I had the opportunity to attend and speak at a George Allen Florida All Media Roundtable yesterday. There were some very interesting speakers at this Roundtable including:
George Measer - CEO of a local group of community newspapers and past preseident of the National Newspaper Association. Mr. Measer spoke about the decline in circulation for daily newspapers nationwide, but interestingly enough, community newspapers have been shielded from this decline and are actually increasing. These seems to be a strong demand for hyper-local news.
Norman Rau - President of Sandusky Radio, with ten radio stations in Phoenix and Seattle. Mr. Rau spoke on the subject of radio, obviously. What struck me about his speech was his' company's attempt at incorporating the internet into their portfolio, but not having a lot of sales success. All of their radio stations are currently streamed online, Mr. Rau said, but with 80% of a radio station's business local, local businesses do not care about the worldwide listeners attracted to an online streaming radio station. The amount of local visitors listening to their stations online is relatively low, and thus they have had trouble quantifying the value to their clients.
Jerry Bilik - VP of Creative Development for Feld Entertainment. Feld Entertainment is the current owner of Ringling Circus, and also has the exclusive contract to product the Disney on Ice shows. He talked about how even in a declining economy, live family shows like Disney on Ice and the circus thrive. Even as families are struggling with high costs of gas, food and housing, they will still find money to bring their children to these kind of events, simply for the moral factor. Mr. Bilik also mentioned a great breaking news: The Ringling Bros Circus is actively searching for locations to FINALLY bring the circus back home to Sarasota, Florida for a year-round show and winter headquarters! This would be huge for the Sarasota area. If anyone has any potential locations in Sarasota that may meet the needs of the circus, contact me and I can put you in contact with Mr. Bilik.
Bob Chandler - Former CBS Senior Vice President and supervisor of 60 Minutes. Mr. Chandler spoke about the upcoming 40 year anniversary of 60 Minutes and told us the origins of how the show originally came to be. Even I got nostalgic about that period of time in TV history, and I wasn't even around then!
I spoke on the subject of TV and the internet, and the multitude of ways that our company is trying to provide content across any particular platform we can imagine - from TV to newspaper to online to cell phones, where people are, that's where we're going to be. There seemed to be a lot of interest in this new world of media, and a lot of disbelief in the way things have advanced and changed. I received some very insightful questions, particularly on the subject of "Information Overload". I just covered information overload in a previous post, so it is definately a problem in my mind as well.
All in all, it was an insightful lunch, and I was delighted to share in the wisdom of these past giants of the media industry.
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Jennifer,
Our retired publisher was lucky enough to attend your media luncheon last Friday. As he was recapping the meeting for me, I wondered how you determine what news is directed into which medium? For instance, what decisions drive you to post information in print or TV versus cell phones or radio? With the flood of information available to the citizenry today, I would imagine your decisions would be driven in part by the demographics common to these types of media.
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