Okay. This "live" blogging stuff gets harder and harder when you're half dead.
And even harder when you spent the night umm sipping, yeah, sipping, scotch and debating journalism with executive editors, publishers and other journalists.
So I'm running a little behind and will try and catch up with a couple of quick posts before heading back into the fray for the "Opportunities Through Effective Partnerships" seminar. (I'm sure it will be more interesting than it sounds.)
Yesterday's lunch, (sponsored by the Abitti people, who, like the Tembec people must hate listening to all these newspaper people talk about new delivery platforms and web -only products and e-paper...) was, well, a hotel lunch with a couple hundred folks sitting around round tables. You've been there. Food was fine, so was the company.
After the Bryan Cantley tribute, our luncheon speaker Leonard Asper, president and CEO of CanWest Global Communications, bounded to the podium.
Asper went to some length to entertain his crowd as much as inform them. He had two short, humourous videos (I'm trying to get my hands on them to post them here): a mock 50s style public service announcement by the "Winnipeg Film Board" with emergency and disaster survival instructions that paired up with a bag of swag they'd taped under every chair (water wings for floods, repellant for mosquitoes etc), and a collection of newspaper front pages showing the way Canada supposedly thinks of Winnipeg and the Aspers and the way those paper's would look if the Aspers every really exerted editorial control across their chain ("Winnipeg the Real Paris of the Prairies" "Jets down Flames to take the Stanley Cup" etc.)
And then he got down to business.
It was the News Business 101, a kind of State of Union-lite with nothing that would surprise any journalist who's turned even half an eye to the state of affairs over the past decade:
- Five year plans are a thing of the past, it's more like 3 month plans and your customers will tell you when and how to change - and you'd better be listening.
- Global CanWest's mission statement is the (enviably brief) Inform, Enlighten, Entertain, to which young Mr. Asper suggests Empower needs to be added.
- Newspapers have a huge advantage over TV and others - they own their content. The key is to recognize you're publishing company, not a newspaper company. Focus on your total audience.
- He's not afraid of no stinkin' bloggers. "The blogosphere would have nothing to write about without our content"
- Five things we need to do better:
- Advertising (online could eclipse print advertising revenue by 2015);
- Market Research ("I'm still shocked that as an industry we don't have the kind of research data other industries have" to which his presenter responded - 'For $100,000 a year the CNA stands ready and willing to do all the research you need');
- Mobile platforms (the next wave - from phones to digital signage, nobody's thinking about that enough);
- Investing in Technology (all reporters neeed to be cross platform, multi-media and have the tools to do that);
- and, oh heck, I can't find the fifth thing he thought we should do better, I'm guessing it has to do with Harnassing Innovation.
- We have to understand who we're competing with and that is: Google, Ebay, Craigslist, Kijiji, Yahoo etc.
Nothing
wrong with anything he said, the man's a decent communicator with a
clear sense of where he thinks he/we should be going. But his talk
underlined something that I hope to return to a little later: there was
nothing new. Nothing inspring or ground-breaking or truly insightful.
It was, as one luncheon attendee remarked as we were leaving "a great
five year old speech."
There's some really hard truth in that comment
- and after two days here, sad to say, it applies to a lot more than
the amiable Mr. Asper.
Bill
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