State of the Media

Budget death spiral

We're entering into the budget dance for 2009.  You know the steps:

1.  We'd like to talk with you about your services (spring)

2.  Let's schedule a meeting (summer)

2.  We're out of budget for this year.  We'll need to talk next year after we've determined our budgets (fall)

3.  We're right in the middle of our program and don't have time to talk (winter)

And back to step 1.

Here's a hint for all you marketers who are considering exploring the world of social media and alternative marketing approaches:  Leave yourself some leeway in your budget to experiment down the road.  If you spend the same amount on news releases, trade shows and collateral material that you did last year, the best you can hope for is the same result as last year.  The definition of insanity, etc.

Google trends and manufactured news

We've been doing some research at Footwasher Media (that includes VC Comm, VitalCom and New Tech Press) to find what industries are doing well in their communications efforts and where the real technology interest is.  We've discovered the wonder and surprise of Google Trends.

One of the things we've discovered is the steady decline of interest, at least in the form of searches and in the form of both REAL and MANUFACTURED news for semiconductor and design automation industries and niches.  We haven't looked into embedded systems closely but will soon.

Let me define the difference between real and manufactured news.  Real news are articles or podcasts created by third parties, either bloggers or traditional journalists.  Manufactured news is contributed articles and news releases.  The latter is always written with a blatant bias and is seen as such.

Now what I've been hearing for several years is that technology companies are relying more and more on manufactured news production because, firstly, it's easier to control.  Secondly, it's supposed t be cheaper than doing press relations and getting the ever shrinking media to write something about you.

But what the trends are showing in at least the Google searches and news coverage is that the production of manufactured news has been steadily dropping for the past three years, although not as fast as real news coverage.  It's understandable that real news is dropping considering we've lost more than 90 per cent of the press covering electronics in the past 8 years, but the drop in news releases and contributed articles was surprising.  Supposedly, DIY news was more cost efficient.

At first I thought that the drop could be attributed to consolidation, but the industries as a whole have been flat -- no growth, no shrinkage -- for about five years.  So that can't be it.  Then I thought that there might be a reduction in the amount of manufactured copy.  But just look at the amount of money Business Wire is making and you know that's not true.

But here is a corollary that might work:  The electronics industry, as a whole, has reduced investments in the people that actually know something about communication, relying instead on automated forms of information distribution, like wire services, Yahoo, Google, websites, etc.  All the investment has been put into the car, but no one knows how to put the gas in.

The decline in interest/searches/real news matches directly with declining investment in marketing personnel.  The result has been cookie-cutter manufactured news that looks and sounds like everyone else.  There is no differentiation in messages or image.  And as the consuming public sees no differentiation, they have no need to look for anything else.

Nasty business this journalism

Picked up the SFExaminer in my driveway to check on some local news and read that the Daily News, another local throwaway, is making cuts.

Here's some history.  The tabloid Daily News started out about a decade ago in Palo Alto, and had such success it started expanding.  Redwood City, San Carlos, San Mateo... all of them making money hand over fist.  It was so successful that it spawned a competitor in the San Mateo Daily Journal and the SF Examiner, after Hearst sold it, changed it's format and distribution model to match.  All these pubs were making money during the big media downturn.

Then the Daily News organization got bought by Knight Ridder, making the founders incredibly rich ... and things started going south almost immediately.  See the thing about the Daily News is it was a LOCAL daily on the Peninsula covering LOCAL news.  Something we didn't have.  They sold ads locally and ... here's the best part ... the website didn't have the local news.  They said on the website that the reason they were successful was because people READ THE NEWS IN PRINT and therefore people saw the ads in print, which made the print valuable.

When Knight Ridder bought the chain, they started posting the news online as well... and local advertising started to drop off.  Hmmm.  Lesson learned?  Not quite.

The guys that founded the Daily News Chain bided their time and waited until the non-compete clause expired.  They just recently launch the Palo Alto Daily Post, stealing the layout and masthead directly from the New York Daily Post, filling it with short local news stories with huge bold headlines and absolutely STUFFED with advertising.  They are making money again.

Yet the Daily News (no no longer owned by Knight Ridder but by the Media News Group out of Denver), while still ably covering local news, also has news on the website, lots of AP stuff and ... diminishing revenues.  The SF Examiner is stuffed with local Peninsula News as well and the Daily Journal has an active website.  For the sake of Journalism on the Peninsula I hope the lesson is well learned:

Local journalism thrives when it focuses on local issues.

The web is a funny place...

The internet is a fun place to get lost in.  More often than not, I find something really interesting that has nothing to do with what I originally started search for.  e.g....

I'm reading Chris Edwards post on the feud between Shel Israel (who I know) and Loren Feldman (who I don't know.  I start searching around for Loren and Shel through Google and other search engines and really don't find anything about the feud, but then I run across this piece by Israel a little over a year ago on why static websites are still valuable.  I think I passed an entire tuna sandwich through my nose on point 5.

1. Environmental purposes. The web site replaces the tripfold, full-bleed corporate broachure that no one ever read.  Entire forests have been saved by the move to websites.  Now no one can read what companies have written in a much more eco friendly way,

2. Historic Value.  Now you can take a trip down memory lane and see the state of last decade's internet technology from the comfort of your home without visiting the Computer History Museum.

3. To see opportunities you missed. Most enterprise site seem to list job opportunities that were filled in time to face the Y2K crisis.  But there they remain, frozen in time, sort of like  Hemingway's leopard on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

4. To lower unemployment. We writers already know we are a low-cost commodity because the supply exceeds the demand. The use of the least talented of us to write websites at least keeps the price above one dime per dozen, which is what most CMOs think writers are worth.

5. To eliminate differentiation. It almost as much fun as reading a train schedule to examine the websites of competing companies.  They use the same color and cliches, art from the same stock supplier, design to look like the other guys.  Then each site tells you that they are the leaders.

Like I said.  It's a funny place.

Brian Fuller 2.0

A little over a year ago I interviewed Brian Fuller, then editor in chief of EE Times on the state of the media.  It was the kickoff of my podcast program and one of the most downloaded podcasts of State of the Media - both parts.

Brian threw us all a curve a few weeks later by resigning from EE Times and resurfacing a couple months later as the vice president of media strategies at Blanc and Otus in SF, a few blocks from the Times building he used to work in.

I decided it would be a good idea to catch up with him and see if his views of media have changed... they have.

Junko Yoshida moves back to the fun side of journalism

I've had my head down for the past few days with green power clients, VCs and media moguls and missed some pretty big news.  In case you missed it too, Brian Fuller broke the news that Junko Yoshida has stepped down from the Editor-in-Chief position at EE Times to go back to covering international news, with a special focus on China.  This is good news for her.  Yoshida is a GREAT reporter and now she has the freedom to do what she does best.  Not sure what it means for EE Times, however.  The still have Rich Nass and Patrick Mannion heading up Embedded.com and Techonline, and they are more than capable of sharing the top spot for the Times, but finding an eventual replacement  for the slot will be tough, even though there are a lot of good news people out on the street now.

Why so tough?  Because running a major B:B publication news room is like being on the Titanic while Palestinian terror groups are deciding who gets to be first in the life rafts.  Everyone is still looking forward to reading the stuff, but the people who are supposed to be supporting their efforts abandoned ship before the iceberg hit (that would be the companies that get their stuff written about, in case you were wondering).  Fuller got off while the getting was good last year and Junko wasn't all that thrilled to be taking over then, as I heard.

So we can look forward to some great coverage of international technology trends in the next few months, thanks to EE Times and Junko, not that many out there will actually be willing to show their gratitude.

And, no, David.  I don't want the job either.  ;)

Wandering the net and finding gold

Found this while looking for something else.  Seth Godin gives me hope.

Party on Facebook

New Tech Press Biz Dev home boy, Ozzie Wallace has started a Facebook Group called "Marketing like it is1999" and we're opening it to everyone.  If you haven't tried Facebook, or signed up and can't figure out what the big deal is, this might give you a reason.

This blog, along with several others, has been maintaining the conversation about the changing state of the media and how it affects business.  It's time to bring it all together and this is where we're proposing to do it.

You have to be a Facebook member, but it took Ann Mutschler at Reed did it in less than a minute.  It's time to get it, folks.

I stand corrected

David Meerman Scott has discovered a very good reason for not embracing effective web marketing strategies.  I have to say, he has a real point.  I never thought I'd find a way to link camel sales with the semiconductor and EDA industries, but they apparently have a lot in common.

Ron Ploof has a link to this same post,but has a bit more to say about it.  'Nuff said.

We need to rethink ... a lot of stuff

Was watching a video on Jeremiah Owyang's site, and it ended with a statement that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity...ethics..."  That's pretty much what I've been doing for several years now and have only, in the past 12 months, started to put into practice.

The assumptions are always there.  "That's not journalism." "That's not ethical." "You don't ask the tough questions."  So I've started at the end and begun asking the tough questions.  What is journalism?  What is Ethics?  What is a tough question?

Not getting a lot of real answers.  What I'm starting to find out is, in the midst of this very real sea change in how information is disseminated, parsed, consumed and created, we have assumptions, not answers.  Journalists have relied on the advertising departments of publications to insulate them from the decision processes that make up their ethics.  The mechanism that supports journalism has become the definition or journalism.  The tough questions are defined by whoever is not doing the asking.

But the mechanisms, shields and assumptions are falling apart right now.  It's up to the individual now to do their own thinking; to define and maintain their own ethics; to be ready to ask a tough question when you think it isn't being asked, rather than denigrate someone else's effort.

We are all on this planet together and no one is getting out alive.  We are the government, we are the ethical construct, we are the machine.  If you don't like the way it's working, stop complaining and do something about it.