The media industry, like nearly every industry in Nevada, has suffered with the down economy. In addition to facing the challenges of reporting the news in these economic times, media companies also face the onslaught of the next wave of technology and must adapt to these new technologies almost immediately in order to remain competitive in news reporting. Recently, executives representing media organizations in Nevada met at the law offices of Holland & Hart in Las Vegas to discuss some of the issues they face.
Steve Schorr, vice president of public and government affairs for Cox Communications, served as moderator for the event. These monthly meetings are designed to bring leaders together to discuss issues pertinent to their industries. Following is a condensed version of the roundtable discussion.
Where do you see the industry today?
Connie Brennan, Nevada Business Magazine: I don’t think it’s in trouble, I think it’s in transition. We’re reinventing ourselves with the advent of new technology. The reader today is very different than the reader was ten years ago or even five years ago.
Emily Neilson, CBS Channel 8, 8 News Now: From our perspective it’s very different. We have tried to focus ourselves on not being a television station but being a local news organization. That’s because it’s a part of our future that we can control. The way technology is changing and the way people can get news and entertainment, especially with high quality video, is changing so rapidly, we don’t know what the role is for our local affiliates. We’re not a local affiliate, we’re a local news organization and that’s what we really do. We’re proud to be a CBS affiliate and we hope it lasts for a long time; it’s still a very good business model. But, people are demanding different things. They want what they want when they want it on the device they choose. If you don’t deliver to them, somebody else is, 10,000 other people are. We’re in a unique position because we’re all respected brands in a local community and that’s an important element that we hold as we go into this transitional phase. It’s definitely a different business than it was five years ago.
Darrin McDonald, Fox 5 KVVU Television: To add to that, from our perspective, content is king. We’re really a distribution platform for content. Hopefully, we all have been transitioning to more and more controlled content, local content, with production on news being the biggest element of that by far. What you have to understand is, how does our content ultimately get to the readers, to the viewer and to the listener? The platforms are changing rapidly. At the end of the day, the media that we’re all sitting here representing still exists and is as strong today as it ever has been. The question is, how do we get the fragmentation out, the content distribution out, and that’s what we’re all doing. We’re trying to figure out how to get that out there as the market and our industry change.
Bob Brown, Las Vegas Review-Journal: The quintessential thing is, how we’ve changed. We’re all saying the same thing, whereas ten years ago we wouldn’t. We’re all multi-channel, we are all strategizing on how to develop better local content, more local content, how we deliver that content and how we monetize that content. That is the name of the game. Is there enough room for all of us in the future? I don’t know. I hope so. It’s going to be real tough because now you’ve got everybody fighting for the same territory.
Have the audiences you reach out to shifted?
Neilson: It’s shifted and it hasn’t. In television, I think it’s different than print. Our television station still tuned 90 percent of the people who live in the market in a single month, 80 percent in a week. Television is still very, very strong, but it’s about all of the other opportunities. It’s about learning on the go. Whether they’re at home watching CSI on a 65-inch screen or at McCarran Airport watching something on an iPhone or iPad, they’re still your customer; but they are accessing you differently.
Brown: We have videographers now. We didn’t have videographers before. We have photographers out, they take pictures and they video the event. The transformation is such that, it’s not just about the platforms, and we have multiple platforms that we deliver on, but we’re also pushing information. We used to be a billboard. People would go to us and find the information and we would present it in our own good time. Those days are gone. Now it’s about directing that story to that person, the content to the person who’s interested and being able to monetize it as well. That’s the key to the future. The person that hits that ball the best is going to the in the best position.
Tom Axtell, Vegas PBS Channel 10: I agree, but I think it is part of what the brands are. It used to be television, print and publishing would say there’s a certain time when we will present the news. Now you have the democratization of information where people can search for things. You have untrustworthy providers who, without our brand, can put false information out. The real trick is how do we drive enough revenue in so that we can create the content. It isn’t free to create. Then, how can we make sure it’s trusted and people will go there before they go to opinion bloggers or people who are deliberately misrepresenting the point. That’s really one of the reasons brands are so important. It defines who the people are.
Brown: There’s never been more information than there is now out in the sphere, anywhere you want to get it. But reliable information, that’s at a premium.
How has the internet changed the way you report news?
Brown: We’re all 24/7.
McDonald: We have the ability now, through technology, to push the information out sooner rather than later. People don’t go home and wait for the newspaper to land or to get the magazine or to get the television program delivered to them. We go out and push it. They can get it at their own convenience. It really has changed only in the speed in which we do what we do. Technology doesn’t necessarily kill industry, it changes industry. That’s what we’re seeing. We’re still doing what we did, it’s just how fast we are doing it and how we’re delivering it. The product is relatively the same.
Brennan: I think the key to all of our survival is to understand the niche we serve. We all have our reputations, our readers and our viewers that follow us. The web is an integral part of that. We can’t compete on a timely basis with a daily television station. We have a different niche. We report more trends and take a higher altitude view of business.
Neilson: The concern that we all have is, it comes back to the audience has shifted. Those that provide good content will find the audience, but monetizing it online and on mobile is not there yet. These experiments are happening now with the journalistic enterprises. My biggest concern is that the pendulum will swing too far the other way and we’re going to lose some really good journalistic institutions before consumers say, “Wait a minute, I’m willing to pay for that.” People are willing to pay for content, we know that. We just haven’t quite gotten that business model set up yet.
Matthew Ward, Las Vegas Business Press: I think the quality of content is really important too. We’re moving into this new era where we have multiple channels and we’re asking our reporters and editors to operate in this environment. We’re stressing the precious resources of the people who actually develop the content that’s attracting audiences. Frankly, the newsroom is shrinking everywhere. At some point, there’s got to be a breaking point of how much you can actually provide on all these multiple channels and whether it’s going to be the kind of quality that we have come to expect. That’s the real kind of dilemma, at least from a print standpoint.
Axtell: The issue you’re talking about is news, but you’re really still thinking of it as a mass commodity. The question is: Is it a mass commodity, or are there narrow interests within the news that want certain kinds of news? That’s the point about understanding the audience. Teenagers want a certain kind of news that’s different from retirees or business people. If we splinter our content to all of these self-selected areas, what happens to mass mediums? Is there a market for that? What happens to our country when there isn’t a shared information base?
Neilson: It’s so interesting, we have more people on our mobile phone product than are watching cable news shows, but the advertiser doesn’t value that the same way as they do in television. There’s still a long way to go.
Brown: Part of that is there’s so much fragmentation in the medium.
McDonald: But that’s the difference of the business. Today we all compete directly head to head with exactly the same media between the Internet and content.
How has the economy affected the quality or way you report news?
Brennan: I think that journalism has changed and the way we report has changed. It’s our responsibility to be economically viable so we don’t sell our integrity. As far as the economy, we’ve all been affected by it.
McDonald: I would agree that the story itself doesn’t change. That’s the area where we look at and say, “we’re not going to change the story for an economic reason.” So, journalism still holds true, though we have to figure out a way to monetize it and make sure that it gives us the ability to do it. The story never changes.
Brennan: It’s about maintaining your credibility.
Brown: If you don’t have your creditability, then you lose everything.
Neilson: In 2008, we realized that this economy would be really bad and we decided that we were going to cut once and we’re going to cut really deep. And then, we’ll be done and we can get back to business. What we did then is focus on a critical few. We don’t have the luxury to do a little more experimenting, a little more exploration, not that any of us had big staffs as it was. For us, we focused on investigative and we focused on truth. We’re stronger now than we were when we made the cutbacks.
Brown: We didn’t have any layoffs. In fact, we have more people now than we had last year. They’re all working harder because there’s a lot more products.
Brennan: I think it’s caused us to reinvent ourselves to some extent. Probably 50 percent of our market share was in commercial real estate three years ago. We saw it coming so we shifted and focused more on other industries. I think that put us a little bit ahead of the curve.
Ward: Talking about the economics of the media industry, you have to create knowledge. You can’t just be an echo chamber anymore. You can’t just follow the competition every day. You have to be so unique to the point where your reporters aren’t just reporting news, they’re reporting knowledge. They’re essentially creating databases and doing the college-level research and then coming and putting together these multi-media packages of visual and print content that is informing people on a different level than your average newspaper every day.
Brennan: I think one of the real high sides to this economy for all of us is “amateur” night is over. We don’t see people coming every month now with a new publication and going out and selling advertisers who then get burned when the publication folds and it rubs off on the rest of us. I haven’t seen that happen in a couple of years. I think that’s good news.
Has the media become too biased, politically and otherwise?
Brown: The media has always been political on editorial pages and we will continue to be. I think most intelligent people understand the difference between an editorial and a news story. Our news stories are news stories. They have facts and they have legitimacy and they’re written by journalists that aren’t biased. I think the key here is that intelligent people have to understand that when a columnist writes a column, that is their opinion.
Neilson: You used the word “intelligent” people could tell the difference. Well, intelligent people don’t often know the difference. They don’t know the difference on a lot of things, they just know it’s content coming to them.
Axtell: But the media is encouraging reporters to blog and so what’s happening is you’re getting a blurring of the line, both in their minds and in the minds of consumers. The reporters are, perhaps more, fully venting their biases. Everyone has a bias, it involves story selection and it involves our life experience. As reporters start to say, “Well, I think I can blog,” and editorial editors tell them do it, the mystique of the independent unbiased journalist begins to erode. There are networks that have made a deliberate decision to slant content one way or another with Congressional encouragement. We’re getting a little more acceptance of the European style of journalism, which is political advocacy journalism.
Brennan: When I was going to journalism school, we were taught that you just reported the facts and let readers come up with their own conclusions. You don’t see that in practice much anymore.
In this market, has bringing in the advertising dollar overshadowed credibility or content?
Neilson: You have all different kinds of customers. But, the most important customer is the one who’s consuming our local news. If you don’t have an audience, you can’t serve your advertising customer.
Brown: That’s absolutely true. We said earlier. The value of journalism doesn’t change. The value of journalism is the ability to tell the truth and that is our stock in trade. Everything that we’ve built over all these years has been built off that and you’ve got to always keep that in mind.
Ward: I’ve witnessed over the last couple of years, trying to integrate Review-Journal content into our business-to-business publication, it’s been really interesting. I have a different relationship with businesses in Las Vegas than Review-Journal reporters. For instance, we run banking columns for John Edwards who covers the banking community for the Review-Journal. I’m a different publication and some of the things he writes for the Review-Journal are sometimes perceived to be adversarial to the banking community. I’m not here to be adversarial to the banking community, I’m here to report on trends and things that will help the banking community be better at their job. Sometimes it gets a little blurry in there. It’s a real trick to use good judgment when it comes to those things.
Brennan: We subscribe to the philosophy that if you have the readership, advertisers will come. If you lose your readership or if you lose your credibility, you have nothing and advertisers won’t be supportive. We really focus on the editorial content, knowing that when we put a magazine together there are cover stories we aren’t going to have an advertising market for but it will engage readers.
Neilson: We often lament that we’re one of the few businesses that actually pay people to go out knowing they might find damaging stories on our advertisers. We pay people to bite that hand that feeds us. In the end, if you’re going to be known for journalism, it’s hands off. It has to be that way because it has to be audience first.
