Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

What if, in the mad dash two decades ago to repurpose and extend editorial content onto the Web, editors and publishers made a colossal business blunder that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars? What if the industry should have stuck with its strengths—the print editions where the vast majority of their readers still reside and where the overwhelming majority of advertising and subscription revenue come from—instead of chasing the online chimera?

That’s the contrarian conclusion I drew from a new paper written by H. Iris Chyi and Ori Tenenboim of the University of Texas and published this summer in Journalism Practice. Buttressed by copious mounds of data and a rigorous, sustained argument, the paper cracks open the watchworks of the newspaper industry to make a convincing case that the tech-heavy Web strategy pursued by most papers has been a bust. The key to the newspaper future might reside in its past and not in smartphones, iPads and VR. “Digital first,” the authors claim, has been a losing proposition for most newspapers....

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti just sent a memo to his employees about the company's growth and its plans for the coming year, and it was loaded with some pretty impressive numbers. August was apparently a big month for BuzzFeed, with record traffic of 85 million unique visitors. For contrast, Twitter gets about 91 million U.S. users per month and Amazon gets 77 million U.S. users, according to Quantcast.

Based on U.S. users alone, BuzzFeed has ~41 million users, bigger than Craigslist or AOL.The company saw a record profit as well (no numbers disclosed, but Peretti says that the company went from "zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees")....

I know plenty of people of all generations, including my parents, who are actively embracing the latest digital platforms and technologies (and having a good time doing so).

Things are at a point tech is democratized and doesn’t require any specialized knowledge to use. It’s nearly all common sense.

So when I saw Dave Winer’s post this morning sharing how a journalist has sadly “given up” trying to learn new things, I had to share it. I’ve summarized the key bits...

The real issue is content, just like it was 2,000 years ago when Roman citizens wrote on the walls of the city. What they had to say mattered more than the medium they chose.

For the moment, the majority get this content from televisions connected to cable or the old-fashioned over-the-air broadcasting.Some of what lies ahead is predictable, as consumers are convinced to buy the latest gadgets.

Much of the future is not entirely predictable. The possibility of wireless transmission of electric power was demonstrated in the late 19th century by the draft-dodging school dropout Nikola Tesla....

CBS Corp., which last week won higher programming fees from Time Warner Cable after a very public fight, is helping to prove wrong predictions that the broadcast TV business would tank in the near future.

CEO Leslie Moonves has led broadcasters toward an economic model more like the cable industry's, drawing subscription as well as advertising revenue. Large audiences for "NCIS," "The Big Bang Theory," and National Football League games have given CBS the clout, like ESPN and Fox News, to demand higher fees from pay-TV services such as Time Warner Cable -- while allowing the company to sell digital rights to new distributors such as Amazon .

"People wrongly believed they were dinosaurs," said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group who recommends buying CBS stock. "Many had argued the death of television for a very long time. And sentiment around it reflected that. This medium isn't dying, it's thriving."...