Turning Old into New Media: Serious Transition Pains (from TheDeal.com)

Has any industry ever encountered a set of strategic choices more fraught than the ones the media business confronts today? It seems unlikely. And five years after the dot-com bubble burst, six years after the ill-conceived creation of AOL Time Warner Inc., a rapid-fire series of acquisitions of new-media companies by the old-media giants -- nine in the last year, including three by News Corp. -- is bringing the issues into sharp relief.

"Nobody has a precise answer as to how all of this is going to shake out," says Dennis Miller, a veteran of old media who's now a general partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-based early-stage investor in media and technology. "But one thing we do know is that, with new media, decision making is from the bottom up. Successful sites are all about community, connectedness and the viral/personal references that one-to-one communication provides. What they're not about is answering to corporate authority or playing by corporate rules."

Memo to media moguls: Get over it.

Get over your need for control. Get over the fear and fealty you've instilled in your subordinates for all those years. And get over the top-down decision-making process that has characterized mass media companies since they first arose in the 19th century. Read on...

posted by Unknown @ Thursday, November 10, 2005,