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Content Bridges

Content Bridges connects the rough edges of old and newer media, linking new revenue lines and the democratizing value of digital content.

How Well Does Fox News Mix with Reality?Yesterday

Quiz question. What's Fox? A news network? A regional sports broadcaster? An entertainment network? A reality show company?

Of course, it's all of the above, and therein lies the rub.

David Carr's Monday The Media Equation column, in the New York Times, told the story of Fox's hook-up with Phoenix' notorious mayor Joe Arpaio. The shtick: The Sheriff tells Fox which bad guys he wants hoodwinked out of their hiding, and Fox artfully turns it into watchable TV.

Carr explains how the show got on the air:

“Smile... You’re Under Arrest” was initially conceived as a pilot for Fox Broadcasting. Executives took a pass and Fox Reality, an offshoot of the network, picked up the pilot. Three episodes are being broadcast with an option for more if they’re successful.

Carr makes the point well that the media's partnership with the over-the-line, lock-'em-sheriff poses a bunch of questions.

One question not posed lingered with me though: Since Fox is both a news channel with pretensions of journalistic authority and credibility and an anything-goes entertainment provider, we see how it is getting harder and harder to separate out real journalism from everything else.

Sure Fox Reality has different standards from Fox News, I'm sure. And Fox's entertainment division sounds like it has differen

New York Times Page One Ad Long OverdueJanuary 7

What a difference a few years can make.

Imagine if the New York Times had been one of the first papers to sell front-page space to advertisers in 2005? It was one thing for USA Today, a paper so totally comfortable with commerce, to put ads on Page One, which it did in 1999, but the Times, that was something else again.

Now in January, 2009, in the belly of the beast, the Times' decision to start the year with a two-and-a-half-inches-high tasteful CBS ad prompts more of a yawn than anything else. Like the Times' dividend cut, its move to re-brand the International Herald Tribune online as the New York Times and its various moves to reach beyond the Times staff for content (Freakonomics and other non-staff blogs, now Times Extra), we can say "good, but what took ya so long?" Decision-making does appear to have picked up steam at the Times over the last year, and that's to the good, given the financial vise tightening each month around the company's neck.

According to the New York Post, the new front-page ad will fetch about $75,000 daily and $100,000 Sunday. That's good money; figure each ad can help pay most of the freight for the care and feeding of one reporter. That makes the decision an easy and a good one. In the past, the Times felt it could sniff and say, "we declined to do that because we thought it cheapened the front page," as new Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth told

In Desperation, Detroit Papers Flip the SwitchDecember 16 2008

As the Great Detroit Experiment begins, the industry owes them for acknowledging the obvious. As Lou Mleczko, president of the Detroit Newspaper Guild Local 22, reported:

"And [Detroit Media Partnership CEO David] Hunke said, if we don't do this, the current model is unsustainable. So he'd rather take the calculated risk of going to a new format -- rather than sit back and do incremental cutbacks."

Unsustainable. In other words, the business model is broken. The cracking we've been hearing are the default roars and whispers coming out of the companies and the lenders. Tribune's bankruptcy made a hole in the ice and now the idea of doing business as usual in 2009 seems increasingly unthinkable.

So Detroit, our newspaper Detroit, is going green. Green as in aiming for a sustainable, profitable model. Green as in fewer felled trees and more pixels. Green as in new green tech fresh, in line with the times with the change in Presidential Administration. Expect many more papers to soon follow the trend, as it appears that about half of the top 50 papers are now unprofitable.

It's a startling plan, even though we expected it. We'll debate the details and the chances of it working, but one fact is clear:  A major American city will essentially see its daily newspaper(s) disappear. The Fr

Sam Zell's Plan D: It's All About Buying TimeDecember 8 2008

Sam Zell's House of Cards has fallen flat. Today's bankruptcy filing changes everything and nothing.

If we still have the capacity for amazement, after a year of subprime meltdown, worldwide recession and the election of Barack Obama, Tribune going banko would be stunning. Its filing reminds us that no news brand is sacred; that we really have no idea what the 2015 news landscape will look like. It's now more imaginable that Tribune papers, and the Tribune itself, can go away, like its former kissing cousin, Knight Ridder.

Still, the bankruptcy option looks to me like just another phase in the Sam Zell strategy. Julie Moos has a good chronology of the Tribune saga, on the Poynter site. I'd sum up his brief year of ownership in four plans:

Plan A: Assume you're smarter than the other guy. Sam Zell, aka the Grave Dancer, thought he was buying a distressed property in a not-unhealthy industry. In fact, he was buying a distressed property in a distressed industry. The normal bottom-feeder drill of buying low, cutting back significantly and then improving margins didn't work. His innovation efforts -- mostly embodied by redesigns that made no significant difference to circulation or advertising -- missed the point of how much the Internet has changed the news business. He tried applying '80s thinking to a generation-next opportunity. He

Tribune's Descent Sends New Shock WavesDecember 8 2008

Post-Bankruptcy Filing Content Bridges post

Has it been less than a single year? One year since Sam Zell took over the Tribune Company as its management, like Knight Ridder's two years earlier, simply ran out of juice and said, "hey you try it, we've run out of ideas and energy?"

In one quick year -- who's doing the photo slideshow online? -- we've seen what happens when the barbarians do enter and start to rule within a formerly genteel kingdom. If it were any other industry, we might see it more as entertaining, but when it comes to the news industry, it's been jaw-droppingly sad.

As the Tribune prepares for the possibility of a bankruptcy filing this week -- and, if not now then probably later -- we can see the shock waves radiating out from the news:

• Yes, Sam Zell's words and actions have been outrageous, sometimes outrageously and even refreshingly true -- on non-commissioned salespeople, on subscription pricing, on trying new things -- but in the end, it's not about Sam Zell. Look around. Just in the last couple of weeks, we've seen Scripps sign the Rocky Mountain News' death warrant; reports that McClatchy has shopping around the Miami Herald (an offer t