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Masters in Business: Bloomberg L.P. Grueskin (Audio) · Masters in Business

0:03
Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg
0:07
Speaker 1: Radio Today. On the show, I am thrilled to have
0:10
Speaker 1: William Gruskin, a person I've known over the years as
0:14
Speaker 1: an editor and dean at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
0:20
Speaker 1: I know Bill from his early days when he was
0:23
Speaker 1: a managing editor at the Wall Street Journal, and eventually
0:26
Speaker 1: he pretty much took over running Wall Street Journal Online, which,
0:30
Speaker 1: as he tells us, is the largest subscription news site
0:35
Speaker 1: in the world. Bill Um has pretty much seen everything
0:39
Speaker 1: there is to see in the world of the business,
0:42
Speaker 1: world of journalism, and we're trying to do more of
0:45
Speaker 1: these shows that aren't just fund managers or economists, but
0:49
Speaker 1: actually bring people in who have run businesses and can
0:53
Speaker 1: talk about it. Bill is uniquely situated. He's seen both
0:57
Speaker 1: the decay in the traditional business of journalism, but he's
1:02
Speaker 1: also been very active on the Wall Street Journal dot
1:05
Speaker 1: com site, which is by all measures, been wildly successful.
1:10
Speaker 1: They probably have of all the mainstream media tablet products,
1:16
Speaker 1: they probably have the best iPad um app I've seen.
1:21
Speaker 1: It's just really a pleasure to use in order to
1:25
Speaker 1: read a newspaper. They're they're fantastic. I know Bill for
1:29
Speaker 1: a good couple of years. I first met him early
1:33
Speaker 1: in the days of Wall Street Journal Digital when they
1:36
Speaker 1: were considering rolling out this thing called blogs, and Bill
1:41
Speaker 1: and I had had a breakfast actually not too far
1:44
Speaker 1: from here, over at Persian Square Cafe going over what
1:48
Speaker 1: they can expect and how they should approach the idea
1:52
Speaker 1: of blogs at the Wall Street Journal, and they took
1:56
Speaker 1: some of my advice. A lot of my advice they didn't.
1:58
Speaker 1: But I think some of the blog that we've seen
2:01
Speaker 1: that the Wall Street Journal have put out, notably Money
2:04
Speaker 1: Beat and Real Time Economics, have really garnered a pretty
2:08
Speaker 1: big following and are a nice addition to the paper itself.
2:13
Speaker 1: I've also spoken with Bill, and I've spoken to classes
2:18
Speaker 1: at the Columbia School of Journalism about enumeracy and how
2:23
Speaker 1: easy it is for reporters to get bamboozled by numbers,
2:28
Speaker 1: especially with what we've seen from trade groups and associations
2:32
Speaker 1: or politicians trying to twist economic releases in their favor.
2:37
Speaker 1: It's very, very easy if you're don't have a facility
2:41
Speaker 1: with numbers, are you're not especially good with math um.
2:44
Speaker 1: If you're an English major and your specialty is writing,
2:47
Speaker 1: not you know, doing calculations, to not fully understand statistics,
2:52
Speaker 1: not fully understand mathematics. It's it's a challenge that reporters
2:57
Speaker 1: have always had, and today, where there's so little training
3:01
Speaker 1: and so little apprenticeship periods, it's become even uh more
3:08
Speaker 1: of a challenge. And and I recall speaking to him
3:11
Speaker 1: in a class at Columbia way back when I've done
3:14
Speaker 1: it once or twice, and it was really quite fascinating
3:16
Speaker 1: discussing how not to misinterpret economic data. But Bill has
3:21
Speaker 1: really a unique insight into the business of journalism, what
3:26
Speaker 1: works and what doesn't work. And I think you'll find
3:29
Speaker 1: this to be quite an interesting conversation. It's a little
3:34
Speaker 1: inside baseball, but interesting nonetheless. And so with no further ado,
3:39
Speaker 1: here's my interview with William Gruskin. This is Masters in
3:46
Speaker 1: Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. On today's show,
3:51
Speaker 1: we're discussing the business of journalism, and I'm pleased to
3:54
Speaker 1: having the studio Bill Gruskin. He's currently executive editor here
3:59
Speaker 1: at Bloomberg. Wired to that he was dean at the
4:02
Speaker 1: Columbia School of Journalism and he spent many years at
4:06
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal. Most recently he was managing editor
4:10
Speaker 1: for The Wall Street Journal Online, which I believe is
4:13
Speaker 1: one of the largest subscription site in the world, actually
4:16
Speaker 1: the largest subscription news site, because Consumer Reports has always
4:20
Speaker 1: had and I presume still has more subscribers than than
4:23
Speaker 1: wh dot com. But when it comes to news sites, yeah,
4:26
Speaker 1: so largest. And you were managing editor of the paper
4:30
Speaker 1: proper and I was deputy managing editor for UM in
4:34
Speaker 1: two thousand seven and two thousand and eight, overseeing all
4:36
Speaker 1: the domestic news bureaus as well as all the editing functions.
4:39
Speaker 1: And let's let's get and start with your background. Undergraduate
4:43
Speaker 1: degree in classics from Stanford. You then went to John
4:46
Speaker 1: Hopkins and got a master's degree in US foreign policy
4:51
Speaker 1: and international economics. There you go, right, pretty good set
4:55
Speaker 1: of broad based background to look at the world's of
4:58
Speaker 1: business and finance all the Oh, I didn't actually get
5:00
Speaker 1: involved in business until I got to the Journal in
5:03
Speaker 1: I'd spent about fifteen years doing metro journalism. So that's
5:07
Speaker 1: a really interesting entree. What was it, Uh? You know,
5:10
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch and his predecessor, the Bancroft's not known for
5:15
Speaker 1: being especially generous with journalists. What was the appeal to
5:18
Speaker 1: bring you over to the Wall Street Journal. Well, what
5:20
Speaker 1: they were generous with was providing time and space to
5:23
Speaker 1: do really great journalism in the mid You might remember
5:28
Speaker 1: what the old Wall Street journalis still look like, totally gray,
5:32
Speaker 1: two big long legs of type on on the left
5:35
Speaker 1: and right, and then the little story in the middle
5:37
Speaker 1: that we called the a head. And and I was
5:39
Speaker 1: recruited to work on what they called the page one desk.
5:42
Speaker 1: And there still is a page one desk at the Journal.
5:44
Speaker 1: But I remember when I first got there. This is
5:46
Speaker 1: when the journal ran five days a week, right, so
5:49
Speaker 1: we had three stories on the front page. You can
5:50
Speaker 1: do the map three times, five fifteen stories. We had
5:53
Speaker 1: twelve editors editing fifteen stories a week. Now, when I
5:56
Speaker 1: worked to the Miami Herald, you would do fifteen stories
5:59
Speaker 1: a night. It really wasn't that unusual. So it was
6:02
Speaker 1: like coming into the Garden of Eden and saying in depth,
6:07
Speaker 1: a little quirky, esoteric exactly. I love those a head
6:11
Speaker 1: stories that were great. The a heads were great, the
6:14
Speaker 1: column six, the stories on the right side of the page.
6:16
Speaker 1: Generally we're pretty heavy on the business and economic front,
6:20
Speaker 1: often driven by news stories on the left side you
6:23
Speaker 1: might remember, tend to be more like features. We look
6:25
Speaker 1: at things like race, we look at things like culture,
6:28
Speaker 1: you know, um, pretty much anything under the sun. And
6:31
Speaker 1: it was just an amazing I feel very fortunate to
6:34
Speaker 1: have been part of that. And you left when Murdoch
6:37
Speaker 1: came in or what was the time, So I had
6:39
Speaker 1: a coincidence. I did leave about six months after Murdoch
6:43
Speaker 1: officially took the reins, and it was kind of a
6:45
Speaker 1: coincidence of several things, but the main one was I
6:48
Speaker 1: got a call from Nick Lemon, who at that time
6:50
Speaker 1: was the dean of Columbide Journalism School, and he said,
6:53
Speaker 1: we're looking for somebody to really move the school into
6:56
Speaker 1: the digital age, and it was a great opportunity. Let's
6:58
Speaker 1: step back and look at them much bigger picture, the
7:02
Speaker 1: changes in the industry. And I referenced a chart that
7:07
Speaker 1: I think was Ryan Chitham of the Audit, which is right,
7:12
Speaker 1: showed that revenues at newspapers are back to levels of
7:16
Speaker 1: nine three right inflation adjusted. Yeah, astonishing, astonishing figure. I mean,
7:22
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a pretty clear trend line. So
7:25
Speaker 1: so is it the business model that's having trouble or
7:31
Speaker 1: is it the content that isn't itself at issue? Because
7:36
Speaker 1: we've seen a lot of things change. So you might
7:39
Speaker 1: remember the first time I met you, I think you
7:41
Speaker 1: were You've been doing your blog for about a year
7:43
Speaker 1: or two and four, yeah something, and dot com was
7:47
Speaker 1: about to dip its big toe into blogs, and and
7:49
Speaker 1: I wanted to take you out to breakfast. And that's right.
7:51
Speaker 1: We went to the best whole wheat blueberry pancakes. And
7:56
Speaker 1: I didn't get an endorsement for that, but but I
7:58
Speaker 1: deserve on. So that's um, that's ten almost over ten years.
8:02
Speaker 1: It's probably about ten years ago. It's in the decade. Man.
8:04
Speaker 1: You and I are old. We are. The funny thing
8:07
Speaker 1: is when when I began blogging, it was, oh, this
8:11
Speaker 1: is kind of fun and interesting. I don't have to
8:12
Speaker 1: send the letter to the eddler. I could do this
8:16
Speaker 1: to say, right, right, and maybe someone will read it,
8:18
Speaker 1: maybe someone won't, right. And I remember I still remember,
8:21
Speaker 1: um dealing with top corporate people at Dow Jones when
8:25
Speaker 1: we were gonna start blogging. I'll never forget there was
8:27
Speaker 1: this one executive, a woman with a Southern accent. I'll
8:30
Speaker 1: never forget. She said, why do people want to read blogs?
8:33
Speaker 1: You know, if you want to read an opinion, you're
8:35
Speaker 1: gonna want to read it from the Journal or the
8:37
Speaker 1: Times or something. And of course that that was clearly
8:40
Speaker 1: not true in two thousand four. Now ten years later,
8:44
Speaker 1: you know, when you look at the number of sources
8:46
Speaker 1: on on business news and some of it, some of
8:49
Speaker 1: it's great, and some of it's horrible, and a lot
8:51
Speaker 1: of it's kind of in the middle. And I think
8:53
Speaker 1: one of the big challenges for all of us UM
8:55
Speaker 1: in the journalism world right now is how do you
8:57
Speaker 1: help readers navigate through that at you know, you look
9:01
Speaker 1: at Seeking Alpha, you look at Business Insider, you look
9:04
Speaker 1: at Yahoo Finance. I mean, these are very different UM outlets,
9:08
Speaker 1: but these have huge audiences and the millions of people.
9:12
Speaker 1: So what does the content creation industry say about journalism,
9:21
Speaker 1: financial media our world? So, you know, in the journalism world,
9:25
Speaker 1: there's really kind of two kinds of content creators. There's
9:28
Speaker 1: the people who are out out there doing the original reporting.
9:32
Speaker 1: There they're going through you know, balance sheets and and
9:36
Speaker 1: and SEC filings in order to dig up stories. They're
9:40
Speaker 1: they're listening to conference calls to try to ferret out
9:43
Speaker 1: what the speaking to original sources exactly, exactly doing original journalism.
9:48
Speaker 1: Then there's a lot of people out there who are
9:51
Speaker 1: aggregating or providing commentary, analysis and opinion around what they're doing,
9:56
Speaker 1: and those are not two complete divisions between each other.
10:00
Speaker 1: Any good news website has some kind of aggregation function
10:03
Speaker 1: to it, and a lot of people, including you, Berry,
10:05
Speaker 1: will I go and find something new and you'll reveal
10:08
Speaker 1: it to your readers which did not appear in the
10:10
Speaker 1: Journal or The New York Times Bloomberg. I'm Barry Ridhults.
10:13
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio today.
10:16
Speaker 1: We're speaking with Bill Gruskin, currently executive editor at Bloomberg,
10:21
Speaker 1: but previously Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and
10:24
Speaker 1: former managing editor for The Wall Street Journal Online. So
10:28
Speaker 1: this has always been the complain about bloggers in general,
10:32
Speaker 1: is hey, we're doing original, certainly a complain about the
10:35
Speaker 1: people who only did aggregation. Like I. I spent the
10:40
Speaker 1: latter half of my career. I began as a trader
10:42
Speaker 1: and became a strategist, so I was cranking out original
10:46
Speaker 1: stuff every day, and I always in oh three, oh four,
10:49
Speaker 1: oh five. That's really what I was fleshing out the
10:52
Speaker 1: blog with It was only later where I discovered, hey,
10:56
Speaker 1: I have a ton of stuff I look and you
10:57
Speaker 1: and I discussed this. I have a ton of stuff
11:00
Speaker 1: I look at at the end of the day that
11:02
Speaker 1: just dissipates from my head. If I make a list
11:04
Speaker 1: of the ten most interesting things I've read, maybe that
11:08
Speaker 1: has a value to somebody. And I've been now doing
11:11
Speaker 1: that for a decade, right, And so it's not that
11:14
Speaker 1: I'm now I'm completely understand the business side of journalistic
11:21
Speaker 1: complaint that hey, we're doing this original research and one
11:24
Speaker 1: of these sites, that was the Beefed HuffPo that they
11:28
Speaker 1: would take all this original content and do an intro
11:32
Speaker 1: sentence and an outro sentence and data and how is
11:36
Speaker 1: that not copyright violation? Well, as long as you're only
11:40
Speaker 1: taking a small excerpt, then it falls with it. And
11:43
Speaker 1: I think they were also taking the punchline. You know,
11:48
Speaker 1: if I don't here's a thousand word article, let me
11:50
Speaker 1: take the hundred and fifty most important words. Why do
11:54
Speaker 1: I have to go read readers is plenty right, I mean,
11:59
Speaker 1: they don't necessarily to read a two thousand words Sorry
12:01
Speaker 1: about why the CFO of the Facebook just stepped down yesterday.
12:06
Speaker 1: You know, they just want to you know, the headline,
12:08
Speaker 1: a couple of paragraphs and boom that they're often story right.
12:11
Speaker 1: So you know, I think this has been hard. You know,
12:14
Speaker 1: the traditional media companies have a lot of problems. The
12:17
Speaker 1: main one is in a digital world, every single piece
12:19
Speaker 1: of content gets atomized, right, so you don't necessarily need
12:23
Speaker 1: it all to be delivered you in one package that
12:26
Speaker 1: hits your doorstep, or that's like a thirty minute broadcast
12:29
Speaker 1: on TV. Every every article, every photo is available anywhere
12:33
Speaker 1: in the world. You could create your own paper, a
12:35
Speaker 1: little of the Times, a little f T, a little Bloomberg,
12:38
Speaker 1: and that's your own very few and I wanted to
12:40
Speaker 1: we kind a laptop. We could go to WordPress and
12:42
Speaker 1: we could create a website and literally two minutes and
12:45
Speaker 1: anything we put on that website would be instantaneously available
12:47
Speaker 1: to anybody in the world. Think about that. That's a
12:51
Speaker 1: that's a game changing That that is a game changer,
12:54
Speaker 1: and that's scary and and it fundamentally and irrevocably changes
12:57
Speaker 1: the economics of our business. You've done a lot digital media.
13:01
Speaker 1: You've looked at the changes in the business model of
13:09
Speaker 1: media and financial reporting. Let me, I wrote a few
13:13
Speaker 1: company names down because I was knowing I was going
13:16
Speaker 1: to speak to you. I was thinking about, let's think
13:18
Speaker 1: about the companies who are making running a journalistic enterprise
13:23
Speaker 1: and challenge and not so much from the content side,
13:27
Speaker 1: from the business side. So here's the shortlist that came
13:30
Speaker 1: up with. Craigslist essentially gutted the class if it's a
13:36
Speaker 1: huge source of revenue for eBay has done a lot
13:40
Speaker 1: to take over the sale of used cars and new cars,
13:44
Speaker 1: Zilo and Trulia on on residential real estate. UM, I
13:50
Speaker 1: don't know what mobile has done to the business model,
13:53
Speaker 1: but it's just another wild card, another random factor. And
13:58
Speaker 1: you know when we talked, we talked earlier about blogs
14:01
Speaker 1: and Twitter. They're really more in terms of content. But
14:04
Speaker 1: what about things like Facebook? What is Facebook advertising which
14:08
Speaker 1: seems to be doing well? How is that challenging? How
14:12
Speaker 1: are all these companies challenging the business model of journalism? So,
14:17
Speaker 1: you know, the interesting thing is a couple of years ago,
14:20
Speaker 1: people used to really focus on things like Craigslist, which,
14:22
Speaker 1: as you said, really did a job on newspapers classified
14:26
Speaker 1: ads and newspapers class fied ads. I think they had
14:29
Speaker 1: like an eight kind of margin that they were just
14:32
Speaker 1: you know, any idiot could run a local newspaper, you know.
14:36
Speaker 1: But what's interesting so with Facebook and obviously with with
14:40
Speaker 1: Google as well, so you have a few issues. One
14:42
Speaker 1: is they're just generating huge amounts of advertising inventory. It's
14:48
Speaker 1: just at a scale that's that no news organization can
14:51
Speaker 1: really hope to match. You know, even the Guardian or
14:54
Speaker 1: New York Times dot com. You know, they don't come
14:57
Speaker 1: close to holding a candle where did? I was reading
14:59
Speaker 1: in one of Facebook learning stories today that two thirds
15:02
Speaker 1: of their one point two billion users log on every day.
15:06
Speaker 1: They have they have two interesting data points, daily average
15:09
Speaker 1: users and monthly average users. But the one caveat I'll
15:13
Speaker 1: warn you about is if you click a like button,
15:17
Speaker 1: that account is having logged on, which really, what is
15:20
Speaker 1: the net dollar game is zero increase the where their
15:25
Speaker 1: profits seemed to becoming. Our people on the site looking
15:28
Speaker 1: at the stream, looking at ads going by. But even
15:31
Speaker 1: let's say it's a third of their advertise, it's still
15:33
Speaker 1: an immense daily number of page views exactly. So you
15:37
Speaker 1: know a few years ago back lines at w dot com,
15:40
Speaker 1: we were looking at digital ad rates. Uh, they call
15:43
Speaker 1: them the CPMs, which is the cost per thousand impressions,
15:46
Speaker 1: be ten twenties. Some parts of the sites were I
15:50
Speaker 1: don't know what comes AD rates are these days. I
15:52
Speaker 1: seem they're still pretty high because it's a premium audience.
15:55
Speaker 1: But a lot of publishers are looking at CPMs of
15:58
Speaker 1: seventy five cents a dollar because that's what Facebook charges
16:01
Speaker 1: right well, But keep in mind it's a mass audience,
16:03
Speaker 1: and the financial audience. I could tell you on the
16:06
Speaker 1: blog five years ago dollars was not uncommon. Now it's three,
16:13
Speaker 1: four or five dollars. I mean it's a side it's
16:15
Speaker 1: a side business. It's and there was never intended to
16:17
Speaker 1: be my main business. But if that's your main business,
16:21
Speaker 1: that's a drop in revenue, and and it's clearly going down, down,
16:26
Speaker 1: down all the time. So a lot of news sites
16:29
Speaker 1: are now in a situation where they're trying to generate
16:31
Speaker 1: more and more traffic just to keep their head above water.
16:35
Speaker 1: You know, if you can generate twice as many pages
16:37
Speaker 1: and the CPN goes down, you're exactly where you were
16:41
Speaker 1: last year. But it's very hard to drive twice as
16:43
Speaker 1: many pages every year, and you're compromising your content slide
16:50
Speaker 1: shows and extreme headlines and exactly well all of the
16:55
Speaker 1: worst sort of clickbait stuff that you know, really takes
16:58
Speaker 1: you from true journalism to write. And there's a reason
17:04
Speaker 1: people look at web based stuff somewhat differently than they
17:08
Speaker 1: do um a print outlet like the Times of the Journal,
17:14
Speaker 1: because a lot of it is nonsense. Yeah, and also
17:17
Speaker 1: advertising on most news websites is terrible. I mean it
17:22
Speaker 1: just does. I mean the ads themselves, theseves, the formats
17:25
Speaker 1: have not really improved. Why I first got to dot
17:28
Speaker 1: com in two thousand one that they were showing me
17:31
Speaker 1: a rectangular ad that would go on the homepage of
17:34
Speaker 1: what they call three D by to fifty which stands
17:36
Speaker 1: for stands for the number of pixels. That was two
17:38
Speaker 1: thousand one, and I agreed to put her on the
17:40
Speaker 1: home page. The add to part. When you go to
17:42
Speaker 1: dot com now or pretty much the website, that's pretty
17:44
Speaker 1: much what you see. It's been thirteen years. You have
17:47
Speaker 1: seven ten by nine. I mean sometimes you get the skyscraper.
17:52
Speaker 1: I think it's one sixty. I mean, everything else has
17:55
Speaker 1: changed in the digital world, but this kind of concept
17:59
Speaker 1: of we're gonna give you or a rectangular ad We're
18:01
Speaker 1: gonna stick next to a story and somehow there's gonna
18:04
Speaker 1: be a lot of value for the advertiser. It's just
18:06
Speaker 1: not true. I'm Barry rid Hults. You're listening to Masters
18:09
Speaker 1: in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Today we're speaking with Bill Gruskin,
18:13
Speaker 1: currently executive editor at Bloomberg, but previously Dean of the
18:17
Speaker 1: Columbia School of Journalism and former managing editor for The
18:20
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal Online since you left the Journal, or
18:25
Speaker 1: really a better way of saying this is, over the
18:27
Speaker 1: past decade, we've seen the sort of uh segregation of
18:34
Speaker 1: outlets by political partisanship. And so I jotted a few down.
18:41
Speaker 1: So you have Fox on the one side and MSNBC,
18:44
Speaker 1: which is really smaller version of it. I tried to
18:47
Speaker 1: figure out who was the other side of Drudge. I
18:51
Speaker 1: can't really put that really isn't on the left. The
18:55
Speaker 1: left is completely right. The right seems to walk a
19:00
Speaker 1: little more in lockstep. And then you know, so you
19:04
Speaker 1: have you have people like um, Matthew Iglesias and and
19:09
Speaker 1: obviously Paul Krugman. But Krugman is a guy. Krugman is
19:13
Speaker 1: a guy with a very specific I have to remember
19:16
Speaker 1: interviewed him last week after Kruger, Right, that's a good
19:21
Speaker 1: way to remember that. But what is this bifurcation by politics?
19:29
Speaker 1: Because because the studies seem to show people on the
19:32
Speaker 1: right go read their sides, people left go read and
19:35
Speaker 1: you end up with this alternative to alternative universes, neither
19:39
Speaker 1: of which necessary necessarily reflect reality. So the first thing
19:44
Speaker 1: to keep in mind is the actual size of these audiences.
19:48
Speaker 1: I mean, here in New York City, we tend to
19:50
Speaker 1: focus a lot on these outlets like MSNBC and Fox.
19:54
Speaker 1: What does MSNBC's nightly audience two hun a thousand viewers
20:01
Speaker 1: or something like that. Blog post can get that, Yeah,
20:04
Speaker 1: and what's the size of how many people live in
20:06
Speaker 1: this country? Fox News is much much better than MSNBC
20:12
Speaker 1: was having one and a half million viewers a night
20:15
Speaker 1: something like that. So first of all, you know, we
20:18
Speaker 1: all here in New York get very focused on this,
20:20
Speaker 1: but when you actually get out of New York City,
20:22
Speaker 1: you find out that, you know, outside certain pockets, not
20:25
Speaker 1: really that many people actually watched these programs that work
20:29
Speaker 1: care And I wouldn't be surprised if you know, half
20:31
Speaker 1: of Fox news audience comes from Jon Stewart and Steve Colbert,
20:35
Speaker 1: because they need they need the material exactly exactly. So secondly,
20:41
Speaker 1: you know, this is the way the world used to be. Um,
20:44
Speaker 1: I mean really, I mean go back a century. You're talking,
20:47
Speaker 1: I go back fourty or fifty years. I mean basically,
20:50
Speaker 1: so what happened maybe a little bit more than fifty
20:53
Speaker 1: years ago, but um, pre war, from pre war, you
20:56
Speaker 1: would take a city like New York City and it
20:59
Speaker 1: had a whole bunch of day newspapers. It didn't just
21:01
Speaker 1: have you know, two or three. Uh and most most
21:05
Speaker 1: metro areas these days only have one newspapers. Yeah, if
21:08
Speaker 1: you're lucky. So if you run the only newspaper in town,
21:11
Speaker 1: you have to be very objective in the middle of
21:14
Speaker 1: the road, right, because you can't piss off the Republicans
21:16
Speaker 1: campus on the Democrats. But in the old days that
21:19
Speaker 1: there were newspapers that were very closely aligned with various
21:23
Speaker 1: political factions and political parties. And this is the way
21:26
Speaker 1: that the world used to work. So this is nothing new,
21:29
Speaker 1: this balkanization to anything. What was new was the relatively
21:33
Speaker 1: brief period of time where you had these you know,
21:36
Speaker 1: where every city has one and only one very objective
21:40
Speaker 1: news provider that like didn't cross the line between the two.
21:44
Speaker 1: And I have to tell our audience. You're waving to
21:48
Speaker 1: every other person that goes by between between the Wall
21:51
Speaker 1: Street Journal and Columbia, you must know half this building.
21:54
Speaker 1: I feel like even the guy who fills up the
21:57
Speaker 1: coffee machine probably worked at the Journal at some point. Yeah,
22:00
Speaker 1: did you guys have good coffee machines? We did for
22:03
Speaker 1: a few years. Yeah, yeah, no, no, And as I
22:05
Speaker 1: call you, you actually had to pay for it to
22:07
Speaker 1: Oh really? Yeah? Right right, Well, the secret is to
22:11
Speaker 1: have a data services business that subsidizes the We tried.
22:17
Speaker 1: We just weren't quite as good at it as Mike Bloomberg.
22:19
Speaker 1: Can I tell you something? Tell rate? And what was
22:23
Speaker 1: the Reuters product? Oh? Icon or well that's the new one.
22:28
Speaker 1: I don't know what. There were three or four companies
22:32
Speaker 1: that were in the running. I mean, I say this
22:34
Speaker 1: is an observer and not to kiss his behind, but
22:37
Speaker 1: pretty much that race is over now. It seems like
22:40
Speaker 1: it's kind of fascinating to see a really competitive mark.
22:44
Speaker 1: It's like search. Hey, there were all these companies and
22:47
Speaker 1: then Google just said, everybody, here's the new search algorithm.
22:51
Speaker 1: You all lose and that's kind of what happened. It's
22:54
Speaker 1: a relatively rare thing to see happen. Yeah, well, so
22:57
Speaker 1: they call the Network of Right basically at certain point
23:03
Speaker 1: the customers go to that's that's what happened here. So
23:06
Speaker 1: we were talking about that's a really interesting observation. In
23:11
Speaker 1: other words, objective journalism and middle of the road. Hey,
23:15
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna share my opinion. I'm just gonna report
23:19
Speaker 1: the facts. Post war aberration last and half a century, right,
23:22
Speaker 1: and now we've gone back to the pre war version.
23:25
Speaker 1: Some look at there's still many news outlets that that
23:29
Speaker 1: still you know, play it down in the middle, and
23:31
Speaker 1: certainly any of the really big national news organizations. I mean,
23:34
Speaker 1: obviously there are people are going to disagree, but I
23:36
Speaker 1: would say, you know, there's a lot of news out
23:39
Speaker 1: there that that that is that I think we all
23:43
Speaker 1: consider is more often than not very objective and and
23:47
Speaker 1: which you really want to strive for. It. I told
23:49
Speaker 1: journalism students this all the time. Isn't so much objective
23:52
Speaker 1: as being a fair and open minded journalists. I'm Barry Ridhults.
23:56
Speaker 1: You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio today,
24:00
Speaker 1: speaking with Bill Grupskin, currently executive editor at Bloomberg, but
24:04
Speaker 1: previously Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism and former
24:07
Speaker 1: managing editor for The Wall Street Journal online commentary and opinion.
24:12
Speaker 1: Isn't that something that journalists would Hey, that's the gravy
24:15
Speaker 1: taint train. You put in your years, you get tapped
24:19
Speaker 1: and now I'm a commentator. I published less and and
24:23
Speaker 1: get paid more. That that was really a certain And
24:27
Speaker 1: you can see this with a ton of people. Uh
24:30
Speaker 1: and then eventually you get a talk show and and
24:33
Speaker 1: you know, there you are talking into a radio microphone.
24:36
Speaker 1: But the real fascinating thing for me is, as someone
24:40
Speaker 1: who's an investor, as somebody who consumes an awful lot
24:44
Speaker 1: of journalistic content, what is the future of this industry
24:49
Speaker 1: gonna look like? Not just in terms of politics and
24:52
Speaker 1: left right, but in terms of look I have my
24:56
Speaker 1: stable of people that I think are I mentioned Jason's
24:59
Speaker 1: why Girl, Dan Gross, who's with the Dale Beast in
25:02
Speaker 1: Gretchen Morganson at the New York Times, and I could
25:05
Speaker 1: probably put together a list of twenty people. It doesn't
25:08
Speaker 1: matter what masthead they're publishing under. Um, I want to
25:12
Speaker 1: read what they have what I have to see, So
25:14
Speaker 1: So here's what's really interesting about that. You can create
25:17
Speaker 1: a Twitter feed or an RSS page where you scoop
25:21
Speaker 1: up Jason's column, Gretchen stuff, Jesse's stuff, you know, and
25:25
Speaker 1: you can basically create your own homepage, right, I mean,
25:28
Speaker 1: whether it's Twitter or using RSS or or Google Plus
25:32
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. And so the idea that
25:34
Speaker 1: you have to buy the Wall Street Journal in order
25:36
Speaker 1: to read Jason, or the idea that that you that
25:40
Speaker 1: you that you that you have to buy the New
25:42
Speaker 1: York Times and already Rea Gretchen, you know, that's sort
25:46
Speaker 1: of dissipating these days. And so what's gonna fund them?
25:49
Speaker 1: How they're not going to do that work if no
25:51
Speaker 1: one's paying their salaries. I mean, we're seeing increasingly increasing
25:54
Speaker 1: adoption of pay walls, and scrip was inevitable, wasn't it. Uh,
25:59
Speaker 1: you know, it seems inevitable now. I remember when I
26:02
Speaker 1: was at Comments had a paywall going back to to
26:07
Speaker 1: you know, people thought we were crazy in the early
26:09
Speaker 1: two thousand's, and I would sit there on panel after
26:11
Speaker 1: panel being be rated by the future Internet people saying,
26:16
Speaker 1: you know, you guys have to take down your paywall.
26:18
Speaker 1: You aren't part of the conversation and we can't link
26:20
Speaker 1: to you. The The advice I gave you with that
26:24
Speaker 1: breakfast a decade ago was to put your blogs outside
26:28
Speaker 1: of the paywall, but only let paid subscribers comments. Everybody
26:33
Speaker 1: else could just read it. And I also, I don't
26:35
Speaker 1: know if you recall this, I also said take all
26:37
Speaker 1: of your content that's more than thirty or ninety days
26:40
Speaker 1: old and put it outside the paywall because the subscription
26:44
Speaker 1: would be supported by the news stuff that's old. Hey
26:48
Speaker 1: monetize it with average. So I think we took part
26:50
Speaker 1: of your advice. All the blogs were outside the paywall.
26:53
Speaker 1: I think on a technical aspect that we weren't able
26:55
Speaker 1: to put the comments behind the paywall and not beyond
26:57
Speaker 1: the paywall, just allow subscribe. And then on the archive thing,
27:01
Speaker 1: we ran into a buzz saw because David Jones had
27:04
Speaker 1: a Factiva news service, which is very profitable thing, and
27:07
Speaker 1: you can't put those stories outside the paywall. You see
27:11
Speaker 1: this is this is one of the issues with any
27:13
Speaker 1: kind of a legacy media short right, you have these
27:15
Speaker 1: kind of entrenched uh um areas of interest, sometimes for
27:20
Speaker 1: very good reasons. Some of them were pulling in millions
27:22
Speaker 1: of dollars of revenue. Sometimes it at very high margins
27:25
Speaker 1: and once you start threatening their business. I'll tell you
27:28
Speaker 1: about a really interesting website. It's called KSL dot com.
27:31
Speaker 1: So KSL is the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, Utah. Okay,
27:36
Speaker 1: it's just your ordinary NBC affiliate. Has to be run
27:38
Speaker 1: by coming called desiret News, which is m operated by
27:42
Speaker 1: the Mormon Church. So they decided about ten or eleven
27:45
Speaker 1: years ago, or maybe a little bit longer, they can
27:47
Speaker 1: see that Craigslist was about to come to Salt Lake
27:50
Speaker 1: and because there are Mormons that they weren't too happy
27:52
Speaker 1: about Craigslist and the kind of standards. Since they did,
27:55
Speaker 1: they have since dropped the issues that were the problem, well,
27:59
Speaker 1: sex ads in the back and the prostitute. So what
28:01
Speaker 1: I'm about to tell you is noel. Craigslist has no
28:04
Speaker 1: Craigslist has just gotten smarter about it, like they've they've
28:07
Speaker 1: from what I understand, so it's still there, it's just
28:10
Speaker 1: a little more yeah yeah. Um. But so KSL, which
28:14
Speaker 1: is a local TV news affiliate, said we're gonna start
28:17
Speaker 1: our own classified ad service, but we're gonna make it
28:19
Speaker 1: really good. You know, how much how much traffic that
28:22
Speaker 1: thing gets gets around two hundred fifty to three hundred
28:25
Speaker 1: million page views a month. Wow. Um. And they have
28:28
Speaker 1: premium ads which they charge money for. They have this
28:30
Speaker 1: huge audience which they can monetize. How come nobody else
28:33
Speaker 1: has challenged Craigslist. That's a really good question because Craigslist
28:37
Speaker 1: is a really crappy experience. Well it's it's hasn't changed
28:41
Speaker 1: and has It feels like twenty years old, and it
28:45
Speaker 1: just feels kind of at least to me, it feels
28:47
Speaker 1: kind of icky. You know. Now, my daughter is just
28:50
Speaker 1: moving to Albuquerque. She's she's she's in her mid twenties.
28:54
Speaker 1: She's Craigslist to find a couple of housemates. They seem
28:56
Speaker 1: like really nice kids. I mean, obviously most of the
28:59
Speaker 1: transactions have on Craigslist are fine, but the overall environment
29:03
Speaker 1: doesn't really isn't really that conducive. I would think to
29:06
Speaker 1: a lot of what people want to do in the
29:08
Speaker 1: classified ads work world. So I think a lot of
29:10
Speaker 1: what media companies have assumed, Oh you can't have a
29:13
Speaker 1: good classified experience, you can't have a paywall. These are
29:16
Speaker 1: things that became part of the mantra that nobody really
29:20
Speaker 1: challenged them, and so it's it's times start challenging some
29:23
Speaker 1: of those. So clearly Washington Post paywall, New York Times paywall,
29:28
Speaker 1: bosting Globe paywall, New York Newsday out on Long Island paywall.
29:33
Speaker 1: So whoever said there's not going to be a paywall
29:37
Speaker 1: at a certain point when it's free and people would
29:39
Speaker 1: canceling subscriptions and droves that had to go away, I
29:43
Speaker 1: think that was inevitable. I'm surprised so many people pushed back.
29:48
Speaker 1: It doesn't take You don't have to be a math.
29:49
Speaker 1: Gen used to say, all right, so we're gonna spend
29:51
Speaker 1: all this money creating content, and we're gonna give it
29:54
Speaker 1: away and we'll monetize it with band rads. That's not
29:57
Speaker 1: gonna happen. And even those days they were maybe ten
30:00
Speaker 1: dollar per thousand banner heads, you know, still not gonna pay.
30:03
Speaker 1: There was no projection you would ever generate enough traffic.
30:06
Speaker 1: It was just you know, this blind faith that don't worry,
30:09
Speaker 1: it'll get better, or if we don't do this, we're
30:10
Speaker 1: gonna be outside the conversation. That just simply wasn't true.
30:14
Speaker 1: So now we have four pay journalism moving behind pay walls.
30:20
Speaker 1: But then we have the five thirty eight in the
30:22
Speaker 1: courts in the boxes. Is it they have they're all free?
30:27
Speaker 1: Do they have just a different cost structure or are
30:30
Speaker 1: they going to run into the same problem in a
30:32
Speaker 1: few years when when the VC funding drives up, are
30:34
Speaker 1: they gonna have the same issue? So I think the
30:36
Speaker 1: cost structure is a really big piece of this issue.
30:39
Speaker 1: I mean, any newspaper these days has they saw printing presses.
30:43
Speaker 1: They still have trucks, a lot of them have unionized workforces,
30:47
Speaker 1: you know, and they still have to support the legacy
30:50
Speaker 1: part of the business because that still brings in seven
30:52
Speaker 1: or eight percent of the total at revenue coming back
30:55
Speaker 1: from from Laguardi. You see the New York Times printing area,
30:59
Speaker 1: it van Wick, it's this, it's a football field, an
31:04
Speaker 1: aircraft hangar facility. It looks brand new. It's got a
31:07
Speaker 1: cost of millions, right, and then they got trucks going
31:10
Speaker 1: out every day, you know, with unionized drivers and stuff.
31:14
Speaker 1: Whereas you know, there's this website here in New York
31:16
Speaker 1: City called d n A Info, which is kind of
31:19
Speaker 1: a weird name for a website. It's actually getting a
31:22
Speaker 1: lot of traffic. They've had a lot of really good
31:24
Speaker 1: metro reporters from the New York Daily News. They've been
31:27
Speaker 1: breaking a lot of stories. They do a lot of
31:28
Speaker 1: good neighborhood stuff, and they don't have any these legacy costs.
31:31
Speaker 1: So it's the structure. The model is that much cheaper.
31:35
Speaker 1: So so the guys who have run the projections on
31:37
Speaker 1: the eight and the boxes, Yeah, that's that's they should
31:42
Speaker 1: be able to make a run of it. Well, keep
31:44
Speaker 1: in mind five eight who owns five three eight? Right now?
31:47
Speaker 1: Barry oh? ESPN? So you know ABC, esp the effective
31:52
Speaker 1: right if if if it loses a few million dollars
31:57
Speaker 1: here and there, it's a couple of quarters in the
31:59
Speaker 1: couch cushion, it's all those Uh it's Disney World is subsidizing.
32:04
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, or ESPN. I mean ESPN is a huge cast.
32:07
Speaker 1: So you know, um, and Jeff Bezos has bought the
32:10
Speaker 1: Washington Post. He bought it for two fifty million, which
32:12
Speaker 1: I think one percent of his net worth. Right, you
32:16
Speaker 1: touch on something that's really interesting. Our big media outlets
32:20
Speaker 1: eventually going to become trophy acquisition. And what was the
32:23
Speaker 1: Chicago paper, the Chicago Tribune who picked that up? Well,
32:27
Speaker 1: there was that whole unfortunate period with Sam's l who
32:32
Speaker 1: who you know, drove that truck right into the mountain,
32:36
Speaker 1: And now they're doing a spinoff where they're trying to
32:39
Speaker 1: extort a big dividend out of the new company. I
32:41
Speaker 1: actually actually wrote a piece for Representative Henry Waxman about it, right,
32:46
Speaker 1: said that the La Times was supposedly up for and
32:48
Speaker 1: the only Time part. But but for example, take the
32:51
Speaker 1: Boston Globe, okay, so, which was formally owned by the
32:53
Speaker 1: New York TI exactly. So in the late eighties or
32:55
Speaker 1: early nineties, the Times paid one point one billion dollars
32:59
Speaker 1: for Oh my god, I think I think they sold
33:01
Speaker 1: it for fifty or seventy million plus. And actually I
33:05
Speaker 1: think that Times had to keep some of the pension obligations. Yeah, so, yeah, right,
33:11
Speaker 1: how do you lose a billion dollar? You know, it's
33:12
Speaker 1: like the old joke by Buffett, how do you become
33:15
Speaker 1: a millionaire? Started with a billion dollars, then you buy
33:17
Speaker 1: an airplane. But so he sold it to John Henry,
33:20
Speaker 1: who owns the Red Sox and who's committed to local
33:24
Speaker 1: civic life in Boston, and he has a strong vested
33:27
Speaker 1: interest in in having a healthy newspaper. At least I
33:30
Speaker 1: hope he does. So the state of journalism is dependent
33:35
Speaker 1: on the altruism of billionaires, he says, sitting in Bloomberg's
33:40
Speaker 1: headquote World Right or some of the philanthropic efforts we've seen.
33:44
Speaker 1: So Stoker's Pro pub because it was initially funded by
33:48
Speaker 1: Herban Marion Sandler, you know, from from the countrywide right
33:53
Speaker 1: or no, not country. Another mortgage company was the mortgage
33:56
Speaker 1: company I know who you're talking about, right, and they
34:00
Speaker 1: they just want a couple of Pulitzers. They I mean,
34:03
Speaker 1: they're doing amazing work. But Joe Eisinger's piece publishes both
34:06
Speaker 1: at Pro Publica and The New York Times, right, and
34:08
Speaker 1: they did the piece on the New Orleans hospital which
34:12
Speaker 1: ran in the time. I remember that. So the Sandlers
34:16
Speaker 1: put up ten million dollars a year for a few years,
34:19
Speaker 1: and now it's a lot of money. I mean, it
34:21
Speaker 1: wasn't that much for them, but but I mean generally speaking,
34:24
Speaker 1: and now they're off raising money elsewhere or Pro public
34:28
Speaker 1: so so so the Sandlers, actually hurb Sandler's contribution has
34:32
Speaker 1: been diminished because they've been able to find other sources
34:34
Speaker 1: of money. So effectively, one aspect of journalism is either
34:39
Speaker 1: find the sugar daddy or be fortunate enough to have
34:42
Speaker 1: someone set up a foundation. And isn't that going on
34:46
Speaker 1: with The Guardian in the UK? So, I mean, they're
34:49
Speaker 1: a wealthy they're a big foundation. They've done really well, well,
34:53
Speaker 1: they've just done really well. So they're run by the
34:55
Speaker 1: Scott Trusts, that's called and the Guardian has been losing
34:58
Speaker 1: money on a pretty a pretty regular basis. And the
35:02
Speaker 1: Guardian has an amazing digital strategy. We actually were fortunate
35:06
Speaker 1: at the Journalism school to hire Emily bell Away because
35:11
Speaker 1: she was and I think at the time we hired her,
35:14
Speaker 1: the Guardian newspaper sold around three hundred thousand copies in
35:17
Speaker 1: their web audience was thirty million. That's amazing number. And
35:21
Speaker 1: and that was five years ago. And from what I
35:23
Speaker 1: understand now, I was just on a panel Earli this
35:26
Speaker 1: morning with Heidi Moore, who writes for The Guardian, and
35:29
Speaker 1: she said their web Allian sounds forty is angry at
35:33
Speaker 1: me these days? I'm sure, I'm sure you'll make it up.
35:36
Speaker 1: But anyway, So, so the Scott Trust owned a lot
35:39
Speaker 1: of Auto Trader, which is this fantastically lucrative thing and
35:43
Speaker 1: he sold it for about a billion dollars recently, so
35:46
Speaker 1: that can be their endowment if you figure five investment
35:50
Speaker 1: returned the fifty million dollars. And you know, at some
35:54
Speaker 1: point they'll get rid of the presses and they'll go
35:57
Speaker 1: to a pure digital operation. May not be you know,
35:59
Speaker 1: a time the next few years, at some point they
36:01
Speaker 1: will and you can run a pretty nice newsroom for
36:04
Speaker 1: fifty million dollars to say the least. So so the
36:07
Speaker 1: future of of media isn't completely hopeless, no, as long
36:11
Speaker 1: as there's wealthy people around to fundent. And we are
36:14
Speaker 1: seeing some business models emerging where media companies like The
36:18
Speaker 1: Atlantic has a really lucrative kind of conference business. Uh.
36:22
Speaker 1: You see a lot of woll Street Journal does a
36:24
Speaker 1: lot of conferences business inside er is just into that
36:28
Speaker 1: area exactly. The f t oh, you know, we really
36:30
Speaker 1: haven't talked about great story. I love ft alphaville is.
36:36
Speaker 1: I love that that blog which is outside the fire
36:39
Speaker 1: the pay wall, but you know, from from our perspective,
36:44
Speaker 1: it's a relatively inexpensive pay but like the Wall Street Journal,
36:47
Speaker 1: it's really and expensive, so we sign up for that
36:49
Speaker 1: as well. It's a really well regarded, well written paper,
36:54
Speaker 1: very credible, very thoughtful. Uh, and they break a lot
36:58
Speaker 1: of stories. But they were they were a little late
37:01
Speaker 1: to the game on the digital subscription strategy. But they
37:04
Speaker 1: really have when when you look at their digital subscriptions,
37:07
Speaker 1: they've really done well. Um they've got They're very smart
37:10
Speaker 1: about how to market it and and how to target
37:13
Speaker 1: the marketing campaigns to people who were reading story X
37:16
Speaker 1: versus story Why. I have said it's got to be
37:19
Speaker 1: since Murdoch bought the journal, I have said the f
37:22
Speaker 1: t is really should be the business section of the Times,
37:26
Speaker 1: and if the Times was in a healthier situation, they
37:30
Speaker 1: should actually reach out. But they can't. My plan B
37:34
Speaker 1: is this guy buys The Times and then buys the
37:37
Speaker 1: Ft to fold into it, and then you have a
37:41
Speaker 1: really dominant global paper, both US and and continental. Well
37:47
Speaker 1: that would be huge. I don't know if it's gonna
37:49
Speaker 1: happen to anything. By the way, I give a lot
37:51
Speaker 1: of free advice to billionaires. I don't know, because you know,
37:55
Speaker 1: buying a newspaper seems like such a smart strategy thousand fourteen.
37:59
Speaker 1: I don't know what they're thinking. It's not a business investment.
38:02
Speaker 1: It's a trophy exactly. The New York Times is a
38:05
Speaker 1: trophy The Wall Street Journal is a trophy. F T
38:07
Speaker 1: is a trophy, and obviously the Washington Post, where I
38:10
Speaker 1: have a column twice a month. Uh. And that's really
38:13
Speaker 1: why bizos. You know, you could have called me directly,
38:16
Speaker 1: could have saved them a lot of money. But um,
38:20
Speaker 1: it's really the changing dynamics, so I know you have
38:25
Speaker 1: to go somewhere else. I want to wrap this up
38:27
Speaker 1: on a positive note. The future of journalism, the future
38:31
Speaker 1: of financial reportage and media. Is it going to survive
38:36
Speaker 1: in some healthy format or is it going to become
38:39
Speaker 1: this little thing that's off in the corner. I'm more
38:42
Speaker 1: confident about business journalism than really any other part of
38:45
Speaker 1: the journalism world because and we see this when I
38:48
Speaker 1: was at W dot com. You know we uh, when
38:52
Speaker 1: I took over at W dot com have been around
38:54
Speaker 1: for about five or six years, they already had about
38:56
Speaker 1: half million subscribers. And why I left six years later,
38:59
Speaker 1: we had over a million. And you know, I'd like
39:01
Speaker 1: to say it is because of our great staff and
39:03
Speaker 1: how smart I was and all that, but the truth
39:05
Speaker 1: is people can see a direct relationship between paying for
39:09
Speaker 1: quality news, paying for quality business news and and getting
39:12
Speaker 1: something out of it. Right, now, is it just business
39:14
Speaker 1: news that people who willing to pay for? Are they
39:16
Speaker 1: going to be willing to pay for? I think nonsins
39:19
Speaker 1: I think increasingly, as as people want to understand the world,
39:23
Speaker 1: as we have a more globally connected world, and as
39:26
Speaker 1: people realize that there's some relationship between the quality of
39:32
Speaker 1: journalists doing the work and the quality of journalism that
39:34
Speaker 1: you get out of them, that that there will be
39:36
Speaker 1: increasing demand for it. Whether the demand will ramp up
39:40
Speaker 1: fast enough I don't know, but as you see, if
39:43
Speaker 1: you look at kind of any big business when it
39:45
Speaker 1: goes through some huge, gut wrenching transformation, there's a lot
39:49
Speaker 1: of the messiness along the way, and then eventually something emerges.
39:53
Speaker 1: And I think we're seeing some of that emerged now.
39:55
Speaker 1: And how long is it going to be before the
39:59
Speaker 1: unit a verse of of financial news in general media
40:04
Speaker 1: um is has find comfortable footing. How long do you
40:09
Speaker 1: think this transitional period is going to be? Are we
40:13
Speaker 1: through the worst of it or is there still a
40:15
Speaker 1: lot more wrenching things to come. I think that we're
40:18
Speaker 1: in for a long period of of of this, because
40:23
Speaker 1: you know, there's a Columbia business professor wrote her book
40:26
Speaker 1: called the end of competitive advantage as about how barriers
40:30
Speaker 1: to entry fall as quickly as as you erect them.
40:33
Speaker 1: I mean, in the old days, you would erect a
40:35
Speaker 1: barrier to entrying in in your business, and in the
40:38
Speaker 1: last five, ten, twenty years now, thanks to technology, as
40:41
Speaker 1: soon as you build it, somebody's out there trying to
40:43
Speaker 1: figure out a way around it. So I think what
40:47
Speaker 1: you need are journalism institutions that are much more nimble,
40:50
Speaker 1: much more technologically adept um. We've started at the j School,
40:55
Speaker 1: at the Journalism School, training students in computer science and
40:58
Speaker 1: coding and data and algor of them because we want
41:01
Speaker 1: the next generation of journalists to be much more adept
41:04
Speaker 1: at this stuff, and to be much more pliable and flexible,
41:07
Speaker 1: and to have the kind of dexterity to deal with
41:10
Speaker 1: unending technological change. You know what, I would be remiss
41:13
Speaker 1: and I know you have to run. I would be
41:14
Speaker 1: remiss if I didn't mention recode Mosburg right, the two
41:20
Speaker 1: technical Walt Mossburg is a legend at in technology at
41:25
Speaker 1: the Journal. That's just another example of no legacy costs.
41:29
Speaker 1: Launch a new model and immediately immediately hit the ground
41:34
Speaker 1: and and with traction and gained an audience. And it
41:37
Speaker 1: also shows the power of individual brands. So if you're
41:41
Speaker 1: I don't know how many Twitter followers karro Switcher had
41:43
Speaker 1: at the time that she left out Jones and started
41:46
Speaker 1: her own business, but I'm sure it was in the
41:47
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands. So when she went from the journal
41:51
Speaker 1: to her new business, she took those followers with her.
41:55
Speaker 1: In the old days, if we went from the Wall
41:56
Speaker 1: Street Journal to the New York Times, your readers state
41:59
Speaker 1: at the Wall Street starting over. Isn't that interesting? And
42:02
Speaker 1: think about the kind of incentives that creates for journalists
42:05
Speaker 1: these days. If you can create your own audience, you
42:08
Speaker 1: can basically take that with you anywhere you go, and
42:11
Speaker 1: so that increases, you know, the incentives to do it,
42:14
Speaker 1: and it means that you have a lot more individual
42:16
Speaker 1: control over your career. And so the future isn't bleak
42:20
Speaker 1: for journalists at all. And the future of the media
42:24
Speaker 1: is going to be different than it is today. But
42:26
Speaker 1: there's reasons for optimism. And you know, there's a lot
42:29
Speaker 1: of great stuff to read online. And when you think
42:31
Speaker 1: about you're sitting there with an uh your iPhone at
42:35
Speaker 1: the doctor's office and in waiting half an hour you're
42:38
Speaker 1: not reading you know, US News and World Report from
42:42
Speaker 1: four weeks ago, where readers digest from last month. You
42:44
Speaker 1: have access to literally thousands or millions of sources the world,
42:49
Speaker 1: the entire world. I mean, isn't that a good thing?
42:51
Speaker 1: It isn't there something good about that? And you know,
42:55
Speaker 1: over time we will figure out how the businesses. We're
42:57
Speaker 1: always seeing some business models emerging. And opportunity to be
43:00
Speaker 1: able to sit at yourdentist's office and read the Johannesburg
43:03
Speaker 1: newspaper or listen to a radio station from Prague, or
43:07
Speaker 1: read your kid's blog all on the same device. There's
43:10
Speaker 1: something good about that. I think there's something fantastic about it. Well,
43:14
Speaker 1: that's an optimistic note we should end on. We should
43:17
Speaker 1: always end on an optimistic That's right. I've been speaking
43:19
Speaker 1: with Bill Gruskin, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, now
43:22
Speaker 1: with the Colombia School of Journalism. Bill, thank you so
43:25
Speaker 1: much for coming. Thank you, bry. This was a lot
43:26
Speaker 1: of fun. Yeah, this has been great and we'll see
43:29
Speaker 1: you again next week. You're listening to Masters in Business
43:33
Speaker 1: with Berry rid Holts on Bloomberg Radio.