Bruce Nussbaum just posted on the future of BusinessWeek which is up for sale... for 1$. He presents two business models. He concedes that there could be others. I think that he's right but I thought I would ponder his proposals a bit and consider how they would play out. (comments after the jump)
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(posted in the comments section of his blog - see trackback)
First a question - Is this bloomberg LLP territory? Might that be a good match? They already have a high-end / high-cost pay model (bloomberg anywhere?) but I wonder how much insight on the data mountain that they mine is actually available. Furthermore, BW seems to have a better, more publicly digestible angle that is one of its strengths. Everyone is mining for diamonds - but there are still so few people in the world who can take a rough diamond and make an object of obsession from it.
Marketing specialty journalism to top executives seems to militate for an elitist agenda (certainly the realm of HBR) and suggests the opportunity for an enterprise subscription model. Does this change the readership of businessweek? Is a smaller and supposedly more elite readership an aspiration? Is it in the best interests of the publication? The current collapse of the manufacturing sector will likely create more opportunities for small-independants, replicating similar post-crash economies throughout history. This would not necessarily work in favor of sharing information and analysis with the top but actually with the bottom - of course, finding that bottom and navigating it is harder than speaking to the suits you already know. What about the international readership that businessweek needs to reach and keep expanding into? Small- and micro- business is the name of the game in countries across in China, Brazil, India, across countries in Africa, and many many other corners of the world. In many of these parts of the world, the 'old' mobile-phone is the mode of information exchange - cheap quick and versatile. Shouldn't there be a model for them? A model like that would certainly not be high-cost/wide margin, but actually low cost/discount margin with less analysis and abstraction but more immediate information. Right? Maybe that makes it more bloomberg than BW territory?
The c-suite model (hope you don't mind my naming it that) might convince businesses to pay premium prices for an enterprise subscription, would this net big $$? Enough to offset the roughly 89% margin that publishing used to garner from advertising? These models, though, suggest that the readership will carry much more of the load - making them what? - more catered to? - more important?
What is the cost-to-privilege ratio that publishers need to meet in this new model? 11% is really not that much given huge amount of individuals contributing to that slice of the pie how much of the remaining 85% can a readership actually carry?
Even if there is some golden ratio for meeting an audience's needs related to their cost of entry, isn't there always going to be an incentive to fit advertising in and then to incrementally increase advertising to increase profit margins? Moreover, in a world of proprietary algorithms of varying reliability and trustworthiness, can we honestly expect 'personalized' advertising to stay in the sidebar? Where is the control mechanism to keep it from hiding in the content and further marginalizing journalistic ethics? What is the oversight model as publishers move to dynamic content and offset their marketing costs by incorporating CPC and CPI models. I see the tracks being laid for a collision between the independent voice of journalism and the co-dependent megaphone of the click-mob.
Assuming this is all resolvable or unimportant, I thought about what the marketing angle might be for those companies that purchase "BusinessSuite". Would it give execs the edge that you suggest rests primarily in the journalists privileged POV? If that is the angle then it leaves two big assumptions to be tested; First, that a professional journalist is anywhere near the center of the information universe and second, that c-suite'rs are the best people to be sharing the best information with.
On the 1st assumption - I believe that jouralists are not the center of the information universe (do you really want to be?). Much like astronomers and physicists, I think that journalists are keen observers of the information universe who can peer into and through it and who (hopefully) have the world's best capacity to research and write eloquent and succinct essays on what they find. Thus helping the rest of us (c-suite'rs and the other 99.9%) separate signal from noise.
On the 2nd assumption - Does it make sense to put a special newstand in the c-suite and take it off the street? Aren't many companies moving in the opposite direction - preferring to share more information at every level of the business and bringing more people into the intellectual part of the business (from the corner office to the copy-room)? At the very least you have to assume that some of the world's largest companies are thinking about how to do more business with fewer employees and hierarchies. This suggests that creating a BusinessWeek that is accessible for many levels of the business is more valuable than giving all of the information to a privileged few. Perhaps this suggests a third business model? - or maybe a "what this means for you" column in your model that will help the erudite masters 'share' with their less privileged colleagues?
So could marketing a publication to individual execs drive a personal database war akin to the rolodex wars of era's past? Tools for personal resource management (Bento, Papers, Bookends, Bloomberg Iphone App, etc.) are in ascendance and someone eventually will make a viable competitor to apple's current stranglehold on the rich-interface appliance market. So would the future BW create something to manage and find resources rather produce a curated weekly volume? Perhaps a resurgence of this kind of hand-to-hand info-combat would be good for everyone. A personal stake in the competition so what about this for the new BW tagline... "For $100 you'll be home for dinner, at your kid's baseball game, and SLEEPING while Bob is still climbing through TPS reports. BusinessWeek - because Bob's still has a rolodex."
Thanks for sharing BW with us BN. Looking forward to reading more.
First a question - Is this bloomberg LLP territory? Might that be a good match? They already have a high-end / high-cost pay model (bloomberg anywhere?) but I wonder how much insight on the data mountain that they mine is actually available. Furthermore, BW seems to have a better, more publicly digestible angle that is one of its strengths. Everyone is mining for diamonds - but there are still so few people in the world who can take a rough diamond and make an object of obsession from it.
Marketing specialty journalism to top executives seems to militate for an elitist agenda (certainly the realm of HBR) and suggests the opportunity for an enterprise subscription model. Does this change the readership of businessweek? Is a smaller and supposedly more elite readership an aspiration? Is it in the best interests of the publication? The current collapse of the manufacturing sector will likely create more opportunities for small-independants, replicating similar post-crash economies throughout history. This would not necessarily work in favor of sharing information and analysis with the top but actually with the bottom - of course, finding that bottom and navigating it is harder than speaking to the suits you already know. What about the international readership that businessweek needs to reach and keep expanding into? Small- and micro- business is the name of the game in countries across in China, Brazil, India, across countries in Africa, and many many other corners of the world. In many of these parts of the world, the 'old' mobile-phone is the mode of information exchange - cheap quick and versatile. Shouldn't there be a model for them? A model like that would certainly not be high-cost/wide margin, but actually low cost/discount margin with less analysis and abstraction but more immediate information. Right? Maybe that makes it more bloomberg than BW territory?
The c-suite model (hope you don't mind my naming it that) might convince businesses to pay premium prices for an enterprise subscription, would this net big $$? Enough to offset the roughly 89% margin that publishing used to garner from advertising? These models, though, suggest that the readership will carry much more of the load - making them what? - more catered to? - more important?
What is the cost-to-privilege ratio that publishers need to meet in this new model? 11% is really not that much given huge amount of individuals contributing to that slice of the pie how much of the remaining 85% can a readership actually carry?
Even if there is some golden ratio for meeting an audience's needs related to their cost of entry, isn't there always going to be an incentive to fit advertising in and then to incrementally increase advertising to increase profit margins? Moreover, in a world of proprietary algorithms of varying reliability and trustworthiness, can we honestly expect 'personalized' advertising to stay in the sidebar? Where is the control mechanism to keep it from hiding in the content and further marginalizing journalistic ethics? What is the oversight model as publishers move to dynamic content and offset their marketing costs by incorporating CPC and CPI models. I see the tracks being laid for a collision between the independent voice of journalism and the co-dependent megaphone of the click-mob.
Assuming this is all resolvable or unimportant, I thought about what the marketing angle might be for those companies that purchase "BusinessSuite". Would it give execs the edge that you suggest rests primarily in the journalists privileged POV? If that is the angle then it leaves two big assumptions to be tested; First, that a professional journalist is anywhere near the center of the information universe and second, that c-suite'rs are the best people to be sharing the best information with.
On the 1st assumption - I believe that jouralists are not the center of the information universe (do you really want to be?). Much like astronomers and physicists, I think that journalists are keen observers of the information universe who can peer into and through it and who (hopefully) have the world's best capacity to research and write eloquent and succinct essays on what they find. Thus helping the rest of us (c-suite'rs and the other 99.9%) separate signal from noise.
On the 2nd assumption - Does it make sense to put a special newstand in the c-suite and take it off the street? Aren't many companies moving in the opposite direction - preferring to share more information at every level of the business and bringing more people into the intellectual part of the business (from the corner office to the copy-room)? At the very least you have to assume that some of the world's largest companies are thinking about how to do more business with fewer employees and hierarchies. This suggests that creating a BusinessWeek that is accessible for many levels of the business is more valuable than giving all of the information to a privileged few. Perhaps this suggests a third business model? - or maybe a "what this means for you" column in your model that will help the erudite masters 'share' with their less privileged colleagues?
So could marketing a publication to individual execs drive a personal database war akin to the rolodex wars of era's past? Tools for personal resource management (Bento, Papers, Bookends, Bloomberg Iphone App, etc.) are in ascendance and someone eventually will make a viable competitor to apple's current stranglehold on the rich-interface appliance market. So would the future BW create something to manage and find resources rather produce a curated weekly volume? Perhaps a resurgence of this kind of hand-to-hand info-combat would be good for everyone. A personal stake in the competition so what about this for the new BW tagline... "For $100 you'll be home for dinner, at your kid's baseball game, and SLEEPING while Bob is still climbing through TPS reports. BusinessWeek - because Bob's still has a rolodex."
Thanks for sharing BW with us BN. Looking forward to reading more.
