by Adam Hartung | Aug 6, 2013 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, In the Swamp, Innovation, Leadership
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon worth $25.2B just paid $250 million to become sole owner of The Washington Post.
Some think the recent rash of of billionaires buying newspapers is simply rich folks buying themselves trophies. Probably true in some instances – and that benefits no one. Just look at how Sam Zell ruined The Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. Or Rupert Murdoch's less than stellar performance owning The Wall Street Journal. It's hard to be excited about a financially astute commodities manager, like John Henry, buying The Boston Globe – as it has all the earmarks of someone simply jumping in where angels fear to tread.
These companies lost their way long ago. For decades they defined themselves as newspaper companies. They linked everything about what they did to printing a daily paper. The service they provided, which was a mix of hard news and entertainment reporting, was lost in the productization of that service into a print deliverable.
So when people started to look for news and entertainment on-line, these companies chose to ignore the trend. They continued to believe that readers would always want the product – the paper – rather than the service. And they allowed themselves to remain fixated on old processes and outdated business models long after the market shifted.
The leaders ignored the fact that advertisers could obtain much more directed placement at targets, at far lower cost, on-line than through the broad-based, general ads placed in newspapers. And that consumers could get a much faster, and cheaper, sale via eBay, CraigsList or Vehix.com than via overpriced classified ads.
Newspaper leadership kept trying to defend their "core" business of collecting news for daily publication in a paper format. They kept trying to defend their local advertising base. Even though every month more people abandoned them for an on-line format. Not one major newspaper headmast made a strong commitment to go on-line. None tried to be #1 in news dissemination via the web, or take a leadership role in associating ad placement with news and entertainment.
They could have addressed the market shift, and changed their approach and delivery. But they did not.
Money manager Mr. Henry has done a good job of turning the Boston Red Sox into a profitable institution. But there is nothing in common between the Red Sox, for which you can grow the fan base, bring people to the ballpark and sell viewing rights, and The Boston Globe. The former is unique. The latter is obsolete. Yes, the New York Times company paid $1.1B for the Globe in 1993, but that doesn't mean it's worth $70M today. Given its revenue and cost structure, as a newspaper it is probably worth nothing.
But, we all still want news. Nobody wants the information infrastructure collecting what we need to know to crumble. Nobody wants journalism to die. But it is unreasonable to expect business people to keep investing in newspapers just to fulfill a public good. Even Mr. Zell abandoned that idea.
Thus, we need the news, as a service, to be transformed into a new, profitable enterprise. Somehow these organizations have to abandon the old ways of doing things, including print and paper distribution, and transform to meet modern needs. The 6 year revenue slide at Washington Post has to stop, and instead of thinking about survival company leadership needs to focus on how to thrive with a new, profitable business model.
And that's why we all should be glad Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. As head of Amazon.com The Harvard Business Review ranked him the second best performing CEO of the last decade. CNNMoney.com named him Business Person of the Year 2012, and called him "the ultimate disruptor."
By not doing what everyone else did, breaking all the rules of traditional retail, Mr. Bezos built Amazon.com into a $61B general merchandise retailer in 20 years. When publishers refused to create electronic books he led Amazon into competing with its suppliers by becoming a publisher. When Microsoft wouldn't produce an e-reader, retailer and publisher Amazon.com jumped into the intensely competitive world of personal electroncs creating and launching Kindle. And then upped the stakes against competitors by enhancing that into Kindle Fire. And when traditional IT suppliers like HP and Dell were slow to help small (or any) business move toward cloud computing Amazon launched its own network services to help the market shift.
Mr. Bezos' language regarding his intentions post acquisition are quite telling, "change… is essential… with or without new ownership….need to invent…need to experiment."
And that is exactly what the news industry needs today. Today's leaders are HuffingtonPost.com, Marketwatch.com and other web sites with wildly different business models than traditional paper media. WaPo success will require transforming a dying company, tied to an old success formula, into a trend-aligned organization that give people what they want, when they want it, at a profit.
And it's hard to think of someone better experienced, or skilled, than Jeff Bezos to provide that kind of leadership. With just a little imagination we can imagine some rapid moves:
- distribution of all content via Kindle style eReaders, rather than print. Along with dramatically increasing the cost of paper subscriptions and daily paper delivery
- Instead of a "one size fits all" general purpose daily paper, packaging news into more fitting targeted products. Sports stories on sports sites. Business stories on business sites. Deeper, longer stories into ebooks available for $.99 purchase. And repackaging of stories that cover longer time spans into electronic short-books for purchase.
- Packaging content into Facebook locations for targeted readers. Tying ads into these social media sites, and promoting ad sales for small, local businesses to the Facebook sites.
- Or creating an ala carte approach to buying various news and entertainment in an iTunes or Netflix style environment (or on those sites)
- Robustly attracting readers via connecting content with social media, including Twitter, to meet modern needs for immediacy, headline knowledge and links to deeper stories — with sales of ads onto social media
- Tying electronic coupons, and buy-it-now capabilities to ads linked to appropriate content
- Retargeting advertising sales from general purpose to targeted delivery at specific readers, with robust packages of on-line coupons, links to specials and fast, impulse purchase capability
- Increased use of bloggers and ad hoc writers to supplement staff in order to offer opinions and insights quickly, but at lower cost.
- Changes in compensation linked to page views and readership, just as revenue is linked to same.
We've watched a raft of newspapers and magazines disappear. This has not been a failure of journalism, but rather a failure of business leaders to address shifting markets and transform old organizations to meet modern needs. It's not a quality problem, but rather a failure of strategy to adapt to shifting markets. And that's a lesson every business leaders needs to note, because today, as I wrote in April, 2012, every company has to behave like a tech company!
Doing more of the same, cutting costs and rich egos won't fix a newspaper. Only the willingness to experiment and find new solutions which transform these organizations into something very different, well beyond print, will work. Let's hope Mr. Bezos brings the same zest for addressing these challenges and aligning with market needs he brought to Amazon. To a large extent, the future of news and "freedom of the press" may well depend upon it.
by Adam Hartung | Dec 10, 2012 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, In the Whirlpool, Leadership, Lifecycle, Television
Remember when almost everyone read a daily newspaper?
Newspaper readership peaked around 2000. Since then printed media has declined, as readers shifted on-line. Magazines have folded, and newspapers have disappeared, quit printing, dramatically cut page numbers and even more dramatically cut staff.
Amazingly, almost no major print publisher prepared for this, even though the trend was becoming clear in the late 1990s.
Newspapers are no longer a viable business. While industry revenue grew for
almost 2 centuries, it collapsed in a mere decade.
Chart Source: BusinessInsider.com
This market shift created clear winners, and losers. On-line news sites like Marketwatch and HuffingtonPost were clear winners. Losers were traditional newspaper companies such as Tribune Corporation, Gannett, McClatchey, Dow Jones and even the New York Times Company. And investors in these companies either saw their values soar, or practically disintegrate.
In 2012 it is equally clear that television is on the brink of a major transition. Fewer people are content to have their entertainment programmed for them when they can program it themselves on-line. Even though the number of television channels has exploded with pervasive cable access, the time spent watching television is not growing. While simultaneously the amount of time people spend looking at mobile internet displays (tablets, smartphones and laptops) is growing at double digit rates.
Chart Source: Silicone Alley Insider Chart of the Day 12/5/12
It would be easy to act like newspaper defenders and pretend that television as we've known it will not change. But that would be, at best, naive. Just look around at broadband access, the use of mobile devices, the convenience of mobile and the number of people that don't even watch traditional TV any more (especially younger people) and the trend is clear. One-way preprogrammed advertising laden television is not a sustainable business.
So, now is the time to prepare. And change your business to align with impending new realities.
Losers, and winners, will be varied – and not entirely obvious. Firstly, a look at those trying to maintain the status quo, and likely to lose the most.
Giant consumer goods and retail companies benefitted from the domination of television. Only huge companies like P&G, Kraft, GM and Target could afford to lay out billions of dollars for television ads to build, and defend, a brand. But what advantage will they have when TV budgets no longer control brand building? They will become extremely vulnerable to more innovative companies that have better products and move on fast lifecycles. Their size, hierarchy and arcane business practices will lead to huge problems. Imagine a raft of new Hostess Brands experiences.
Even as the trends have started changing these companies have continued pumping billions into the traditional TV networks as they spend to defend their brand position. This has driven up the value of companies like CBS, Comcast (owns NBC) and Disney (owns ABC) over the last 3 years substantially. But don't expect that to last forever. Or even a few more years.
Just like newspaper ad spending fell off a cliff when it was clear the eyeballs were no longer there, expect the same for television ad spending. As giant advertisers find the cost of television harder and harder to justify their outlays will eventually take the kind of cliff dive observed in the chart (above) for newspaper advertising. Already some consumer goods and ad agency executives are alluding to the fact that the rate of return on traditional TV is becoming sketchy.
So far, we've seen little at the companies which own TV networks to demonstrate they are prepared for the floor to fall out of their revenue stream. While some have positions in a few internet production and delivery companies, most are clearly still doing their best to defend & extend the old business – just like newspaper owners did. Just as newspapers never found a way to replace the print ad dollars, these television companies look very much like businesses that have no apparent solution for future growth. I would not want my 401K invested in any major network company.
And there will be winners.
For smaller businesses, there has never been a better time to compete. A company as small as Tesla or Fisker can now create a brand on-line at a fraction of the old cost. And that brand can be as powerful as Ford, and potentially a lot more trendy. There are very low entry barriers for on-line brand building using not only ad words and web page display ads, but also using social media to build loyal followers who use and promote a brand. What was once considered a niche can become well known almost overnight simply by applying the new dynamics of reaching customers on-line, and increasingly via mobile. Look at the success of Toms Shoes.
Zappos and Amazon have shown that with almost no television ads they can create powerhouse retail brands. The new retailers do not compete just on price, but are able to offer selection, availability and customer service at levels unachievable by traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. They can suggest products and prices of things you're likely to need, even before you realize you need them. They can educate better, and faster, than most retail store employees. And they can offer great prices due to less overhead, along with the convenience of shipping the product right into your home.
And as people quit watching preprogrammed TV, where will they go for content? Anybody streaming will have an advantage – so think Netflix (which recently contracted for all the Disney content,) Amazon, Pandora, Spotify and even AOL. But, this will also benefit those companies providing content access such as Apple TV, Google TV, YouTube (owned by Google) to offer content channels and the increasingly omnipresent Facebook will deliver up not only friends, but content — and ads.
As for content creation, the deep pockets of traditional TV production companies will likely disappear along with their ability to control distribution. That means fewer big-budget productions as risk goes up without revenue assurances.
But that means even more ability for newer, smaller companies to create competitive content seeking audiences. Where once a very clever, hard working Seth McFarlane (creator of Family Guy) had to hardscrabble with networks to achieve distribution, and live in fear of a single person controlling his destiny, in the future these creative people will be able to own their content and capture the value directly as they build a direct audience. A phenomenon like George Lucas will be more achievable than ever before as what might look like chaos during transition will migrate to a much more competitive world where audiences, rather than network executives, will decide what content wins – and loses.
So, with due respects to Don McLean, will today be the day TV Died? We will only know in historical context. Nobody predicted newspapers had peaked in 2000, but it was clear the internet was changing news consumption behavior. And we don't know if TV viewership will begin its rapid decline in 2013, or in a couple more years. But the inevitable change is clear – we just don't know exactly when.
So it would be foolish to not think that the industry is going to change dramatically. And the impact on advertising will be even more profound, much more profound, than it was in print. And that will have an even more profound impact on American society – and how business is done.
What are you doing to prepare?
by Adam Hartung | Nov 28, 2011 | Books, Defend & Extend, Disruptions, In the Rapids, In the Whirlpool, Innovation, Leadership, Lock-in, Web/Tech
Not far from each other, in the area around Seattle, are two striking contrasts in leadership. They provide significant insight to what creates success today.
Steve Ballmer leads Microsoft, America's largest software company. Unfortunately, the value of Microsoft has gone nowhere for 10 years. Steve Ballmer has steadfastly defended the Windows and Office products, telling anyone who will listen that he is confident Windows will be part of computing's future landscape. Looking backward, he reminds people that Windows has had a 20 year run, and because of that past he is certain it will continue to dominate.
Unfortunately, far too many investors see things differently. They recognize that nearly all areas of Microsoft are struggling to maintain sales. It is quite clear that the shift to mobile devices and cloud architectures are reducing the need, and desire, for PCs in homes, offices and data centers. Microsoft appears years late recognizing the market shift, and too often CEO Ballmer seems in denial it is happening – or at least that it is happening so quickly. His fixation on past success appears to blind him to how people will use technology in 2014, and investors are seriously concerned that Microsoft could topple as quickly DEC., Sun, Palm and RIM.
Comparatively, across town, Mr. Bezos leads the largest on-line retailer Amazon. That company's value has skyrocketed to a near 90 times earnings! Over the last decade, investors have captured an astounding 10x capital gain! Contrary to Mr. Ballmer, Mr. Bezos talks rarely about the past, and almost almost exclusively about the future. He regularly discusses how markets are shifting, and how Amazon is going to change the way people do things.
Mr. Bezos' fixation on the future has created incredible growth for Amazon. In its "core" book business, when publishers did not move quickly toward trends for digitization Amazon created and launched Kindle, forever altering publishing. When large retailers did not address the trend toward on-line shopping Amazon expanded its retail presence far beyond books, including more products and a small armyt of supplier/partners. When large PC manufacturers did not capitalize on the trend toward mobility with tablets for daily use Amazon launched Kindle Fire, which is projected to sell as many as 12 million units next year (AllThingsD.com).
Where Mr. Ballmer remains fixated on the past, constantly reinvesting in defending and extending what worked 20 years ago for Microsoft, Mr. Bezos is investing heavily in the future. Where Mr. Ballmer increasingly looks like a CEO in denial about market shift, Mr. Bezos has embraced the shifts and is pushing them forward.
Clearly, the latter is much better at producing revenue growth and higher valuation than the former.
As we look around, a number of companies need to heed the insight of this Seattle comparison:
- At AOL it is unclear that Mr. Armstrong has a clear view of how AOL will change markets to become a content powerhouse. AOL's various investments are incoherent, and managers struggle to see a strong future for AOL. On the other hand, Ms. Huffington does have a clear sense of the future, and the insight for an entirely different business model at AOL. The Board would be well advised to consider handing the reigns to Ms. Huffington, and pushing AOL much more rapidly toward a different, and more competitive future.
- Dell's chronic inability to identify new products and markets has left it, at best, uninteresting. It's supply chain focused strategy has been copied, leaving the company with practically no cost/price advantage. Mr. Dell remains fixated on what worked for his initial launch 30 years ago, and offers no exciting description of how Dell will remain viable as PC sales diminish. Unless new leadership takes the helm at Dell, the company's future 5 years hence looks bleak.
- HP's new CEO Meg Whitman is less than reassuring as she projects a terrible 2012 for HP, and a commitment to remaining in PCs – but with some amorphous pledge toward more internal innovation. Lacking a clear sense of what Ms. Whitman thinks the world will look like in 2017, and how HP will be impactful, it's hard for investors, managers or customers to become excited about the company. HP needs rapid acceleration toward shifting customer needs, not a relaxed, lethargic year of internal analysis while competitors continue moving demand further away from HP offerings.
- Groupon has had an explosive start. But the company is attacked on all fronts by the media. There is consistent questioning of how leadership will maintain growth as reports emerge about founders cashing out their shares, highly uneconomic deals offered by customers, lack of operating scale leverage, and increasing competition from more established management teams like Google and Amazon. After having its IPO challenged by the press, the stock has performed poorly and now sells for less than the offering price. Groupon desperately needs leadership that can explain what the markets of 2015 will look like, and how Groupon will remain successful.
What investors, customers, suppliers and employees want from leadership is clarity around what leaders see as the future markets and competition. They want to know how the company is going to be successful in 2 or 5 years. In today's rapidly shifting, global markets it is not enough to talk about historical results, and to exhibit confidence that what brought the company to this point will propel it forward successfully. And everyone recognizes that managing quarter to quarter will not create long term success.
Leaders must demonstrate a keen eye for market shifts, and invest in opportunities to participate in game changers. Leaders must recognize trends, be clear about how those trends are shaping future markets and competitors, and align investments with those trends. Leadership is not about what the company did before, but is entirely about what their organization is going to do next.
Update 30 Nov, 2011
In the latest defend & extend action at Microsoft Ballmer has decided to port Office onto the iPad (TheDaily.com). Short term likely to increase revenue. But clearly at the expense of long-term competitiveness in tablet platforms. And, it misses the fact that people are already switching to cloud-based apps which obviate the need for Office. This will extend the dying period for Office, but does not come close to being an innovative solution which will propel revenues over the next decade.
by Adam Hartung | Feb 9, 2011 | Current Affairs, Defend & Extend, In the Swamp, In the Whirlpool, Leadership, Lock-in, Weblogs
Summary:
- Start-ups that flourish give themselves permission to do whatever is necessary to succeed
- Most acquisitions kill that kind of permssion, forcing the acquired company to adopt the acquirers legacy
- AOL’s legacy business has been dying for several years
- AOL’s history of acquisitions has been horrible, because it doesn’t learn from the acquisitions.
- AOL’s acquisition, and announced integration, of Huffington Post will likely do nothing to turn around AOL, and probably leave HuffPo about as well off as AOL’s acquisition of Bebo
After the Super Bowl Sunday Night AOL announced it’s acquisition of The Huffington Post for $350M. Given that you can’t give away a newspaper company these days, the acquisition shows there is still value in “news” if you understand the right way to deliver it. HuffPo’s team of bloggers has shown that it’s possible to build a profitable news organization today – if you do it right. Something the folks at Tribune Corporation still don’t understand.
BusinessInsider.com headlined “AOL’s Huffington Post Acquisition Makes Sense for Both Sides.” For Arianna Huffington and her investors the big cash payout shows a clear win. They are receiving a pretty penny for their start-up. Beyond them, it’s less clear. AOL’s been losing subscribers, and site vistors for years. They’ve made a number of acquisitions to spark up interest including blogs Engadget, Joystiq, ad network Tacoda and social networking site Bebo. None of those have flourished – in fact the opposite has happened. AOL investors lost almost all the $850M spent on Bebo as Facebook crushed it. So far, the AOL track record has been horrible!
AOL clearly hopes HuffPo will bring it new visitors – but whether that works, and whether HuffPo continues growing, is now an open question. MediaPost.com reports “AOL Starts Mapping Plans for Huffington Post.” Unfortunately, it sounds much more as if AOL is trying to integrate HuffPo into its traditional organization – which will most likely do for HuffPo what integrating at News Corp did for MySpace – namely, layering it with “professional management,” additional systems, more overhead and rules for operating. Or, in other words, bury it in company legacy that strangles its abilitiy to innovate and shift with rapidly emerging market needs. The company that’s actually growing, winning in the marketplace, isn’t AOL. It’s HuffPo. If there’s any “integrating” needed it should be figuring out how to push AOL into HuffPo – not vice-versa.
As the New York Times headlined, this acquisition is “AOL’s Bet on Another Makeover.” And that’s what’s wrong. The acquisitions AOL made were pre-purchase successful because they were White Space endeavors that had close connection to the market. The founders gave their organization permission to do whatever it took to be successful, without artificial constraints based upon legacy. Their acquisitions have not used by AOL to create White Space with better market receptors – to teach AOL where growth lies. Rather, AOL has hoped they can use the acquisition to defend and extend their old success formula. AOL has hoped the acquisitions would allow them to slow the market shift, and preserve legacy operations.
As we’ve seen, that simply does not work. Markets shift for good reason, and the only way a business can thrive is to shift with them. At AOL the smart move would be to let Arianna run the show! A few months ago AOL purchased TechCrunch and ever since Michael Arrington, the founder, has been villifying AOL management for its bureaucracy and inability to adapt. What Mr. Armstrong, the relatively new CEO at AOL misses is that AOL’s business is dead. AOL needs to find an entirely new way of operating – and that’s what these acquisitions bring. AOL needs to get out of the way, let the acquisitions flourish, and learn something from them. AOL management needs to accept that the old AOL business model is rubbish, and what it must do is allow the acquisitions to operate in White Space, then learn from them! But that’s not been the history of AOL’s purchases, and doesn’t look like the case this time.
Mr. Armstrong could learn a lot from Sir Richard Branson. Virgin has made many acquisitions, and developed several new companies. He doesn’t try to integrate them, or drive them toward any particular business model From Virgin Airways to Virgin Money to Virgin Health Bank to Virgin Games (and all the other businesses) the requirement is that the business be tightly linked to market needs, operate in new ways and find out how to grow profitably. Virgin moves toward the new markets and businesses, it doesn’t expect the businesses to conform to the Virgin model.
I’d like to think AOL could learn from HuffPo and dramatically change. But from the announcements this week, it doesn’t look likely. AOL still looks like a management team desperately trying to save its old business, but without a clue how to do so. Too bad for AOL. Could be even worse for those who read HuffPo.
by Adam Hartung | Sep 29, 2010 | Current Affairs, General, Innovation, Leadership, Openness, Web/Tech, Weblogs
Summary:
- Traditional news formats – such as magazines and newspapers – are faltering
- On-line editions of traditional formats are not faring well
- Important journalists are transitioning to blogger roles to better provide news consumers what they want
- Important journalists from Newsweek and the New York Times have joined HuffingtonPost.com as bloggers
- Forbes.com is transitioning from traditional publishing to bloggers in its effort to meet market needs
- The new era of journalism will be nothing like the last
In early 2006, before it completed the leveraged buyout (LBO) that added piles of debt onto Tribune Corporation I was talking with several former Chicago Tribune executives who had been placed in senior positions at the acquired Los Angeles Times. Their challenge was figuring out how they would ever improve cash flow enough to justify the huge premium paid for the newspaper. Unfortunately, 90% or more of their energy was focused on cost cutting and outsourcing, with almost none looking at revenue generation.
In the face of a declining subscriber base, intense competitiion from smaller, targeted newspapers in the area, and a lousy ad market I asked both the publisher and the General Manager what they were going to do to drive revenue growth. They, quite literally, had no ideas. There was a fledgling effort, dramatically underfunded for the scale of the country’s largest local newspaper, to post part of the LATimes content on-line. But the entire team was only 30 people, they were restricted to re-treading newspaper content, and mostly they focused on local sports reports (pages which drew the largest number of hits). About a third of the staff were technical folks (IT), and half were sales – leaving very few bodies (or brains) to put energy into making a really world-class news environment worthy of the LATimes.com name. The group head was trying to find internet ad buyers who would pay a premium to be on a well-named but woefully content-weak web-site.
Lacking any plans to drive growth, in old or new markets, it was no surprise that lay-offs and draconian cost cutting continued. Several floors in the famous newspaper building right in downtown Los Angeles, like the Tribune Tower in Chicago, became empty. By 2008 as much of the building was used as a movie set as used by editors or reporters! Eventually Tribune Corp. filed bankruptcy – where it has remained going on 3 years now.
When asked if the newspaper would consider adding bloggers to the on-line journal, the entire management team was horrified. “Bloggers are not journalists,” was the first concern, “so quality would be unacceptable. You cannot expect a major journalistic enterprise to consider blogging to have any correlation with professional journalism.” I asked what they thought about the then-fledgling HuffingtonPost.com, to which they retorted “that is not a legitimate news company. The product is not comparable to our newspaper. It has nothing to do with the business we’re in.” And with that simple attack, the executives promptly dismissed the fledgling, fringe competition.
How things have changed in news publishing. Four years later newspapers are dramatically smaller, in both ad dollars and staff. Many major journals – magazines as well as newspapers – have discontinued print editions as subscriptions have declined. Print formats (physical size) are substantially smaller. While millions of internet news sites attract readers hourly, print readership has only gone down. Major journals, unable to maintain their cash flow, have been acquired at low prices by newcomers hopeful of developing a new business model, and many well known and formerly influential news journalists have been laid off, or moved to on-line environments in order to maintain employment.
About a week ago the Wall Street Journal reported “Newsweek’s Howard Fineman to Join Huffington Post.” This week Mediapost.com headlined “The HuffPo’s Hiring of NYT’s Peter Goodman Is More Significant Than You Think.” Rather rapidly, in just a few years, HuffingtonPost.com has become a major force in the news industry. Well known journalists from Newsweek and the New York Times add considerable credibility to a new media which traditional publishers far too often ignored. Much to the chagrin, to be sure, of Sam Zell and the leadership at Tribune Corporation.
Today people want not only sterile reporting, but some insight. “What does this mean? Why do you think this happened? Is this event important, or not, longer term? What am I supposed to do with this information?” People want some analysis, as well as news. And readers want the input NOW – immediately – not at some later time that meets an arbitrary news cycle. Increasingly news consumers want Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olberman (depending upon your point of view) rather than Walter Cronkite – and they’d like that input as soon as possible.
Bloggers provide this insight. They provide not only information, but make some sense of it. They utlize past experience and insight to bring together relevant, if disparate, facts coupled with some ideas as to what it means. Where 4 year ago publishers scoffed at HuffingtonPost.com, nobody is scoffing any longer.
And it’s with great pleasure, and a pretty hefty dose of humility, that I’ve become a blogger at Forbes.com (http://blogs.forbes.com/adamhartung/). Hand it to the publisher and editors at Forbes that they are moving Forbes.com from an on-line magazine to a bi-directional, real-time site for information and insight to the world of business and economic news. Writers aren’t limited to a set schedule, a set word length or even set topics. Readers will now be able to visit Forbes.com 24×7 and acquire up-to-the-minute news and insight on relevant topics.
Forbes.com is transitioning to be much more like HuffingtonPost.com – a change that aligns with the market shift. For readers, employees and advertisers this is a very, very good thing. Because nobody wants the end of journalism – just a transition to the market needs of 2010. I look forward to joining you at Forbes.com blogs, and hearing your comments to my take on business and economic news.
