by drm on February 18, 2010
Steve Rosenbaum did a great interview with Columbia’s Ana Seave that was published on MediaBizBloggers earlier this week.
Seave is one of the key contributors to The Curse of the Mogul, required reading for anyone in the media business who wants to dig into the critical issues facing media companies and their business models.
Seave’s thought a lot about content, cost, quality and digital. Media brands can create increased loyalty with their readers, she believes, by enriching their experience of content. A key element of that is curation, Seave explains:
I think that the actual idea of curation and aggregation and packaging stuff and being the in between, between the content production and getting it to a consumer is exactly the right place to be. I think that video is really the future of the Internet as well. The text business is where I come from and where I live and it’s easy to search, and so forth and so on, but YouTube as I understand it is the second largest search engine. What is that about? That means that people who are younger than me think of things in video and it is really, really important for all media companies to be in pictures at this point. So, that’s the reason why I am interested in Curation, I have a lot of faith in this space and I think it’s gonna go really far, and it’s gonna be in the right place with the right technology. (LINK: http://bit.ly/cPDkae)
The combination of curation and wholly-original content goes at the core of the cost issue for a publisher. One of the fundamental challenges of transitioning a print content model to the web is that the value of the ad inventory online doesn’t support that same content costs as the value of the print ad page.
Ultimately, content costs are a by-product of hours of labor. By shifting talented content professionals to a mode where they are able to identify and share good content — thereby extending the brand “voice, as Seave calls it — as well as create that content, the business is able to increase the ad inventory attributable to the content costs.
This is the kind of thinking that is both relevant to the digital market and attacks the puzzle of costs.
by drm on January 8, 2010
A new data point emerged in the reporting on the job figures today: the employment population ratio. The metric a fairly absolute measuring stick: What percentage of the people in the United States, of any age, are employed at anyone time.
One version of the data is presented below in a chart from Calculated Risk, showing the trend back to 1960 and highlighting periods of recession.
A couple of comments. Human nature is most attuned to changes in velocity; our state of existence can change significantly over time, but if it happens at a gradual pace, we are less aware of it. When change happens quickly, we are highly aware, but our ability to process the change is limited by a set of primitive responses driven by fear, shock and self-protection. (Think about your different awareness of gaining weight at 1 pound a month, versus gaining 12 pounds in 1 month.)
Recessions create significant awareness of people out of work. Looking at the ratio over time, I’m struck by the fact that we’re back to the same level as in the early 1980’s, when we were just coming out of a prolonged recession. Because of the growth in our population, millions more people work today than then, but the ratio is about the same.
From 1975 to 2000, growth in the ratio was a by-product of a profound cultural change, with broad participation by women in the workforce. (I saw a report recently showing that more women than men get bachelor degrees, giving young women on balance better earning prospects than men of the same age.)
Over the past decade, there’s clearly another cultural shift that’s embedded in the numbers. Various factors contribute to the decline: a slight shift away from two-job households; an increase in the number of older people who are alive and not working; and an increase in the birth rate means there are more young people who can’t work.
The biggest change, however, is among the number of people who are 16-24 years old, with participation by 16-19 year old declining to just 35%. A higher percentage of these teens are in school — nearly 57% compared to about 42% in the late 1980’s, and a higher percentage of the teens attending schools are out of the labor market, as detailed in an analysis by WallStreetPit.com.
