The annual media events presented by Fairfax Digital and organised by Brendan Harkin’s X-Media Lab are always a great February event, spent at the beautifully scenic Walsh Bay Wharf at Pyrmont. While I missed last year’s event, I was told that Media 2010 was a lot more upbeat and optimistic in its tone than last year’s event.
Jack Matthews, CEO of Fairfax Digital, led off by noting that the current risk was assuming that things were “back to normal” after the global financial crisis, and neglecting the profound structural changes facing news media. He observed that we always over-estimate the impact of technology in the short-term, but also always under-estimate its impact over the longer term. He recommended reading Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks as a guide to how the industrial model of media, where media companies control both content and its distribution, as a guide to how things are developing.
Richard Titus, CEO of Associated Northcliffe Digital (publishers of the UK Daily Mail), noted that in the UK there are now 170,000 Internt enabled devices available on the market, so you cannot produce specifically for a device. He observed that they cluster around mobile devices, which tend to be used in very social ways, and fixed devices, which are more push-focused. He argued that what is now valuable is not media content per se, as content is ubiquitous and never stops building, but the information that exists around an asset about its users.
Titus also wondered how to create a single customer view across all digital properties, that delivers messages of value to users and filters out messages that are not valuable. He also observed that in the last month, 8 billion links were accessed through search engines (Google, Bing etc.), but 6 billion links were accessed through Facebook, Twitter, Bit.ly etc. The latter are endorsed links, as they have been recommended by someone that you know socially or professionally. By any measure, teh time individuals are spending on social media is dwarfing that spent on any other.
Marc Frons, the Chief Technology Officer (Digital) at the New York Times, discussed their decision to go to pay-walled content from January 2011. He observed that this has been a difficult and contentious decision for NYT, and they are hoping that new devices such as the Apple iPad will make the shift easier for them. They are proposing a metered approach, where payment requirements kick in after a certain number of views per month. He also envisaged that subscription packages will bundle Web, print, mobile and archived content at the one price.
You can also read up on the event at Brad Howarth’s blog.