“Media Industry” Items

Coming Media Industry Storm, 1999 Speech

In February 1999, I gave a speech at the 10th Annual Interactive Newspapers Conference in Atlanta. At that time, the newspaper industry was still clinging to its traditional revenue pillars—print circulation, display ads, and, most crucially, classifieds. However, to me, there was no doubt that those pillars were now built upon shifting sands.

I gave the speech in my role as Director of Technology and Information Strategies for Central Newspapers. I wanted to issue a warning that time was short to hope that changes were evolutionary not revolutionary. Looking back, I’m particularly proud that I said that the internet was a fundamentally a different medium, not an extension of an existing medium.

I asked Chat GPT to read the transcript of the speech and write a post. [The full transcript is available here.] This is what AI wrote:

Drawing from his experience launching online ventures like ArizonaCentral.com and HomeFair.com, Howard Finberg projected a not-so-distant future in which classifieds—the cash cow for local papers—would erode significantly. Industry research was already signaling a potential 7% loss in bottom-line revenue. “Look around the room,” Finberg said. “Seven percent of us won’t be here next year unless other things happen.”

What followed was a clear-eyed, sometimes humorous, always practical exploration of how newspapers needed to reinvent themselves—organizationally, culturally, and strategically—for the internet era.

A New Business, Not a New Department

Finberg’s core message was that digital wasn’t just an add-on. It was a fundamentally different medium with different economics, content, and user behavior. Drawing a comparison to how early television mimicked radio before finding its own identity, he urged media leaders to stop thinking of the web as an “extension of print.”

Instead, he proposed a hybrid model he called Integrated Independence. The idea was to combine centralized resources (like shared technology platforms and content services) with localized control. Local newsrooms would have the freedom to tailor digital strategies to their communities while benefiting from corporate-level efficiencies. “Nobody knows the local markets better than the local publishers,” Finberg reminded the audience.

Breaking the Assembly Line

Finberg also called for deep structural and cultural change within newsrooms. The traditional assembly-line workflow—where one department handed off content to another in rigid steps—wasn’t going to cut it. He advocated for flatter hierarchies, shared knowledge, and team-driven processes where journalists were empowered to collaborate, experiment, and respond to audience needs in real-time.

One visual metaphor stood out: the future journalist not as a solitary reporter with a notebook, but a nimble, multi-skilled “first-on-the-scene” storyteller—equipped with audio, video, and digital tools, capturing stories from the ground up.

Talent, Risk, and Retention

Finberg was equally blunt about the staffing crisis on the horizon. Starting salaries in journalism couldn’t compete with emerging web companies offering equity and entrepreneurial freedom. “We face a real brain drain,” he warned. His solution? Pay strategically for “Hot Jobs,” break HR molds when needed, and—most importantly—offer employees the chance to learn, move, and grow. “We (must) reward failure,” he said, “by not penalizing it—and by encouraging the next try.”

A Call to Look Beyond

Perhaps the most striking element of Finberg’s talk was his push for the industry to stop looking only inward. “We need to start attending conferences outside our field,” he said. “Broadcasting, cable, tech—we have to see what others are doing.” It was a call for curiosity, humility, and horizon scanning—a mindset that still resonates today.

More than two decades later, many of the ideas in this talk—content re-usability (“author once, publish many”), cross-platform journalism, digital-first thinking, and agile teams—have become core to modern media strategy. But in 1999, this was revolutionary thinking.

Finberg’s presentation wasn’t just a roadmap. It was a challenge. A reminder that digital disruption wasn’t just coming—it had already arrived.

Electronic Newspaper of the Future, 1992

One of the more innovative folks in the design universe was a professor from Spain, Dr. Juan A. Giner.  Giner was at the School of Journalism  at the University of Navarra. In 1992, he asked several folks for their thoughts about electronic newspapers.  This is before the Internet.  I think he was using some of the information for a research paper and for a presentation at the Summit Meeting of Editors and Publishers, a European conference, I’m guessing.

Here’s what I wrote, the conclusion of my thoughts, sent via FAX:

They have information to sell, regardless of the form it takes to reach the reader. Unfortunately, only a few see the road ahead; too many are looking behind at the road they have just traveled.

If the current leadership fails in understanding the market place or fails to adjust to the needs of the news consumer, then the consequences will be two-fold:

• Many more companies will go out of business.
• Many more companies will be bought by those who understand the needs of the marketplace and replace those publishers and editors who do not.

The future will belong to the quick and smart. Be neither quick nor smart and you’ll be out of the game.

It was fun to think about the future.

Michael Bloomberg on Newspapers

Michael Bloomberg, president and founder of Bloomberg Financial Markets gave a keynote speech at the International Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 1997.  His speech was about the future of electronic devices and he spent a lot of time talking about newspapers and whether there’s an electronic solution that would make consumers give up on print. [That’s why I’m posting his speech]. An excerpt:

And if we are going to build consumer products, if our businesses are going to grow and let electronic devices replace newspapers they are going to have to provide the same functionality. Now another answer to the problem would be don’t let radio and television become the substitute for newspapers. But find some way to make newspapers more valuable, more economic. And if you think about it, it is a very easy thing to do. Right now we go and we chop down an awful lot of trees in Canada, we haul them to the mill, we grind them up into paper, we put ink on it, we deliver it to the comer newspaper stand or the newspaper boy or girl throws it on your doorstep. You read it once and you throw it away. It is a phenomenally inefficient thing screaming for a technological solution.

Bloomberg also so the coming of streaming television:

No matter how many times people tell you that broadcast is here to stay, the feet of the matter is it is not here to stay. It is so compelling to be able to get what you want, when you want it, independent of everybody else that we are going to give you video on demand no matter what it costs and no matter who’s axe gets gored and people will try to protect their industries. They will try to protect their jobs, but the feet of the matter is, if you look at the public, the public has the interest in getting a movie they go to Blockbuster, they want to see it when they want to see it. The public even goes to the comer movie theater to see it when they want to see it. The public wants to be able to jump over commercials, which is going to be a very big problem. Who is going to pay for all of this? The public wants to be able to stop that football game for two minutes when the phone rings or when the diaper needs changing. And we are going to have to deliver those kinds of products, those facilities, those attributes for television.

His speech had some good visionary moments.

Online Consumer Survey, 1992-1993

The Interactive Services Association, a trade organization for companies that marketed online services [think AOL or CompuServe] to consumers, issued several reports about consumer behavior online.  The 1993 report was done just before the wide-spread use of the World Wide Web.  Here are some of the highlights from the report:

  • Active users find that no one system meets their needs completely, and seek out unique content and bargain features. Three in five online survey respondents use at least two online systems, and more than half subscribe to three or more. This should strongly encourage innovations by incumbents and unique offerings by new entrants – right-minded efforts will be recognized and rewarded by a market that restlessly seeks out new and improved services. (More representative survey data suggest that only about one-fourth of all online users use more than one system.)
  • BBS’s appeal to online users on both price and content. About two-thirds of respondents use bulletin board systems (BBS’s) in addition to commercial online services. A third or more cite cost, software libraries for downloading, and communication with other users as the reasons for BBS’s appeal. Commercial services must continue to expand their offerings beyond these latter areas in order to justify their higher fees.
  • Software downloading, communicating with others who share interests, and getting PC-related help and information lead in popularity among applications. Respondents were asked to choose, from a listing of 10, the three applications they use most. In addition to the three just mentioned, exchanging electronic mail with friends and family, and obtaining current, general news round out the first tier of most-used applications. Systems and services competing for the core of today’s market must continue to advance their offerings in these areas.
  • Online use by multiple household members is substantial and growing. Regular use by other family members was reported by a full 42.5% of respondents, almost double last year’s percentage. In addition, a remarkable one in ten of all respondents report regular use by a child or children 12 or under. Although Prodigy did not participate in the survey, its use by multiple-system users may underlay this phenomenon – along with the growth of family-oriented features on other systems. This paradigmatic change, regardless of its source, presents a new opportunity to be addressed broadly by the industry.

In a couple of years, there would a report on how to build online services that were Web-based.

10th Annual Interactive Newspaper Conference

I was a speaker at the Editor & Publisher magazine’s 10th Annual Interactive Newspapers Conference in Atlanta, Ga. My speech was recorded live on February 18, 1999 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Here’s a bit of what I said at the start of my speech:

I made a presentation to our managers at Phoenix Newspapers a couple of weeks ago, and I sort of titled it “Armageddon” and whether, when we lose all, some share of classifieds in the next three years, what impact will that have on the bottom line. And if you look at the latest research from Forrester, they predict, on industry average, a 7% reduction in bottom line figures. If classified continues going the way it’s going then seven percent of us won’t be here next year, unless other things happen.

Another couple of interesting statistics is that in less than a dozen years, in 10 years, everybody under 50 will be computer literate. We’re all basically computer literate here; and obviously, the generations coming behind us are all computer literate. And even scarier is that by 2010, everybody under the age of 21 will not have known a world without the Internet. To us, some grey hairs [old folks] in the room, along with myself, is that we can remember, hot type and cold type and all that. And we remember when the Internet first took off.

This transcript is sometimes hard to read since the transcriber didn’t catch all of the jargon. However, it gives you a taste of what we were talking about in 1999.

Media Companies Launch Consortium

This is the official launch of PAFET, Partners Affiliated for Exploring Technology. It was a consortium that hoped that by exploring technology together, these companies would benefit from shared knowledge in the creation of new businesses and/or services.

“Our purpose is to maintain and strengthen our competence in collecting, packaging and marketing information, making use of the best of evolving technologies available. As a group we can invest in research on new information technology that larger companies are pursuing,” states James N. Rosse, president and chief executive officer of Freedom Communications, Inc., who will be the first chairman of the PAFET management committee

Speech at the 10th Annual Interactive Newspaper Conference

In February 1999, I gave a presentation to the the interactive newspaper group gathered in Atlanta, GA. It was a speech about what was going on at Central Newspapers and about the future of newspapers. Here’s a taste:

Another couple of interesting statistics is that in less than a dozen years, in 10 years, everybody under 50 will be computer literate. We’re all basically computer literate here; and obviously, the generations coming behind us are all computer literate. And even scarier is that by 2010, everybody under the age of 21 will not knows a world without the Internet. To us, some grey hairs in the room, along with myself, is that we can remember, we don’t necessarily like to remember, hot type and cold type and all that.

Here’s the full speech transcript 10th Annual Interactive Newspaper Conference_1999

How Consumers Spend Their Media Day

How consumers use media has always been an interesting topic. However, it never really got the attention of those at the top of newspaper organizations.  One of the better studies was this one:

The Center for Media Design at Ball State University conducted the Middletown Media Studies in 2003-2004. These investigations tracked the ways in which ordinary Americans residing in and around Muncie engage with the many new forms of media available in the twentieth century. More details are available in the CMD Reports and White Papers listing.

Here’s a copy of a paper about the study in the International Digital Media & Arts Association Journalism from Spring 2004.

Here’s a link to Ball State’s documents about the project.

Convergence and the Changing Media Corporate Culture

Howard Finberg gave a speech at the opening of the Newsplex, a prototype newsroom of the future, at the University of South Carolina. Newsplex is a cooperative project between private and public media organizations and academia at the USC’s College of Mass Communications and Information Studies. His topic was “Convergence and the Changing Media Corporate Culture.”

The idea he presented was this: Before convergence can succeed in the newsroom, it has to be adopted in the boardroom, where major cultural and business changes are also needed.

The article/speech kicker:

Next time you are in the boardroom, remember the three “Rs” – research, retraining and risk taking. Remember that it takes a long time to change our cultural templates. But it can be done.

Here’s a link to the complete article.