Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Media. Show all posts

Friday, July 14, 2023

14: Media And History

Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Could The New York Times Relaunch As A Tech Startup?

The New York Times Co. Reports $709 Million in Digital Revenue for 2018

709 million dollars is a lot of revenue. For a tech startup on the way up. But for an old company, it is chump change. Your market value is not what you are making this year. It is what you are projected to make in the future years. If you are making 700 million this year, but are projected to make no money in three years, your market value will nosedive to zero. On the other hand, if you will stagnate at 700 million, you might get a 5X or a 10X and have a market value below 10B.

What would it take for the New York Times to see a 40% increase in revenues every year for years and years? Obviously the same old, same old would not do.

Is it possible for an old company to relaunch itself? Or must old companies necessarily die and new ones take their place?

Is there a hybrid model possible where a new small team comes in to take an old company to new heights? An equity structure might be where that new team gets one third, and the old NYT keeps two-thirds in equity, and the new team helps take the organization to new heights with new business models.

The broad directions would be deeply digital, niche payments, tiny payments, and global.





Saturday, November 27, 2010

Old Media, New Media: Man Bit Dog, Dog Bit Man


That is an old dictum from journalism school, that man (sic) bit dog is news, but dog bit man is not. How new media has changed that and turned it upside down! If a dog bit man, and that man is your friend, that is not only news, that is big news. If that man walked his dog, and sent out a tweet about it, that is still news, to you. How things have changed!

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea


A few days back the image above started showing up when I loaded Farmville for me. And I am like, yes! I suggested this directly to Mark Pincus. He said he liked the idea, but that was a while back. Looks like finally he has gotten around to doing it.

I came to Farmville late. I have not been much of a gamer. But Farmville was talked about so much in the blogosphere. And the TechCrunch dude Mike Arrington had just given the game quite a beating. Some of my friends were on the game. What had most got me interested was there were reports Farmville was using the Facebook platform to beat Facebook itself in the monetization game. That piqued my interest. It also helped that I grew up in a farming family. Have you watched the milking of the cow/buffalo - by hand - the milk that you drank an hour later? I have.

So I got onto the game and was hooked. So hooked I went on to become the richest farmer in my neighborhood, bought a million dollar villa, and so on.

My Facebook Photo Album: Farmville

Note, Anu Shukla is one of my neighbors. She just might be my very best neighbor. And, by now, she has the most beautiful farm in my entire neighborhood. She has really taken to farming these past few weeks. There is something to be said of people who sell their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. When they take to farming, they really take to farming.

Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I have said several times in Fred Wilson's comments sections, (Fred Wilson's Insight) and I will say it again, Farmville is the media savior, it is not the iPad. Look at the Farmville business model, 99% of the users do not pay anything, and Mark Pincus is not up in arms about it. In fact, Farmville has been teaching Facebook how to make money. Trying to walk away from the browser is not a good idea. Trying to create artificial scarcities and artificially high prices is not a good idea.


And, while you are at it, call the firefighter.



This is from Social Media Week in early February. (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever)

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Jeff Jarvis: Bold Restructuring

Video: Eye To Eye With Katie Couric: Jeff Jarvis (CBS News)

American journalist Jeff Jarvis at the 2008 Wo...Image via Wikipedia

The Great Restructuring by Jeff Jarvis

This is a great blog post by Jeff Jarvis, someone I got to meet in person on February 3 at the Diller building. (NY Tech MeetUp: 02/03/09)

Davos 09: Open Bank full disclosure of performance and compensation. ...... a means to confirm that customers understood what they were buying ...... Bankers are in fortress mode ...... eimagined retail, education, and government. ....... obert Scoble, who has been arguing that the way out of our mess is to start a million companies ....... Shimon Peres, who made a forceful argument that the future will be secured with investment in technology (including biotechnology) and education (which he as much as said was the next thing to come after the internet wave). ........ giving trillions of dollars to the incumbents, to people like that sneering banker ....... We should, instead, be investing our money in entrepreneurs and technologists, the people who will change old industries, reimagining them under new rules with new people ..... need to look at replacing rather than just repairing these broken institutions .... We are bailing out the past. Instead, we must bail out the future.
Scenario For News news - on both the content and business side - will no longer be controlled by a single company but will be collaborative. ....... provide platforms that enable communities to do what they want to do, share what they want to share, know what they need to know together ........ open the process of news in blogs ...... Editors will become more curators, aggregators, organizers, educators. ....... less about controlling a flow than encouraging and improving creation. ....... nvestigations matter more than ever ....... Do what you do best and link to the rest ........ covering a niche deeply ....... The old syndication model will die ..... he wire-service model is in jeopardy ..... any media, wiki snapshots of knowledge, live reports, crowd reports, aggregation, curation, data bases, and other forms ........ EveryBlock will organize data; Outside.in will organize geo content; Daylife will organize news; Publish2 will organize links; Digg will help the crowd curate; Clickable will help sell ads; Google will serve ads; YouTube and Brightcove will serve videos ......... algorithms mining newly transparent government documents ........ Seth Godin’s prescription for The New York Times ..... Why doesn’t the paper have 10,000 stringers, each with a blog, each angling to be picked up by the central site?
The Link Changes Everything The more your customers take ownership of your brand, the less you will spend annoying people with your ads.
Job Losses Hint at Vast Remaking of Economy



Jarvis is an imaginative optimist.

Instead of seeing job losses and folding companies and wrecked futures and dislocations he sees capitalism's creative destructions. Historic parallels still apply. What is happening right now to the economy seems to happen once every 70 years, has happened four times in a row now. After each such crisis the economy has come out better than ever before. Jarvis is suggesting the same is about to happen all over again. He is focused on the impending good news.



Not all the observations are his, he borrows as freely as he expounds. But they together are a great narrative to these wildly depressing times for the most. Many jobs are lost forever. But new, better jobs have to be created, and people need to be helped to transition to those new jobs.

What are some of his observations, and that of others he mentions?
  • The market is rightly bringing down the artificially high prices on a host of things.
  • An old building is being brought down so a new building can take its place.
  • This fundamental restructuring is to the economy but also to society. How we relate to each other is changing.
  • Many jobs lost now will never return. "In key industries — manufacturing, financial services and retail — layoffs have accelerated so quickly in recent months as to suggest that many companies are abandoning whole areas of business." (New York Times)
  • Not just jobs, entire sectors of the US economy might disappear.
  • Newspapers, magazines, books, broadcast media, all are experiencing upheavals.
  • A lot of retail is going online.
  • Business travel will for the large part be replaced by more efficient communications.
  • Dirty energy will "shrivel."
  • Real estate construction will decline.
  • Health care and education will see reinvention and growth.
  • Ditto government.
The good news?
"Every one of the collapsing industries listed above will be replaced - in a different image, at a different scale - and that presents opportunities."

The promise is a new economy, a new society, a new world. Help people see through the transition.

Credit will have to flow again, spending will have to grow again. But they will go in new directions.

But right now we are in the destruction part of the cycle. Let the creation begin as soon as possible.

Jarvis has done a good job of describing where we are now and we are or should be going, but he has not done a good job of connecting the two. How do we help people with the transition? How to minimize disruptions? How to move people from lost jobs to better paying jobs?








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