Traditional Media and Digital Platforms

Implications: Comments from News Corp. COO Peter Chernin at the recent UBS conference affirms importance of traditional media in launching new digital initiatives.

Chernin however is quick to point out that it's not a good idea to be the 3rd newspaper or 5th TV station in a market attempting to do so.


Analysis: The annual UBS media conference always attracts a crowd of top-level media execs who usually have some interesting things to say.  News Corp's Peter Chernin used his session at UBS to tout the importance of traditional media to launch digital platforms in to other venues.

Certainly Mr. Chernin's comments are well taken--and applicable to the big giants like his company, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom to mention a few.  But the real challenge is for the medium and smaller size groups, and how they can leverage their assets in such a way.  Most of these companies are engaged in fierce local competition, and are suffering the decline of advertising dollars to online.  Newspapers are all losing circulation; many TV stations are still grasping with how they are going to be ready for the digital TV transfer by February 2009.

Monetizing the digital spectrum is clearly a smart strategy, and News Corp has bought several Internet-related companies like MySpace to help with these efforts.  But this is out of reach for many smaller players, who are threatened by just about everything that is happening--whether it is Google selling local advertising, or YouTube capturing a lot of video content.

Key point--most of the smaller and medium sized companies truly lack a clear digital strategy beyond having a web site.  They simply are not sure where to invest their precious resources.