct-revenue-for-consuming-journalism one might expect. In some ways, the situation is not all that different than some of the workaround financing in conventional media --- the classified, advertorial and service journalism in some sections of a newspaper, or the paid programming on broadcast outlets, generate substantial revenue with only a portion of the programming expenses, so they help fuel newsrooms and are not only useful to the audience but to the creators. Which is why the new Business Week piece on Google feels like relief in opening the lid on what the behemoth is doing to the world of advertising, including the advertising for the press. Someone is actually saying clearly that certain precepts --- that journalism can be paid for by adjacent Google ads and display --- are "idiotic." And someone is also saying that Google is scraping a lot of the necessary funds away. And that Google is essentially taking a free press and monetizing it largely for itself.
