Business Success

The Federal Communications Commission has moved to keep Internet service providers from limiting or unreasonably discriminating against content provided by competing servicesThe regulations are designed to keep telephone and cable companies that provide phone services from using their Internet services to limit use of Skype and other online telephone services. It is also intended to halt them from making content provided by audio and video service providers they do not own less desirable...

A growing number of firms are aggressively pursuing the market for information by providing material that answers online searches and employing strategies so their material appears high in search results.These enterprises are providing high quantity, low quality material on topics designed to produce many search hits and driven by the desire to make money from advertising received as high traffic sites. Some are proving quite successful.Demand Media, for example, uses about 13,000 freelance writers...

Newspaper publishers need to explore new methods of pricing content as they expand their digital portfolios because merely transferring the methods used in print can never bring the success publishers desire.Print newspaper publishers have traditionally tended to set prices based on production and distribution costs and not on value created. Unfortunately, this has made it impossible to possible to obtain a price premium for factors such as prestige, service, experience, and convenience.New digital...

The somewhat improving condition of the newspaper industry is permitting companies to move from merely paying operating expenses to finding ways to improve their balance sheets and looking for new opportunities. In recent weeks:The Gannett Co. has placed senior notes totally $500 million that will be due in 2015 and 2018. The notes financed at 6.375% and 7.125% will give the company some financial breathing space by being used to pay a maturing loan and revolving credits. In addition it negotiated...

It has not been a good month for newspaper unions at bankrupt newspaper companies or the government corporation that insures pension funds. As part of their reorganizations, a number of bankrupt newspaper firms are not paying money owed union pensions or are quietly letting the guaranty pick up the tab for retiree costs.Unions of Philadelphia Newspapers LLC (The Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News) were forced to accept 12 cents on the dollar for the $12 million the bankrupt company owned to...

Since the emergence of cable and satellite television services there has been struggles among platforms to increase their attractiveness to audiences and to draw market share from terrestrial television in developed nations. These struggles have had affected content producers, broadcasters, platform operators and regulators attempting to fashion socially optimal broadcasting systems.In the first competitive struggles between terrestrial broadcasters and cable operators, broadcasters controlled...

Following hearings on the state of newspapers this past year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission staff has now prepared a discussion paper of potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism.It is a classic example of policy-making folly that starts from the premise that the government can solve any problem—even one created by consumer choices and an inefficient, poorly managed industry. Most of the proposals are based in the idea of using government mechanisms to protect...

Commercial media have faced product and price challenges in 2-sided markets for more than a century, but are encountering greater difficulties in getting it right as they try to effectively monetize multi-sided markets. 2-sided and multi-sided markets are ones in which more than one set of consumers must be addressed and there is an interaction between strategies and choices for each set of customers. Prices for one group of consumers affects their consumption quantity and this, in turn, affects...

Media executives around the globe are clamoring for new and alternative business models and industry associations everywhere are holding seminars and conferences on how to create and discover them. There is just one problem: They don’t know what business models are.When you cut through the rhetoric, you find that most executives are merely interested in finding new revenue streams. Even when you consider firms touted as having best practices in that regard, none have been very successful in establishing...

Industry, scholarly and policy discussions about the future of the news industry in North America and Europe continue to focus on how news enterprises can sustain themselves in the 21st century. Publishers keep asserting that things will be fine if they can erect pay walls and charge for news online and they argue that governments should provide legal protections for online news so they can make news a viable digital business product.Their approach is wrong and ignores the fundamental reality that...

Pink Floyd was always a unique rock group and understood its music as a form of artistic expression. It evolved from psychedelic music in the 1960s to progressive rock known for rock instrumental and acoustic effects in the 1970s. The group often saw their albums as integrated works of art in which subsequent tracks built upon earlier ones. They considered their entire recording to be art; that the ordering of tracks was part of the expression and should not be altered, and that the album should...

I was sorting through some of my father’s belonging recently and came across the 1941 souvenir edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Jan 8, 1941), “The March of Hawaii.” Its lead story was the reorganization and strengthening of the Pacific Fleet and the appointment of Admiral H.E. Kimmel to head it. My father acquired the paper while stationed in Hawaii with the Army Air Corps. Eleven months later the U.S. was at war, with Kimmel taking heat for having the bulk of his capital ships anchored in...

The struggle to control prices of digital content sold online continues, with producers and distributors battling over prices for downloads of books and music. In the latest skirmish, Amazon removed Macmillan books from its website after the company protested that online retail was using monopoly power to force publishers to accept prices no higher than $9.99. Macmillan and other publishers have now signed distribution deals with Apple that allows them to price downloads at $12.99 and $14.99.Producers,...

Efforts to professionalize journalism began early in the twentieth century as a response to the hyper commercialization of newspapers and the “anything goes” approach to news that emerged in the late nineteenth century as a means of increasing street sales through sensationalism, twisting the truth, and outright lies.The impetus for journalistic professionalism originated among publishers who wish to counter the trend and it gained support of journalists who saw it as a means of improving their...