The first panel discussion of the day at SIIA was entitled "Sink or Swim: How do you Grow an Information Business Now?"
The moderator was, somewhat ironically, Kevin English, SVP at Satyam, a company that is doing more sinking than swimming right now. The panelists were Vanity Fair writer (and Newser co-founder) Michael Wolff, Time Inc's Vivek Shah, CQ President Bob Merry and Oakeigh Thorne, co-president of b2b publisher Blumenstein Thorne.
The panel was chock-full of good lines, but failed to really answer the question posed in its title - how do you grow an information business now?
A few of the more interesting lines:
Vivek Shah:
"Traditionally, news orgs focused on getting the story first. But, on the Internet, that’s gone away as it’s hard to tell who had story first. Voice, personality matter a lot more. Points of view matter."
Michael Wolff: "as recently as 15 years ago, the cover of Time & Newsweek were powerful – they were able to set the agenda for national discussion. That's a void today."
Wolff: "the foreign (news) bureau, as we know it, has largely gone away. But, in some ways, we have much more info coming from foreign markets than we had before. We now have instant access to newspapers and other information sources in those areas where we were previously dependent upon foreign news bureaus."
Shah: "As you go from PC-based web to mobile, the real estate devoted to advertising is pretty small. What happens then to the advertising $?"
But, perhaps the most telling comment came from an audience tweet from @lfschwartz: none of these guys runs a successful online business so why should I care?
