In four minutes, industry leaders from the New York Times and Philadelphia Media Network discuss:
- The challenges of shifting from print to digital
- Newspaper publishing across multiple media platforms
- The value of digital technology to advertisers
-Transcript-
Larry Ingrassia: "Does this really make sense? Don't we run the risk of cannibalizing ourselves, you know, why are people going to buy the newspaper when they can get the content online earlier.
Industry Leaders on Print, Digital, and New Technologies
Larry Ingrassia: "Lets dial back the clock to 1960s-1970s, the Japanese start making these small cars. Detroit says, 'Oh my god, small cars? You can't make money on those things. We're gonna let them have the small car market, we're not gonna worry about that, we're just gonna concentrate on the big car market, what we think we do best.' Well we all know how that one ended up, and I said we can choose to cannibalize ourselves, we can chose to kind of post things earlier, faster, trying to get more enterprise, trying to get people to come to our website throughout the day as opposed to make it, kind of, their going to look at it once during the day. But if we do that, then somebody else is gonna canalize So we have a choice, we can cannibalize ourselves, or we can let somebody else cannibalize it and I think that there is really no choice when you look at it that way."
Greg Osberg: "A lot of people ask me 'how much longer do you think newspapers will exist?' I don't have the answer to that, nobody has the answer to that, the consumer will ultimately determine that. What we want to do, is align ourselves with the consumer, and the technology companies, which has been highly uncharacteristic of the newspaper industry in the past, so that we can be right there with the consumer. If this was a tablet, it's not but if this was a tablet, this is just another delivery platform for the content that we generate on a daily basis through the Inquirer and The Daily News of Philly.com. We're somewhat agnostic overtime on what platform we decide to publish on and its up to us to create a business model to do that, but we are not really focusing on a timetable because the consumer will determine that. But we want to be in line with the consumer, to sort of follow them and the technology."
How are publishers using new technology to improve their products?
Larry Ingrassia: "The web enables us to do something else, and that is to reach down deeper and narrower to target some of those audiences, and some of those readers, we think have a particularly strong affinity with the New York Times. Their our readers, and if we can get more of their mind time, we get more of their reading time, thats gonna do two things. One, its gonna bind them more to the New York Times at a time when they have this greater fragmentation of readership across the media world. And two, by the way, its going to make the New York Times more valuable to advertisers."
Greg Osberg: "We're publishing content over seven platforms, today. Who would have ever thought that a couple of years ago. And what we are learning is that you can't take the same piece of content and publish it across all seven platforms. Social media is a different phenomena than mobile, right? The mobile device is a different platform, we're realizing, than tablet device; the tablets different than the newspaper, the newspaper is different than the PC or the laptop. So, again, we're going to be very agnostic with respect to which device we prefer or push on the consumer. We're going to respond to the consumer marketplace and our goal is that we're the number one content provider in this region, and audience developer in the region with all of the platforms."
