The Naughts: a decade to forget for the trade press

Where were you on New Year's Eve 1999? Were you on break from school? Busy in the newsroom? Selling ad space? Drunk on the coach?

If I were to say that the media world looked a lot different in 1999 than it does today . . . well, there would be no way to measure how much of an understatement that would be. But which medium has suffered more in this decade: newspapers or the trade press? Both have been slammed. But I would lean towards saying that no media segment has been hit worse than B2B.

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Will 2010 bring more closings? or less?

I created an animated GIF out of a couple of pages of information from the Paper Cuts Out of Print page which rather graphically shows the accelerating pace of newspaper closings from 2007 to this year.

2009 may have been a record year for newspaper closings, but my guess would be that 2010 will be an even worse year for trade magazines. Many are hanging by a thread now, yet I see very little real change going on in the industry. The reason for this may be that so many titles are owned by financial interests that play the game of musical chairs with their properties -- so hope springs eternal as owners pray that they can dump their properties for only a modest loss (closing properties, therefore, is not a solution they would prefer since it would lower the overall sales price of their companies -- but if the losses are too great then closing is the only way to save their EBITDA based financials).  But this game, of course,  can only be played if there are other financial companies willing to pay inflated prices in order to enter the game.

NYT announces the end of free content . . . seriously

I'm having a real hard time trying to figure out the point of this article: is it simply one of those end-of-the-year prediction stories that old editors force their reporters to write?

Apparently everyone has to do these prediction stories -- Folio:'s Jason Fell is doing a series of interviews along these lines -- so New York Times reporters Richard Pérez-Peña and Tim Arango have been pegged to give us the newspaper-of-record's take on where the media world is going:

Over more than a decade, consumers became accustomed to the sweet, steady flow of free news, pictures, videos and music on the Internet. Paying was for suckers and old fogeys. Content, like wild horses, wanted to be free . . . Now, however, there are growing signs that this free ride is drawing to a close.

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Do you have "linkophobia?

This amazing story on the City Desk blog page of the Washington City Paper site got me thinking this morning about something: B2B media execs, do you authorize your editors to link to the competition? or to other media, in general? If the answer is "no", maybe it's time to rethink this policy.

More on the story mentioned above, and why it illustrates one of the weaknesses of "old-media-think" after the jump.

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Launch on Friday, failure on Monday

This was a great way to start the Christmas week, with a laugh: here's a story from the The Business Insider on why the GQ and Esquire iPhone app launches are an abject failure.

That's right, Condè Nast and Hearst launch their magazine apps late last week and within a couple of days a columnist has already passed judgement: no one wants to read their magazines on a phone.

After a few days of sales, neither the January issue of GQ (featuring a near-naked Rihanna), nor the January issue of Esquire are in Apple's list of the top 100 best-selling paid apps in the App Store. (Each costs $2.99.) Nor is either in Apple's list of the highest-grossing apps, which sorts by revenue generated (versus strictly unit sales).

(By a weird coincidence, I am currently rereading a biography of Thomas Edison. As the book points out, Edison's work method was simply to try a million different ways to get the result he wanted, refining as he went along until he got something that worked. Thank God Edison didn't have to read this kind of nonsense or we'd still be in the dark. And I'll take this analogy one step further: the move from a successful print model to a successful online or mobile model is no less daunting than creating the phonograph or incandescent light bulb -- ask any publisher or ad director.)

As for whether people will read publications on their phones, the writer ignores the fact that both the New York Times and WSJ apps are doing well. Both apps are free, however.

So now publishers are experimenting with paid models. Will a paid app model work? I say yes; Dan Frommer says no, with a bunch of caveats where he speculates that a tablet reader might work better than an iPhone reader, etc.

But can we at least give it a full week before declaring the experiment a failure?

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Week in Review

Short reads on a Saturday morning:

• After 23 years of advertising on the Super Bowl broadcast Pepsi has decided to place those advertising dollars online. A 30 second Super Bowl spot will set you back $3 million, a bit less than the price of a banner ad on this site (hey Pepsi, what a deal! Call me.). 

• The Detroit Media Partnership get e-reader fever, signing a deal to appear on Amazon's Kindle device. Readers will be charged $6.99 a month for access to the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.  Both newspapers are also working with Plastic Logic to develop a new edition of their newspapers in a different format.

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