The Times They Are…

I read a couple of things with interest this morning.  One confused me, one made absolute sense.  I thought I’d let you come to your own conclusions.  The first has to do with fighting city hall (OK, actually fighting some big changes) and the second shows what a business can do when it changes the paradigm a bit and gets with the program.  Everyone ready?This is the announcement that confused me:

Following a drop over 25% in ad revenue from print magazines last year, a group of prominent magazine publishers including Time Inc., Hearst, Conde Nast, Meredith and Wenner Media are launching a jointly-funded $90 million dollar ad campaign to help convince readers, advertisers and shareholders of the “power of print.” The 7-month campaign, developed with Y&R New York, is expected to roll out with lush color spreads in the May issues of nearly 100 print magazines and web sites with taglines such as “We Surf the Internet. We Swim in Magazines” and “Will the Internet Kill Magazines? Did Instant Coffee Kill Coffee?”

Why am I confused?  Because these folks are about to spend a lot of money telling people that their content matters.  No one doubts that – just look up the web traffic numbers of any of the companies mentioned above.  I’ll bet a fair amount that if you could net out their magazine readership and their web traffic they have a lot more readers today than they did 10 years ago.  But why are they so married to the tangible paper experience?  Maybe what they should be spending some of that money on (and I imagine a lot is donated space not cash) is restructuring their businesses to support the channels through which their content is consumed.

Here is the second item:

Figuring to keep eggs in both baskets, Conde Nast is moving along with plans to create iPad native version of several of its popular titles including Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour, according to the NYTimes. The publisher will sell editions and subscriptions through iTunes and encourage readers to register their personal info to better track consumer data.

OK, so Conde is spending money on digital development to get ready for another new channel – doing exactly what should be done – while supporting the campaign mentioned in item 1.  That’s why I’m confused.

Compare this:

Look for upgrades to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video player on CBSSports.com this year, including statistical overlays, a new “boss button” and the ability to watch picture-in-picture highlights of other games while watching a live stream. CBSSports.com will once again distribute NCAA March Madness on Demand across 3rd party sites with its Developer Platform, allowing sites to link directly into the MMOD video player.

CBS has spent literally billions to acquire the Tournament and yet they’ve managed to grow the audience (and revenue) nicely by making the content available in a channel-agnostic manner.  Kudos!

Can anyone help with this?