@ Media & Money: Brill: Getting A Newspaper Delivered To Your Door Could Last Another 15 Years

Media Money Faber, Brill, Donohue

CNBC anchor David Faber started off a panel discussion on the fate of newspapers at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money conference by holding up today’s New York Times. Turning to his right, he asked Steve Brill, co-founder of paywall consultant Journalism Online, how much longer newspapers like this will still arrive at his doorstep. Brill offered a few guesses, ultimately settling on perhaps 15 years.

In discussing Journalism Online’s efforts to sign up newspapers to erect some sort of paywall, Brill said that the NYT, as national newspaper of some renown, is an anomaly. Brill: “We have signed up 1,200 affiliates. A typical one is a midwest paper we’re working with. The paper just wrote a profile of a newly arrived principal in a small town. That’s not the kind of thing you can go online and find six different versions of. Newspapers need to figure out what makes them different. Once they do that, they can charge $3 or $4 a month to its readers. After that, they’ll be able to charge more for advertising.”

Aside from charging readers, Lisa Donohue, CEO of Publicis media agency Starcom USA, put her faith in the better use of data that will allow content companies and marketers to better target consumers. “Tools are the answer to many of the problems face by media,” she said. “And we’re still in the early stages of using those tools.”

Kirk McDonald, president of Digital, Time Inc., said that the right tools haven’t arrived yet. “I don’t believe the answer is CPC or other recent models. The problem with looking for a single measurement tool is that it doesn’t add all the branding exposure that goes into into cost-per-acquisition. All the inputs mean something. There are so many data companies trying to fit in a full ad attribution model. *Microsoft* recently started doing engagement mapping, *Google* will soon do the same. That will provide more value and meaning to ads and the media that run them.”

Brill, naturally, argued against putting too much faith in advertising and the data that support it to an even greater extent: “As advertising has become more accountable, buyers realize they’ve been over-paying for it. If you were just buying the third spot on a network TV show turns from ratings of a TV show, to how many people saw the ad, and then to how many people bought the product as a result. That will continue to drive the price down.”

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