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Only the brave will survive

Tuesday, 4 September 12


At the beginning of the 20th Century, newspapers were one of the wonders of the modern age.


For the first time ever, news and opinion was circulated to enormous numbers of people every day...


Sometimes even more than once a day. This was revolutionary.


Before that people had to make do with a town crier or coffee shop gossip. Newspapers were hot property. They made heaps of money and they made their owners powerful and influential.


Let’s just imagine for a moment we’re in the company of the innovators and industrialists who ran these businesses. They were partying. The champagne was flowing and the band was playing. They were enjoying all the beautiful fruits of the industrial age.


But as they sped across the Atlantic in the world’s biggest ‘unsinkable’ ship, it hit an iceberg and was holed below the waterline.

Newspaper revenues in the US have plummeted by $43.5 billion since 2000


Newspaper revenues in the US have plummeted by $43.5 billion since 2000

Newspaper job cuts in the USincreased by 30% in 2011


Newspaper job cuts in the US increased by 30% in 2011

According to the CEA, newspapers are the US’s fastest-shrinking industry


According to the CEA, newspapers are the US’s fastest-shrinking industry


The news isn’t good

The newspaper industry is a “sinking ship”Jack Shafer, Reuters


Reuters’ Jack Shafer recently compared the newspaper industry to a “sinking ship” – and many would agree with him. But I don’t.

Marketeer/Technologist/Entrepreneur/Investor


True, I know very little of the Newspaper industry. I’m a not a Newspaperman. I’m a marketeer, a technologist, an entrepreneur and an investor. And I’d first like to talk first about the record industry. Remember that?It was a collection of businesses.

Content Production

Distribution Marketing


Content, production, distribution and marketing. But the value chain was a muddle.


Content was owned by the Artists.


Production was owned by the studios and record stampers.


Distribution was owned by the wholesalers and retailers


and marketing was owned by a stream of agencies and promoters. Nobody cared much because everyone was making money.


Then something happened. It was something I know a lot about. Technological innovation. The internet happened. And peer-to-peer file sharing.


Napster. Napster let people share audio files over the internet. Suddenly the young people who were responsible for buying the most music could just get it. Well, steal it. And even if the original company ceased operations over copyright infringement, the world had changed forever.


The power brokers of the music industry were fighting for the lifeboats.


So where did the leadership in the music sector come from? A technology company. One that had a super-bold vision to own a huge chunk of the value chain. And they gave nothing away for free.Once consumers sampled the benefits of this new handy solution, we bought into the vision. Who has an iPhone or iPod in their pocket right now and a bunch of CD’s and LPs rotting in their cupboard?So what has this got to do with the Newspaper industry? Everything.


When they launched the iPod Apple were in real trouble. As Steve said at the time, “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” And so do you.

“The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” Steve Jobs


When they launched the iPod Apple were in real trouble. As Steve said at the time, “The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament.” And so do you.

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1792.Clayton_M_Christensen


Content Production



You too have businesses that incorporate content, production, distribution and marketing. But where do you actually create value for consumers? What is the core of your business?

Content Production



It has to be content because without content, you would be shipping blank pages all over the place and spending a lot of money trying to persuade people to buy them.


Let’s look at what has happened in news content over the last few years? Citizen journalism has made news so plentiful, we are overwhelmed with the stuff. Ariana Huffington, Twitter et al have ‘Napstered’ – or should I say drowned – the quality news industry. You are being beaten up on all sides. Content is everywhere - most of it is rubbish but most of it’s free. Print is dying off as the world consumes more and more news on smartphones, tablets, laptops and via broadcast media. Advertising is in retreat too as it becomes more ineffective and more distrusted. Social media is empowering us all to make news and read about our close friends and colleagues.


Golly. Things look bad. To make matters worse, the visionaries who created the newspaper industry have largely gone. Newspapers are a mature sector - with more-or-less fixed products, and fixed ideas.When an industry gets to this stage, its leaders tend to be focussed on process improvement and cost reduction, rather than the riskier business of innovation. But to be successful, corporate leadership has to exhibit a blend of skills and qualities. Leaders need to be dynamic and courageous, as well as having the technical skills to steer a path through the harsh realities of process and profits. Above all, the individuals at the top should inspire and drive a constant flow of fresh ideas to keep their businesses ahead.

I speak geek


Remember, I’m not a newspaper man. I advise technology startups on how to grow their businesses. I can speak geek.The companies I work with are about as different as it’s possible to get from the giants of your industry. They tend to be small, which makes them nimble and flexible. They are innovative, which is easier for them because they are not hidebound by history and tradition. And they are high-energy and risk-taking.

I speak geek


In fact, I think they share a lot in common with the courageous and innovative founders of the great newspapers. Just to survive in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace they have to move fast.In the past, technology entrepreneurs like them typically took around two years to build a product, hire staff and work out whether or not they had a viable business.Today, they often setup and launch in just a few months. Their aim is to cycle quickly through a number of different business ideas and models until they find one that bears fruit.


Instagram for instance built a billion dollar business in 551 days with 13 staff. I wonder how long it would take them to launch a newspaper?These companies tend to be run by people in their 20s and 30s who are used to trying out new things and ruthlessly abandoning them if they don’t work. Such flexibility has a name in the tech world: it’s known as ‘pivoting’. Leaders who pivot are prepared to switch their product and business model as often as necessary until they get it right.

551 days, 13 staff, $1 billion


Instagram for instance built a billion dollar business in 551 days with 13 staff. I wonder how long it would take them to launch a newspaper?These companies tend to be run by people in their 20s and 30s who are used to trying out new things and ruthlessly abandoning them if they don’t work. Such flexibility has a name in the tech world: it’s known as ‘pivoting’. Leaders who pivot are prepared to switch their product and business model as often as necessary until they get it right.


Buddhists say, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got.” And according to research reported in the Wall Street Journal, the more a tech entrepreneur is willing to pivot, the more investment capital they’re likely to attract. It turns out that investors like tech entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid of making mistakes – because people who make mistakes tend to learn from them.Up to now the relationship between these startups and the big companies has been cannibalistic – the corporate giants gobble up the glittering start-ups in the hope that some of their brilliance will rub off… But it rarely does. Think of Bebo and Myspace, for example.Instead of preying on the small, agile companies, the big companies need to behave more like them – and be willing to take risks and seed new ideas.

Clayton M. Christensen


The learnéd Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen talks in The Innovators Dilemma about the inability of the big lumbering firms to innovate.The sheer vastness of the business creates an irresistible momentum… like the Titanic, as it sped towards the iceberg, unable to change course. Christensen advocates creating a ‘child business’, which grows and grows independently until it eventually eats the parent.





26m iPhones, 17m iPads, 4m Macs


I mentioned Apple earlier. Their iPod and subsequent iPhone sales have grown from nothing to dominate the rest of Apple’s business. (Apple's recently reported Q3 hardware sales numbers tell the story: 26 million iPhones, 17 million iPads, 4 million Macs)The children are already outperforming the parent – that’s how Apple has grown so quickly, against all the odds. But what does all this mean for you?And what could you do to revolutionise your business? Let me give you a 30 second lecture on branding.


People often believe that a brand is just a mark. A squiggle. A shape. Well it is. But it’s more than that. Logos are a way of summarising everything that you have learned about a product or service. And if that experience is good, consumers seek them out and wear them with pride.


Newspapers have mastheads. They mean something. They can reflect the quality of the language, the research, the excitement, the balance. That’s for you to know - I’m not a newspaperman. But those qualities attract value. And as consumers tire of the flood of amateur news, I’m confident that they will return to the sources they can trust.

Warren Buffet


I’m not alone in this view. Warren Buffet is buying newspaper businesses because ‘the money has already been lost’ and he figures he can do a better job of monetising their news gathering than the incumbent owners.


If you are creating great content, can I please ask you to stop giving it away? As my younger friends would say, “Are you high?”

Free content? “Are you high?”


If you are creating great content, can I please ask you to stop giving it away? As my younger friends would say, “Are you high?”

I speak geek


Now let me talk technology to you. I am very comfortable with technology. Some people hate it but, trust me, technology will be your salvation. I don’t believe that printing is the future. It’s too slow. By the time I get a newspaper, I know the news that’s in it. It’s environmentally unsound. In ten years time it will be dead.


So I guess one thing you could do is launch a paperless newspaper with your own, tied news reader. Like a branded Kindle type device. Maybe using E-Paper? If you sold it with say, an 18 month subscription, it would probably make a lot of money. If you tied up a deal with the Amazon e-book store and took commission on book sales you could make more. And then add email services, dating, classified ad search. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? Well, do it.


Another one. You may have seen Flipboard and Paper.li.


These platforms let you curate your own newspapers using rss and social feeds. They are great but how I yearn for the same functionality in the Economist iPad app. And think of those bloated Sunday newspapers. How much content do I pay for, never read and put straight into the bin. I would pay more to read less and so would many of my time-poor peer group.


Which brings me neatly to a story of a Tech Entrepreneur friend of mine who recently sold his 3rd company and was looking to start a new one. He thought that sentiment analysis would be an interesting area to invest in because, essentially, it’s an automated way of making sense of the tidal wave of content we’re drowning in. So he found the head of computational linguistics at Cornell University in New York who had spent 10 years researching how to extract what people were thinking, feeling and saying from unstructured content. Together with her and the university, he created a joint venture called...


....Appinions to focus on the extraction and analysis of opinions. An opinion is usually the most useful part of a long article because it’s a very efficient way of exciting a reader. The new company extracted and tagged opinions with details of whose opinion it was, the topic of the opinion, and whether the opinion was positive, negative or neutral in terms of sentiment.Then they applied this technology to everything that’s being published on the internet, in real time. (That’s 5 million information sources and 100 million opinions every day). By searching for topics and opinion holders of your choosing, it’s possible to spot incredibly relevant news within seconds of its publication. And if an opinion strikes you as interesting, you can simply click on it to link you back to the original context.


Innovation hasn’t stopped there. The scientists discovered that they could analyse where an opinion actually started life. Who inspired a chain of thought. It suddenly became possible to identify real influence using their approach. This isn’t based on how many Twitter followers someone has or how important their job title might be, but on what they say and how it affects others. Great journalists – you’ll be glad to know - feature as highly influential. But wouldn’t you like to know how they rank with respect to a given topic? Or in relation to each other? Well now you can.


A few weeks ago, Lucky Magazine launched a new section of their website driven by consumer content. Before launching the site, they needed to populate it with content. Lucky used Appinions to identify influencers in the various sections (fashion, accessories, beauty, etc.) and asked them to curate content for the new community, which simultaneously grew Lucky’s visibility across these influencers’ networks.


Another example of innovation. For 25 years, I’ve worked in various capacities with Adobe - a technology company that I think you all know. They have been responsible for much of the technology in image editing and page layout for many years now. Last year, one of my companies helped Adobe to showcase the first version of their Digital Publishing Suite. After years of creating print, Adobe set out a bold vision to build the best content creation tools for tablets like the iPad.


As many trialists discovered, it wasn’t perfect but it showed the opportunity for publishers -allowing them to embed video content, engage with advertising and experience something that paper would never provide – interactivity. Tablet adoption is exploding – for example, iPad sales in the US are equivalent to 1 in 9 of the population – and this is just the beginning.


The revolution of social media offers the biggest opportunity for publishers since Gutenberg – I’d happily tell you why but I’m a bit stuck for time.


Do a WolframAlpha report on your Facebook Data and you’ll get the gist of it. Suffice it to say that we have never been able to get better insight into what readers are thinking, doing and saying. We need to learn from this and use it.Consumer generated content and commentary needs to be a part of every online news product. And online news delivery is the future - there’s simply no turning back.I won’t say don’t worry. I’d say worry.But if you focus on where you are creating value and continue to enhance it, I don’t believe your ship will sink.


You need lots of innovation and courage to keep sailing. But you can. And if you don’t, someone else will. News is here to stay – but consumers will only pay for something that fulfils a need. Great journalism and brilliant editorial is valuable enough to make it into the lifeboat. And brand new ways of searching news content and alerting consumers to topics and speakers will do for news what the iPod and iTunes did for the music industry. Let’s go back and remember the people who started this industry – men and women who conquered the world of news, built the great newspapers and changed the world.What would they think if they were here with us today?

email [email protected] twitter @rodbannerTuesday, 4 September 12

What would they do?I don’t believe they’d be interested in investing in a dying industryOr sailing in a sinking ship.They’d be using every brand new tool of the brand new age - to make themselves unsinkable (properly this time) and plot a course through stormy seas. And that’s what you have to do. Before it’s too late.I’m not a newspaper man. But if you want to talk more about bold ideas and technologies to revolutionise the newspaper industry, I’m here to help…

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

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