I spent Memorial Day weekend with my family in California, which is always nice in a variety of ways. It was a chance to see my parents, siblings, as well as my son and daughter-in-law. I was able to catch-up with the various family issues AND wonder how in the world anyone does business in California! Continue reading
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Staying Focused
I was reading Joe Webb’s blog last week that was titled “Where Does Print Media Fit? It’s Up to Us.” A lot of thought provoking information, but it could be summarized by this statement, “Communications markets are changing, and slow economic periods only intensify the interest in disrupting the status quo, especially when it is believed that the changes will reduce costs or increase effectiveness despite austere budgets. This is the marketplace we are in; we can be a part of the overall solution, making new media more effective, or we can choose to ignore the obvious.”
Yet, the real question which has been raised by many, and recently by David Dodd in an online article titled “To Be, or not to be, an MSP,” can a print provider/manufacturer morph his/her business into a Marketing Services Provider. Or should they? Continue reading
Call Me a Curmudgeon
It was reported in the May 18th issue of the New York Times that “Alongside the explosive growth of online video over the last six years, time spent on social networks surpassed that for e-mail for the first time in February, signaling a paradigm shift in consumer engagement with the Internet.”
I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Continue reading
EFCA – More To Think About
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you have read or heard about “Card Check” or the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This proposed legislation is not friendly to business, regardless of what form it will take in the House or the Senate. Continue reading
Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell’s text, which I read several years ago, observed that “tipping points occur when the momentum for change becomes unstoppable.” I wonder if our industry is reaching that point regarding digital print technologies.
Big Box Outsources
It was announced this past week that FedEx Kinko’s is outsourcing their online solution to VistaPrint. We can discuss, as many are doing, as to what went wrong resulting in FedEx Kinko’s outsourcing rather than using their own solution. I’d rather ask the question, what does this portend for the rest of the industry? Continue reading
Print is Dead?
Two weeks ago the New York Times Company reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million. Advertising revenue at the company’s publishing segment fell 28.4 percent in the quarter, including an 8 percent decline in Internet advertising at the News Media Group. The New England Media Group, which consists primarily of The Boston Globe and its site, Boston.com reported that it’s on track to lose $85 million this year, and as of Monday there were talks of closing this venerable institution founded in 1872.
Many individuals see this type of news as a condemnation of print as a media. I see it as a condemnation of newspapers as a channel of advertising – and let’s not get newspapers confused with printing.
Print will continue to play an important role in visual communications today and well into the future. Those of us in the industry just have to remember the mistake the railroads made at the turn of the last century and the newspaper made in this one. In the early 20th century, railroads did not understand they were in the transportation business – not the railroad business. Newspapers forgot they were in the business of producing/packaging news – not in the print producing business.
