Pub Talk
By Jim Sturdivant
About Jim
Jim Sturdivant is senior editor of Publishing Executive magazine and a contributing editor at Book Business magazine. A former community newspaper editor in Philadelphia and Northern New Jersey, he has been covering the publishing industry for NAPCO since 2007. He writes about technology, market trends and revenue opportunities in magazine and book publishing. E-mail him at jsturdivant@napco.com or call 215-238-5224.
B2B Beat
ABM Annual Conference Greatest Hits
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The Digital Domain
To Pay or Not to Pay ... That is the Changing Question
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The Decline of Publishing - Blame it on Johannes!
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Gamification: Today's Hottest SEO Technique
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The Digital Market
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Apr 18, 2013A blog came out recently on the redesigned Google Play for mobile. It appears Michael Siliski, group product manager for...
The Postal Pundit
Climbing Out Of The Rubble Of Sandy
Dec 11, 2012The entire Eastern seaboard, but now mostly New York and New Jersey, has been struggling through the aftermath of Sandy,...
Everything Publishing
A New Way To Be a Player
Sep 19, 2011If you want to increase affinity with your brand, grow traffic (up to 20x for some sites) and retention, create...
Byte Back
What Is “Interactive” Anyway? (Part 2)
Feb 28, 2011The real question, it turns out, is less about embedded multimedia than it is about personalization, relevance and immediacy of...
Newspapers Confront Competing Realities
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Bloomberg speaks lovingly of the Financial Times. When asked recently if he might buy the paper, he responded "I buy it every day!" (Talk about a hedge.) His staff loves it too, believing it would be a game-changing platform for Bloomberg's high-quality content, creating a new global forum for deep dives into business and finance that could, the thinking goes, fill a niche left underserved by Murdoch's changes to the WSJ.
It all makes so much sense—except financially. And here's the rub for the media business. A company produces an excellent product, which people love. There's synergy (to use a cursed term) with the business operations of a potential deep-pocketed buyer. Yet, it's still a tough sell, because it doesn't make a lot of money. When quality and passion—even profits (but not much growth)—can't get people to open their checkbook, what can?
Newspapers, whatever they try to tell you, are far from out of the woods, because it is still the case that digital advertising revenue cannot approach what can be earned from print. It's not even close. It may be an old story at this point, but it's no less critical an issue than it was a couple of years ago. Markets pay attention to trends, and even a paper with 600,000 subscribers and a robust paywall is a tough sell, because as subscribers move from print to digital, the ad revenue does not keep up. Without huge spikes in either subscribers or ad rates, the line will continue to point in the wrong direction.
Maybe Bloomberg could bring those new subscribers. Maybe ancillary products, licensing, services and events could fill the gap. Maybe—but it's a risk. Maybe Mayor Mike should get Warren Buffett on the horn.
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