January 31, 2006

Sayings: Look to the Past; Blog It; Listen Up; Too Much Media

 "Decades of high profit margins have shielded papers from hard decisions involving unions, printing costs, the rise of online readers and a decaying demographic for their products. Looking for future of the newspaper? Look to the past - when there were no monopolies and the advertising business was harder - papers worked to build audiences, and were amongst the most competitive and cutthroat businesses out there - not above making the story to sell papers and not above having a point of view to keep audiences."

-- Chris Tolles: VP of Sales and Marketing, Topix.net

 "About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, 'I've got this blog and maybe you'd like to run it.' They said, 'It's a what?' But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog."

-- Dave Barry

 "Our consumer-driven society is about a lot of things besides hard news," Decherd says. "Americans spend a tremendous amount of time focused on their lifestyles. We have to listen to our audiences to some extent."

-- Robert Decherd, CEO, Belo Corp.

 Publishers may not control the distribution of content, or even its creation, but they still have brands that people trust. I guess at the end of the day it's all about control. If you don't control the creation or the distribution of the content, what do you control? I may not want journalism delivered in a static print publication. But I also don't want to be awash in a sea of stories. Even in a town hall meeting (or any meeting), you don't accomplish much when everyone talks at once.

-- Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0

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Posted by Tim Porter at January 31, 2006 06:25 AM