What does the future of media look like? A panel of warriors battling on the front-lines of the shrinking territory of 
Quality Media talked about what is happening today at Digital Hollywood.
It isn’t pretty, especially this week. The L.A. Times has quietly laid off veterans Tina Daunt, Susan Spano and Diane Haithman, with a dozen others to follow. The New York Times announced its plans to lay off 100 people before the end of the year. (Read Mikulan on the L.A. Times.) BusinessWeek got sold for a handful of shiny pebbles, and Conde Nast is closing titles, while cutting staff at remaining publications.
So we are all desperate to figure out where this is all headed, what the correct business model may be.
Here at TheWrap we have our belief that becoming an essential read to a niche, high-value audience is the future. (Photo: me, Heikes, Frutkin, Anita Vogel and Hofmeister.)
Alan Frutkin, who produces video for Nielsen's digital platforms, offered up video as a way of finding revenue. He said the Reporter, which is now functioning with a skeletal reporting staff and has very few ads in its print edition, has been seeking out video content on red carpets and at table reads of TV shows. “We don’t believe we’re reinventing the wheel,” he said, “but the moving image is a complement to the written word.”
Drex Heikes, the new editor of the L.A. Weekly, said this period reminded him of the first half of the 20th century, when there was an explosion of metropolitan dailies, an oversupply that got whittled down over the decades.
“The model’s broken again,” he said, suggesting that mainstream media “needs to form cooperatives.”
Interestingly – since he let go one of the best writers there, Steven Mikulan, who is now anchoring the L.A. Noir blog at TheWrap – Heikes said the Weekly was moving decisively into covering ... food.
Really.
“By the end of the year we’ll have more coverage of food than the L.A. Times,” he said.
Sallie Hofmeister, who now oversees all the business entertainment and "Calendar" coverage, said Heikes was mistaken when he said there’d be 50 layoffs at the Times. But she did not say how many would be eliminated.
“The gateway to survival is Jon and Kate, Balloon Boy and Glenn Beck,” she said, with no great enthusiasm. But Hofmeister said the paper was committed to fostering its ties in the entertainment community, and beefing up that coverage. That’s because the ad revenue lies here, you can believe that.
I confess I was very curious to hear what Neil Stiles, the president and publisher of Variety Group, had to say. For close to a year the trade, which has been around for some 75 104 years (Update: Variety was founded in 1905), has been cutting and cutting editors and reporters – some of whom now work at TheWrap.
But other than improving the p&l, it’s not been clear to me what Stiles’ strategy is to turn around the fortunes of the once-flush trade.
