While the tweets flowed throughout the conference, I'm a couple of days late in posting my day two notes. The second day seemed to have a faster pace than the first. The day got off to a great start with the opening keynote by Henry Blodget, the best presentation of the conference IMO.
Henry's presentation focused on "the rise of online journalism". He opened with a discussion of why online journalism was different than traditional journalism:
- Aggregation: there are so many thousands of good, quality sources that the mere act of aggregation can be very valuable, esp if you add a layer of why we’re bringing this to you
- High velocity production: newspapers have greatest teams spend most of the day creating their story, which goes up at 10pm for the next morning; for online publishers, if you can put up new content all day, when people are at work… much more like broadcast news than like print. Stories evolve and change.
- Conversational, interactive: as soon as they publish something big, they get strafed by half their readers.
- Snackable: people want short articles they can read in 3 mins after getting off a call, etc.
- Real-time
- Omnimedia
He noted the challenges facing online media:
- Online readers think everything should be free
- Online ads have barely innovated since 1995
- Advertisers only care about “clicks”; even though brand can get out there on the banners
- Massive glut of inventory = prices plummeting
Then he summed up the problems with old media in two words: It's Over.
The debate over whether online media is better than traditional media is irrelevant. As with any disruptive technology, it's not necessarily better, but it's cheaper, more convenient and it's good enough. Online revenue cannot cover the print cost structure and print revenue is disappearing. But, he noted, some traditional media are doing fine, highlighting Bloomberg and Dow Jones as examples. Blodget also outlined his view on how the New York Times could be saved: cut costs 40%, raise the price of the print paper and charge for online subscription, buying time for their transition to fully online.
Henry also pointed out that journalism isn't dying, it's just old-line newspapers which aren't adapting. In the new model, with 1 billion potential fact-checkers, if Watergate were to occur today, the underlying documents would have been posted to smokinggun.com.
So, where's it headed? Looking forward, Henry projects:
- More newspapers sold, folded or bankrupt
- Online journalism grows, gets professionalized
- Some old media companies adapt
- Some old media journalists adapt (Krugman)
- Creative destruction leads to new, better future: over time, talent comes to Gawker, HuffPo, Politico, etc and they will improve their quality going forward. Eventually, the new media companies will acquire what’s left of old media
