Does the Departure of Tina Brown from the Daily Beast Portend a Less-Than-Rosy Future for Online-Only Journalism?

The news that Tina Brown is leaving the Daily Beast, the online-only news site she founded in 2008 isn't big news, outside of Manhattan. The fact is that the Daily Beast wasn't getting much attention in the first place. Even with the merger of Newsweek's reporters and content, the site sometimes known as News-Beast has been less successful than the Huffington Post or the less serious BuzzFeed.

Its web traffic dropped 15.4 percent in August to 5.6 million unique views, according to a Wall St. Journal article about Brown's departure.

In Manhattan publishing circles, there had been a cult of Tina based on her tremendous success as the former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, but less success on TV and, now, online.

But the news of Brown's departure should be considered big news not because of Brown but because of what it says about the possible future of online journalism. I find it interesting that no has (yet) has declared the online-only model of journalism to be dead.

After all, the common wisdom is that print journalism is dead or at least dying, that it's difficult and expensive and outdated to publish news on paper, and that the answer is online-only journalism.

The fact is that online journalism is much tougher than many realize. Let's face it, 5.6 million unique viewers can be more than the numbers of viewers tuning in to some network or cable shows -- so the challenges isn't just finding an audience.

It's generating enough revenue.

Since most people expect news to be free, raising revenue is a big problem -- for online-only as well as print journalism. Perhaps even more so for online-only because print can charge subscription fees more easily (you don't expect to walk up to a newsstand and walk away with a copy of the New York Times without paying for it) and print can charge higher ad rates, too.

My point: having an online-only business model is not a guaranteed formula for success -- and neither is having a print component a surefire path to failure. What's important is the point of view, the value of the journalism that you can offer your readers, and in turn attract the kinds of readers that draw significant advertising dollars.

By the way, the merger with Newsweek was not successful, and while I do think the Newsweek merger was a distraction to running the Daily Beast, I believe that with or without Newsweek, the Daily Beast was always on the same trajectory.

When No News is Bad News: The Atlantic Monthly on why we need serious journalism

According to the introduction to an article by James Warren, "When No News Is Bad News,"is an look by a former managing editor of The Chicago Tribune into "the collapse of the newspaper industry" in which Warren "tries, mostly in vain, to find hope for the future of journalism."

With an introduction like that, you basically know what Warren, a contributor to the Huffington Post, will say. After all, the article is based on a speech he made, “Democracy, the decline of Mainistream Media and Rise of the Internet” at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy.

So here's his point: good democracies require good journalism.

Or in his words:

The question is, how much light can you have if you aren’t willing to pay to look into military hospitals in Washington, into those on Death Row in Illinois, into whether those wooden Thomas the Tank Engine toys made in China are safe, into the safety of school lunch programs, into whether people needlessly die on airplanes, or even just into whether there are obvious conflicts of interest on the local zoning board?

And lastly, we have to be brutally honest with a final, crucial question: Even in our democracy, are there enough people out there who care whether the light of serious journalism is allowed to fail?

I don't have an answer to that. I know demand for journalism continues even as traditional newspapers are collapsing. There are now nonprofits working in several markets trying to offer serious journalism, trying to serve as a monitor to their municipal governments.

The question for them: can they sustain their operations? Will they be able to find readers?

Ultimately, there's a question of the marketplace: Will people pay to support good journalism?

What is a Gateway Economy -- and why you should know about it

According to George F. Colony, CEO, Forrester Research, we're in a gateway economy -- "a portal connecting two very different eras."

In an article on the Huffington Post, "Beyond the Gateway Recession: What CEOs Will Face Next," Colony argues that "Those who can speak digital will thrive, and those who cannot will finally get the message and retire."

For PR functions, here are some of the highlights of Colony's thesis:

• Digital will be mandatory, not a choice. I think we can all agree about that. After all, there's very little left that comes into the home that's not digital. Probably water is the only thing not digital other than our food.
• Brand loyalty will be limited. This is because customers will have the ability to easily change their purchase decisions (because, in part, of digital delivery).
  
• You will sell differently. Just as social media has changed the way people interact online, it has already changed they way companies sell and compete. Colony expects this to continue, and he's right. Though I do wonder that at some point this may change because of a bottom-line need to hard sell. As it is, clients who are interested in social media are also wondering what benefits they'll receive if they start to engage via social media. The soft sell is harder to quantify.
  
• The way you innovated is dead.I thought this was one of the more interesting points Colony made.

Check out the full article, and let me know what you think about Colony's predictions.