BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

Month: November 2005

  • Anybody want to buy a newspaper?

    10 comments on Anybody want to buy a newspaper?

    I’ve said that if I owned a newspaper, I’d sell it (in fact, a prospective student at CUNY just quoted that back to me last night). And now Floyd Norris writes a column in the Times (behind the barbed wire; sorry) asking who would buy one.

    There is a venerable Wall Street joke featuring an investor who, having accumulated a large position in an illiquid stock, decides it is time to get out. “Yes, sir,” replies the broker when he is told to sell. “To whom?”

    The current situation of Knight Ridder, the owner of newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald, brings back that joke, albeit painfully….

    Mr. Sherman’s problem is one known by many investors who look for cheap stocks: where they see value, others see problems. The consensus Wall Street view of newspapers now is that they are a dying breed, destined to wither under relentless competition from the likes of Google. Profits may be good now, but they will not last, as circulation declines and advertisers seek newer media. An index of newspaper stocks is down 22 percent in 2005.

    As long as newspapers keep thinking of themselves as papers, they will shrink. Guaranteed. The question is whether they are the best positioned to get to the other side, to the future of news, and whether they can afford to get there. More on that later….

  • FCC hell

    1 comment on FCC hell

    Well, this may explain why FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has been delaying his crackdown on farts. It appears he’ll now have a chance to better stack the FCC deck. Liz Berg on WFMU’s blog reports:

    Commissioner Abernathy announced that she will be leaving the FCC (PDF) on Dec. 9, 2005. This represents yet another shift in the balance of power and opinion at the commission: earlier this month, the president renominated indecency hound Michael Copps (democrat) for another term, and filled the open republican seat (which was left when Kevin Martin moved up to replace Michael Powell as Chairman) with Deborah Tate, who has yet to demonstrate her positions on key issues.

    Commissioners Abernathy and Adelstein (the commission’s other democrat) have been keeping the indecency issue in check, favoring less regulation and fewer fines, while Martin and Copps have both expressed their lust to unleash hell-fire and damnation upon broadcasters who fail to bleep a curse word or cover a cartoon buttocks. Depending on who Bush Jr nominates for Abernathy’s seat, we might see indecency return to the front pages soon.

    Copps, a Democrat, is the single scariest member of the commission. I fear a clone.

  • unPR

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    As the kerfluffle over Audible’s podcast offering went on, I was wondering what Audible’s PR people must have been thinking, Cal Bruckner speculates that it was a form of new-age viral marketing. Mitch Ratcliffe says no but doesn’t back away from the stove and throws some more fuel on it. I still wonder what the PR people are thinking. There has to be a middle ground between disingenous flackery and flaming, just as there is a middle ground between messaging and listening. I’d like to see a Steve Rubel case study of this one.

  • The alleged ad scarcity

    2 comments on The alleged ad scarcity
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    Gary Stein at Jupiter argues that the ad scarcity is real. I argued that it is a false scarcity created out of laziness or ignorance on the part of media buyers. Stein says:

    Large brands seeking to make a significant impact will always seek high-profile placement.

    Is that laziness? Not really. It is ego. Even if no one ever bought a Coke because they saw the neon sign in Times Square, it is still important enough to Coke’s brand and culture to demonstrate that they are big enough and strong enough to put that message in that spot. So, as long as there are new-model-car releases, brand-launches and opening-weekends, there will be a reason to pay tons of cash for the home page of Yahoo! Scarcity will exist for that, and it will keep prices high.

    But the problem comes in if you say “well, Yahoo’s home page is gone, so there goes the campaign”. Online advertising is all about technology innovation and the twin turbines of targeting and optimization are will both increase the revenues for publishers as well as the effectiveness for advertisers.

    The shortage? It’s just gonna lead to more technology innovation. Any network/serving technology/targeting system who can (really) do optimization is in a good place right now. They’re the ones who will benefit the most from a shortage.

    Yes but….

    The importance of any home page on any portal will decrease as more and more traffic is generated directly through searches and links. The problem remains that advertisers want to re-create TV; they want one-stop-shopping mass buys; they want upfront. But they shouldn’t want that because it only creates a scarcity that drives up prices. That’s why I say it’s laziness, because if they really did their homework and figured out that they can get better targeting, better reach, more efficiency, more effectiveness by engineering ad hoc networks tailored to their needs, they’d benefit greatly. But that takes work: not just the effort of putting together one flight but research and education and experimentation.

    One agency and advertiser will figure this out and then the others will catch up for the same reason Gary cites: ego.