Liveblogging from The Future of Business Media

I'm in New York City today at the Future of Business Media event put on by the ContentNext organization.  I was drawn because of the very specific focus on how business and trade media is changing because of social media and consolidation.  The agenda is packed with top people from such organizations as Time Inc., Forbes, BusinessWeek, Conde Nast, Dow Jones, Reuters, CNBC, along with a lunchtime Q&A with Neil Cavuto.  It should give some great insights into where the traditional media properties are going in the new "world order" and where the opportunities will exist for our clients and prospects in technology.

Kicking off the morning is Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com and Roger McNamee, Managing Director of Elevation Partners, a private equity partnership focused on media, and an investor in Forbes.com.   

Forbes has been unique since the formation of Forbes.com in 1997 in the fact that it runs its Web outlet completely separate from its magazine.  In effect, its philosophy is that the web audience is completely different from its magazine readers, so it approaches advancing Forbes.com in a separated fashion from the magazine.  The magazine can only offer a fraction of what the broadest audience needs, so it's best to separate the two so the print issues don't hold back the web version.  Jim commented on how it views the web now:

The web is not a form of media, it's a platform to provide several media formats [text, audio, video, interactivity] in the same place.  The brand is analogous to its offline companion and is separate.  Forbes.com is not Forbes magazine online, it is its own entity that we want people to go to independent of the magazine.

Jim described how Forbes.com delivers on two types of stories, "wide aperture" (lifestyle-focused) and "narrow aperture" (focused deeply on very specific topics that provide great value to different profiles of readers).  It currently has 20 million uniques on a monthly basis.

Roger commented further on Forbes.com's view of the web, saying that it is a great way of bringing together not just the data, but the interpretation of it and interaction around it.  He also commented on other magazines' redesigning print to look more "webby", saying that it's not about how it looks but what it says. The web audience is different from the magazine audience, so redesigning the magazine will hurt the web audience.

What this is really about is that the web is a completely different business model, and any company that holds onto the old model and ties the two together are not going to do well.  For WSJ, it's not an issue of making WSJ.com for free, it's about tying the Web content to the newspaper too tightly.

Responding to a question on how Forbes.com views video, Jim described it as extremely important to them now.  The role video plays is giving Forbes.com a lot of flexibility to give its audience different degrees of consumption depending on how involved the reader is in a subject.  More and more people are oriented toward video content of the site, and Jim feels that people "will think of the video on our site along with other forms of content like a business cable channel."

Next up (via a short video interview) was Ann Moore, Chairman and CEO, Time Inc., who commented immediately on the decision to close Business 2.0.  It was an economic one -- it didn't have enough advertising, so it was more important to shutter it and beef up the coverage in Fortune.  The whole business sector has been hit hard, with ad dollars being taken away by automotive books and women and lifestyle magazines overall.  Moore described the partnership with CNN (consolidating business titles to CNNMoney) has been very successful -- adding profits to bottom lines of each of the titles. 

Interestingly, echoing Jim Spanfeller's view of video, Anne stated how people don't need a cable channel anymore, because Time Inc. does video very well on its site.  Video is easy to produce in multiple locations and cheap distribution.  Video has tripled its CPM's and readers.

I'll blog about additional sessions in separate posts, as there's an interesting panel with the major "consumer business magazines", a Q&A with the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and a panel on technology business media during the day.