Plus, if someone can figure out a combination of tech and business that works in journalism, they are going to make a lot of money.
A lot.
One of the keys will be something mentioned in yesterday's "Okay, Maybe There's More to Bitcoin Than Drugs": Digital rights and smart property....
Another is a refinement of the "Journalist as Brand" wave we saw in 2013-14, some of our posts are linked in Oct. 2013's "Journalist as Personal Brand: The Economics".
We need the journalists, if for nothing else than refilling the idea hopper.
I, for one, don't have enough creativity to fill a thimble so someone has to do it.
Otherwise we're left with serendipity.*
From Jalopnik:
How Money Is (Not) Made In Auto Journalism
Do you work in an industry that is fundamentally broken? If you do, does it leave you unsettled because you don't know how best to react? That terrible self-pitying need to sit and moan with your colleagues about the desolation of the wider situation set against the exciting knowledge that now is the time you might actually be able to winkle yourself some audience share. It fries my brain.
My world – that's the one which both reviews cars objectively and uses them for more base entertainment purposes is about as broken as they come. I spend too much of my time sitting at my desk, or sitting in cars thinking about how I can somehow navigate a way through it. Or what's to become of it? Or whether I'm a mug to assume I can maintain some kind of presence in it for the next decade? And that can be a lonely pastime, so I'm going to share some of it, dear reader, with you.
All of this is a bit weird I know. This is unquestionably the best job in the world. I know as much, I'm eternally grateful for the chance to do it, and I want to do it forever. Hence the reason the edifice all being a bit wonky right now is the cause of some consternation.
The base problem Why is the business of reviewing cars broken? You can point to all manner of factors, most of which I'll trawl through here at some point, but the fundamental issue is that making money from the process has become too difficult for most. It's a classic case of a conventional business (print) being decimated by something new (the web) underscored by one uncomfortable bleak structural issue, that the old way of doing things (paper) still often generates more money than the new way (internet). Loving my brackets there.
The print problem And so all the while print runs are shrinking and the advertising coin is leaving print, and in most cases it is not reappearing in the digital replacements. The main exception is if you're a big consumer review catalogue on the interweb, all five star reviews and manufacturer hand-jobs, the cash is probably rolling in as makers attempt to tactically position themselves against rivals. But that's not really the side of this business people like us care about.
The content driven side: the great stories, the spellbinding photography, that's the bit that's taken the hit and looks unlikely to recover. Magazines have less space and budget for indulgent features, yet they feel unwilling to post such long-form content on their websites because they don't want to upset that rapidly dwindling print readership. And you know what? Just giving shit away for free doesn't make those who created it feel especially good.1
The web and e-reader problem
Then there was the iPad revolution and Apps and inApp marketing and magazine editors poncing around auto shows talking of media empires displaying some beautiful interactive magazines on their tablets. All of which happened to be a 1GB memory cluster-fuck and, for most mortals, impossible to buy. And not ideal for reading mid-shit. So no one bought them.2Will a conventional website ever be able to serve longer-form content in a way that replicates your favourite magazine? I don't believe it will. Its best chance was through the tablet, but that can now be called a failure and the whole concept of people ditching paper for pixels seems to have ground to a halt. Sales of Kindles literally dive-bombed over the Christmas period in the UK. Of course, part of this problem is that if you offer people a choice of words on a page, or a video player to click, they choose the video....3
The video problem ...Which leads us further into the story of fragmentation – a narrative bollocksed by me and my pals from /DRIVE (which I was a part of and still own a portion of), who came along and gave away shed-loads of pretty good video because YouTube gave us lots of money. It was all actioned, to mirror the process mentioned earlier, with no end game. We came, we disrupted, we trusted that YouTube had a plan to monetize all these gadzillion video views and maintain the momentum (hindsight, dear chap, hindsight) and then YT stopped handing out cash and the music stopped. And someone had removed half the chairs. Balls.
...MUCH MORE including some very sharp comments from the peanut gallery.There was and is very little money in internet video. But your instincts tell you that because we love making it and people love consuming it, it must make commercial sense. Wrong answer. That assumes all market economies adhere to some form of common sense, but people still buy Priuses and drink terrible beer, so that's all bunkum.4...
*Serendipity, Buffett style:
...To earn even 15% annually over the next decade (assuming we continue to follow our present dividend policy, about which more will be said later in this letter) we would need profits aggregating about $3.9 billion.
Accomplishing this will require a few big ideas - small ones just won’t do. Charlie Munger, my partner in general management, and I do not have any such ideas at present, but our experience has been that they pop up occasionally. (How’s that for a strategic plan?)...
-Warren Buffett, Letter to Shareholders, 1984
.........................
...You may remember the wildly upbeat message of last year’s report: nothing much was in the works but our experience had been that something big popped up occasionally. This carefully-crafted corporate strategy paid off in 1985. Later sections of this report discuss (a) our purchase of a major position in Capital Cities/ABC, (b) our acquisition of Scott & Fetzer, (c) our entry into a large, extended term participation in the insurance business of Fireman’s Fund, and (d) our sale of our stock in General Foods.
Our gain in net worth during the year was $613.6 million, or 48.2%. It is fitting that the visit of Halley’s Comet coincided with this percentage gain: neither will be seen again in my lifetime.....
