Old Media Insists the Old Way is Best

Here’s a gratuitous piece of advice for a young reporter, (assuming there still are any young people interested in becoming serious journalists out there), and that is this: Don’t believe every “study” that gets published. Rather, be extremely picky and choosy. Stay skeptical.

Our Bnet Tech Industry analyst, Erik Sherman, illustrates this principle of informed skepticism today in his post entitled, “Tech Companies Should Give Media an Intervention.” The point of his piece is similar to one we jointly explored ten days ago, that now is the time for the big tech companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to take over the struggling media companies that are wandering around like desperate men, lost in the desert at Death Valley.

In order to illustrate his point, Erik analyzes a recent study both of us had noticed about how traditional advertising is out-performing online advertising. You can go to his post to consider the specifics of this data; which appear to be valid and accurate. The reason I “passed” on this study when I originally read it was that it was sponsored by Conde Nast and CBS (note relevant disclosure below), two traditional media companies that have not yet demonstrated much innate ability to grasp the new in an age when their ultimate survival depends on doing so.

The top execs at Conde Nast, (which own Wired magazine but apparently never read it), have performed so pathetically in the online transition that barely three percent of their overall advertising revenue comes from digital! (Compare that to Time Warner, not exactly a leading light in this context, either, but which collects ten percent of its total ad revenues from its digital properties.)

What I am saying here, and which Erik notes as well, is why should we trust the results of a study funded by companies so financially dependent on convincing potential advertisers that the old way remains superior to the new?

It’s an adage as old as time — whoever controls the purse strings controls the message. Thus, although the data in the advertising study look solid, the argument being made by its authors appears to be deeply flawed. Conde Nast, as a company, maintains an outright hostile stance against digital media, IMHO.

CBS, meanwhile, arrived at the party a decade or so after one of its chief rivals, NBC, for reasons you’d have to travel far higher in its corporate ecosystem that where I reside, as a humble blogger buried deep within the recently constructed CBS Interactive empire, could possibly comprehend. (There’s your pro-forma disclosure.)