New Media

While preparing for a series of meetings on emedia strategy over the weekend, one thought kept nagging at me: What the hell is emedia anyway?

Online and email advertising, webcasts, virtual trade shows, ebooks, ecommerce…oh, my! In the publishing world, it is the holy grail that will save us all thanks to high profit margins and easy scalability (relative to print media), but it seems like the goal posts that define it and its success are getting moved every year as the smoke gets thicker and the mirrors are repositioned.

Where does emedia really fit in the big picture of magazine publishing? Is it another revenue stream running off of Content Mountain — I still believe Content is King, though Context is now his equally powerful Queen — or is it something new and different altogether that calls for a brand new canvas and change of scenery?

If print media is the physical container that content and advertising is packaged into and delivered to the reader, and the subscription and advertising revenues it generates is offset by its related editorial, printing, production, circulation and fulfillment expenses, then shouldn’t emedia be budgeted and defined the same way? Would the profit margins for a website be as high if it had to bear even half of the burden of the expenses of the print container from where much of its content and most of its brand awareness comes from?

If there were no print host, could the electronic parasite survive?

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The Atlantic has a must-read essay from James Warren, “When No News Is Bad News” (h/t @guykawasaki), that does an excellent job of putting into perspective how the Internet played a role in the death spiral of newspapers. Most interestingly, he makes it crystal clear how precarious the road ahead is for real journalism’s survival as a result, while calling bloggers out on their exaggerated self-importance and understated reliance on traditional media.

Newspapers have been and remain by far the largest source of news coverage and analysis in any city or town. Without the local paper, the TV and radio stations would be in difficult shape, despite the good work they often do. The most popular websites—Yahoo, the Drudge Report, MSNBC.com, CNN.com, the Huffington Post, you name it—also rely heavily on the work of newspapers, more often than not appropriating and linking to their stories without providing a penny in payment. As I write, the headline on the lead Huffington Post story is about the Bush administration “Burrowing Political Appointees into Career Civil Service Positions.” Upon closer inspection, this Huffington Post Story turned out to be a truncated version of what was in fact a quite interesting Washington Post story. (And upon even closer inspection, the actual story made clear that this had been common practice among all administrations in their final days and cited about 50 examples of the Bill Clinton administration doing the same thing.)

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