Google CEO Lauds Professional News Organizations, Steps in a Mess?

A smart chief executive officer knows how to tailor his or her remarks to an important ecosystem partner. The trick is to do so without alienating another important part of the same ecosystem. I'm not completely sure Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, completely succeeds on that score.

He makes the point that the importance of "journalism" is its quality, compared to much content produced by bloggers. At some level, that's simply a reflection of reality. Blog content is uneven. And Schmidt is right in catering to the professional content producers whose help could be invaluable in creating more-powerful advertising models for Google.

Still, there are relatively more artful, and less artful, ways of phrasing things. Perhaps another approach would have made the same point without risking some amount of potential blogger ire.

Do People Pay for "Access" When "Buying Content"?

James McQuirvey, Forrester Research VP, thinks people often pay for "access" when they "buy content." It's a complicated idea, in some ways. The point is that "access" still provides lots of ecosystem value. 

Just like AT&T

All media, not just all communications, are being forced to change because of IP and the Web. You all know that. Believe me, it is something we grapple with all the time as a "print publisher." We all know a transition to online and Web-delivered content is inevitable. How well we succeed will be measured by how fast any Web-based portion of our business grows, compared to the inevitable rate of decline for anything we do in print form. Oddly enough, we are in the same position the old AT&T was in. Our legacy business probably cannot be expected to do anything more than decline at fairly predictable rate.

Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons argues that the company's "publishing" operation can be successful, and grow at eight to 10 percent a year, "for a long time, if we successfully make this transition to digital.”

So that's the issue, isn't it? Cost controls only get any of us so far. And digital revenues have to grow fast, from a small base, to make any significant contribution to overall revenue. And one thing is certain: no matter what publication we are talking about, over the long term, the economics of the business are changing enough that tweaking through cost controls will be exhausted.

At some point, quality will have to be diminished, as painful as that will be for any entity that prides itself on such things. That doesn't mean "poor" quality: simply "uneven" quality. More and more of what we and others do will be like the Web itself: some really good stuff; some useful stuff; lots of irrelevant or shabby stuff.

Like most communications service providers, media will have to make hard choices. Free, cheap, more costly options will surface. Quality is going to get more uneven as a result. Still, we are just at the front end of the process. Change has been largely incremental up to this point. It won't stay that way for much longer.