|
|
|
Peter Osnos, 2/28/2006 описывает основную философическую ошибку (imho) demoscope weekly At the Dow Jones Company, an otherwise routine shift in leadership now under way has major significance for traditional media businesses. Gordon Crovitz was named publisher of the Wall Street Journal and president of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group. Crovitz, who has law degrees from Oxford and Yale, continues a Dow Jones practice of choosing publishers with experience on the news side of the company (he was an editorial writer and editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review). What makes this promotion notable is that Crovitz’s last job was to run the company’s online operations and he is now responsible for both print and online operations, a merger which goes a long way to defining the future. This column is called "The Platform" for the obvious reason that it is one, an opportunity to report and reflect on the changing nature of journalism. But the second meaning of the name is the more relevant one: media companies are adapting the content they provide to the ways they deliver it, and how that process unfolds will have a profound impact on the nature of information. The Wall Street Journal has something like 750,000 subscribers to its online edition. Even subscribers to the newspaper have to pay for online access. And in recent Dow Jones results, the online paper was a solid profit maker while the paper has never really recovered from the collapse of technology advertising in 2000–2001. Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal have long regarded themselves as the elite of the information businesses, whereas wire services were the grunts. But now the requirement for instant information and a 24-hour news cycle is lifting the “wires,” especially those whose main outlet is the Web, to a position of prominence. The same is true of cable channels. CNN.com is apparently soaring compared to the second-place struggle of its television counterpart. The MSNBC Web site has been a great popular success compared to the writhing of its television partner, which Microsoft has signaled for some time it wants to abandon. Merging a daily newspaper with what was, until recently, a wire service, as the Journal has done, consolidates this shifting balance of stature. Dow Jones has been a disappointment to shareholders in recent years, particularly given its position as a pillar of Wall Street. This new management structure is the latest of many gambits intended to galvanize the business. As is often the case, there are interesting precedents for what is happening now in media history, which can be useful in making sense of the upheaval. For something like 150 years, Reuters was the respected British version of the Associated Press, an international wire service in which the British newspapers were shareholders. At one time it delivered the news by carrier pigeon. In the sixties and seventies, Reuters and many of the British papers were struggling. The venerable Guardian, for example, and the Sunday Observer with their family proprietorships and trusts were threadbare with circulation, infrastructure, and union problems. Then Reuters’ management began to build on the agency’s capacity to deliver financial news and in 1984 Reuters became a public company listed on the New York and London exchanges, valued at about $1.5 billion dollars. The shareholding newspapers got about $300 million of that, which enabled investment in technology and real estate, invigorating British papers for the next 20 years, although they, like our own, are now coping with circulation and advertising problems. But the Reuters example is instructive because of the way the agency built on its brand and reputation to enhance its reach by adding services without diminishing those it already provided. The expansion did not mean that Reuters could coast. In the tech bust of 2001, the company took hits of various kinds and has been rebuilding since. Nonetheless, it is a fair bet that the newspapers that owned so much of it and perhaps Reuters itself would be gone altogether by now, if not for taking advantage of its platform. The New York Times Company is another interesting case of an opposite kind. In the mid-1980s, the Times licensed the right to sell its information after it had appeared in the newspaper to Lexis-Nexis, which may have made a modicum of sense then but would be a catastrophe in today’s world. On a much smaller scale, the company sold its book company to Random House because it found the brand expansion through books a nuisance. It seemed then that the company could literally not be bothered with the idea of selling material initiated outside the newspaper columns. Fortunately, both the deals contained loopholes the Times eventually used to rescind them. Expanding platforms is now a core element of the company’s strategy for growth. Combining the print and online news output under a single management, as Dow Jones has now done, is today’s realignment of resources, an acknowledgement that the information gatherers (reporters, editors, photographers, and their digital, video, and audio associates) will be offering their output on many platforms. This will certainly have an effect on how the information is packaged. Adapting from the pigeon delivery system of 19th century Reuters to the teletype, telephone, and cable of the 20th is going to seem easy by comparison. Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. |
|
|