Summary of Meeting the Challenge of Declining Print Revenues - Part 1

I’ve just watched the first part of a video entitled “Meeting the Challenge of Declining Print Revenues” – a tad relevant to this blog don’t you think?
You can view the video at SIIA Brown Bag Lunches but here’s a summary with my take on it.
Heidi Cohen, a Principal at Riverside Marketing Strategies, New York, NY, chaired the meeting and in setting the theme she quoted Ann Moore of Time Inc. as saying “the average reader of Sports Illustrated delivers about $118 to the bottom line in Time Inc. The average very engaged user of SI.com can generate about $5 in advertising contribution.” Sums up our dilemma very well don’t it?
There is a clear recommendation that comes out of Part 1 of this video and it’s the old age maxim of understanding your customer. As Heidi Cohen said, “It’s not about the company, it’s not about where you want people to be or what you want to offer them. It’s about what your customer is talking about”. Dora Chomiak, Senior Director of eBusiness & Digital Media at McGraw Hill suggested we think about “where’s the audience and where’s the audience going and how do we evolve with that audience” whilst Andy Pickup, President and CEO of The Wall Street Transcipt (no, not the Journal) asked us to think about “what value am I creating for my customers here, is everything that I used to be doing still as valuable as it used to be?”
My take - It’s just one of those reminders that occasionally comes along letting you know that you’re not seeing the wood for the trees? Of course we need to focus on the customer and I’m as guilty as everybody else. We all talk and think about becoming a content-oriented or content-centric publishing business but, according to Andy Pickup “rather than saying the centre of my world is content . . . [we should be] saying the centre of my world is my clients".
And finally, I know we’re after making as much ‘dough’ as possible but is Dora Chomiak really suggesting we become bakers when she proposes we ‘bake’ our information as tightly as possible into the workflow of whoever it is who is using our content?
I’ll be summarizing parts 2 and 3 shortly so do drop by soon.