The Monitor embraces its future - a digital one
Monitor 2.0. The Boston-based Christian Science Monitor said last week that it would shift to publishing a weekly magazine (instead of a daily newspaper) and put more emphasis on its website. Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, blogged about the implications. He is involved with a new nonprofit called Global Voices, which collects blog entries from "under-covered" countries.
On the one hand, you can read this move as a brave embrace of the future business reality that faces high-quality journalism. Readers are moving away from print and towards the Web. While revenue has yet to follow them to the extent that newspapers would like, it's no longer possible to believe that adding color photos, more local coverage or snappier graphics to a daily paper edition is going to regain lost readers, at least in print editions.
It's a scary move for the Monitor, because everyone agrees that advertisers aren't paying the premiums online that they've paid for print placement, but it seems like the best way to maintain the paper's commitment to investing heavily in international coverage.
Anyone who cares about the survival of international news - or perhaps the survival of independent, high-quality journalism in general - will be watching the future of the Monitor closely. But the traffic numbers the website is currently experiencing are dispiriting, not just for the Monitor, but for all internationally focused news sites. The Monitor's website sees roughly 1.5 million visitors a month, and those visitors generate $1.3 million in ad revenue. I'm surprised by how small the online readership is. It's huge in comparison to the print readership, of course, but only about 3 to 4 times of the readership of [internationally oriented blog site] Global Voices across our different language editions. Given that reach, I would have expected less online revenue - that's encouraging, as GV starts looking to increase earned revenue and decrease our reliance on foundation funding.
The numbers the Monitor is revealing are a strong signal that there's not an enormous, pent-up demand for high quality international news in the US right now.
Of course, circumstances could change. If there were critical international issues affecting people's lives, I'm sure we'd all pay more attention. You know, a global financial crisis where mortgages in California sink banks in Iceland, cutting police budgets in the UK. Or a worldwide energy shortage coupled with global climate change. Or a complex war, with many international actors and complex religious and cultural dynamics. I'm sure something like that would have readers looking for more international perspectives. I'll just keep crossing my fingers that some important international news occurs soon. ethanzuckerman.com/blog
Partly sunny. For technology companies, the current recession won't be as agonizing as the one that followed the dot-com implosion, according to George F. Colony, founder and chief executive of Forrester Research in Cambridge. He offered reasons why. Among them:
1) Tech will be down, but not out. 2001-2003 was a tech depression. Spending stopped, projects were canceled, [and] excess inventory flooded the market, destroying pricing. Cisco lost half a trillion dollars of market cap. Why? Tech had a long way to fall . . . There was fluff and fat everywhere. When the bubble burst, the fall was precipitous. But tech spending was up only 6 percent from 2006 to 2007. Users of technology are far more disciplined and have cut out the nonsense. So yes, growth will slow, but it won't fall off a cliff.
2) Transformation and innovation will lead recovery. CIOs and CEOs are telling me that they plan to change their way out of this mess. Goldman Sachs is scoping best practices in commercial banking (its new world). JP Morgan has to integrate Bear Stearns. Bank of America will be converting and integrating its systems to fit with Merrill Lynch. Wal-Mart is going to use social computing to increase customer responsiveness. FedEx is replacing its data centers with high-efficiency, green designs. When we come out the other side of this crisis, companies will look quite different - and technology will have been a catalyst in those changes.
3) Tech is everywhere. It's seven years since the last recession. Technology has become markedly more pervasive in that time - it's the air we breathe and the water we swim in. Cell phone penetration in the US has tripled in that time; eCommerce has increased by 85 percent. While it may have been "nice to have" (and therefore eminently cut-able) back in 2002, tech now sits at the center of companies' operations. IT has become Business Technology. If you don't believe me, start unplugging wires at your company and see how long you can develop, manufacture, deliver, sell, and service your products. blogs.forrester.com/colony
Hasta la Vista. Microsoft says that in 2010 a new operating system will replace the ill-starred Windows Vista. And it won't bear the Vista name. Even though the company also announced its intention to make its popular Office applications available on the Web, to compete with Google, Hewlett-Packard executive Antonio Rodriguez blogged that Microsoft's days might be numbered.
It wasn't until recently that I realized how ridiculously impossible it is for a company with a great, profitable franchise (like Windows) to find itself another new one . . . Sadly, what the numbers are saying is that the desktop [operating system] is now an absolute commodity, mostly because as we all know, the best thing it can do is boot up quickly and provide us with a fast and stable browser. Even the sudden explosion in the low-cost ultra-portable segment ("netbooks") won't help reverse this trend.
I feel for Microsoft on this one. They've had a great run. People have been circulating premature rumors of their demise for a long time now. But this time it feels like the combined pressures of the Web and users' appetite for innovative integrated solutions may finally get them. theonda.org
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