Ken Riddick is the bearer of bad news. Well, he’s not giving us information that we didn’t know, he just has the task of presenting some of the problems from the business side of the news industry.
Riddick, Vice President for Interactive Media at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, brought a slideshow with scary charts and graphs abound. Scary because most of them are pointing down; as in, stock market crash down. But, there’s hope, he says, because of the leaps and bounds in the online dimension of news. For example, since 1995, the percentage of readers going online has skyrocketed from about 12 percent to nearly 70 percent.
Then, Riddick presented the slide show of an absent panelist, Robert Benz. More scary charts, this time actual stock charts. Benz’s presentation also showed the ways that people can get things on the internet that they used to get from newspapers. I know I’m quicker to jump onto Craigslist than to flip to the classifieds. At least the print is bigger online.
The point of these presentations and all these scary charts and whatnot is that the internet is where it’s at. The internet can make those charts look healthy again. The problem is that the medium itself is so young and powerful, and an optimum business model to reach and monetize a big chunk of the audience has not yet been created. Or, if it has, it hasn’t been implemented.
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