News Flash: Newspaper Publishing Is Not Dead
We were recently invited to a symposium hosted by the LA Times Media Group; in attendance were senior representatives from the likes of Ning, Facebook and Passenger. In a nutshell, the panel reinforced some very critical points about the digital publishing world, namely that the transition from paid print content to shared digital currency is a very promising and very scalable model. In giving us an exclusive sneak peek of the LA Times site redesign, it was also apparent that new feature sets would facilitate this growth; among them, ‘unstandardized’ ad spaces as well as ‘content adjacencies’, in which the establishment of strategic content partners provide real value with things like popular cross-posts, all of which bolster engagement and awareness around select categories. While the verdict is still out on newspaper print operations (and respective ad sales which still haven’t bottomed out), when you consider utilities like Kindle and a whole new suite of mobile apps (including one coming soon from Ning), the ‘Times’ should prove to be quite profitable in the not so distant future. Oh, and where does social media play a role? Right in the middle.
