Media Transparent » disintermediation

Disintermediation of the Media Celebrities

Pat Kitano — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:56:41 +0000

Media celebrities, from on-air personnel to executives, reaped the high salaried rewards of a high margin business model based on promoting “air” time.

Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman suggests that the CNBC decision to part ways with ex-news chief Jonathan Wald reflects the new budget reality predicated by the slow decline of the broadcast media combined with an advertising recession:

The Wald story is a defining moment. You can call it, with apologies to author Malcolm Gladwell, the tipping point of the news industry.

CNBC put a line in the sand for all media companies. It’s sending a message to the world that it wouldn’t pay up to keep Wald, one of the brightest executives around.

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Today, there’s further evidence of media retrenching… Harper Collins Lays Off Two Executives. It’s notable that “superstar” industries are downsizing top down, presaging a new management structure that processes instead of making deals.

Slow Death of Traditional News Syndication – AP

Pat Kitano — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:39:33 +0000

Associated Press once was the RSS Feed of news distribution. Newspapers, already affected by plunging profits and now retrenching for recession, have been canceling their AP service contracts in droves due to AP’s high pricing structure:

October 16: Tribune Companies

October 17: Columbus Dispatch

September 26: Minneapolis St Paul Star Tribune

September 2: Spokane Spokesman Review

AP has a relic business model – news syndication – that relies on paid content sources written by AP staff writers, now commodity journalism. Twitter reports breaking news hours faster than AP. Social media distributes content just as well free or at a fractional cost. Newspaper don’t need AP, they should devote their efforts in finding and promoting these content sources, like bloggers and independent news services, who would appreciate and value mainstream media reference. They can then extend their brand name creating new aggregated news services like Politico or Huffington Post.

Read Write Web describes AP’s new feedreader-like product called AP Member Marketplace that begins to automate news syndication for web editors.

The problem is the marketplace is limited to AP news stories, ignoring the vast resources of the web for news content. This is a business that is painstakingly attempting to remain relevant, and relying on its customer base to believe in the old power and brand of AP.

Diaspora of Journalists

Pat Kitano — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:17:02 +0000

On Community Funded Reporting site Spot.US, David Cohn reports from Freelance Camp – “an unconference for freelance professionals of all sorts – artists, coders, writers, designers etc.”

The most pertinent session for me was aptly titled “How the Changing Nature of Information Affects Information Providers.” It was proposed by a local magazine writer who recently lost a column to content produced via “the wires.”

Simply put, the Reporter Diaspora has been exacerbated by three main trends:

The growing supply of citizen journalism and user-generated content is effectively replacing traditional journalistic content.
Newpaper business models based on print advertising slowly lose relevancy as fewer people read print.
Newspapers must cost cut and writers are fired.

Journalists (now known as “information providers”) are positioning themselves to leverage specific expertise that bloggers don’t own – in-depth, quality research and reporting. This is in large part the mission of Spot.US – to fund raise and compensate journalists on projects for the common good.

More recent evidence of the Diaspora:

SFChronicle lets Real Estate Columnist go
Adding up the Newspaper Cutbacks
LA Times drops Print Real Estate Section