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Entertainment And Money
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Introduction.
MediaChannel: There's been talk today about all content being considered
entertainment. Is there a danger to that?
James Ledbetter,
New York bureau chief of the Industry Standard:
I'm not overly worried about entertainment values overtaking the Internet,
because I really feel that while it's certainly true that traditional media
companies have moved very rapidly to take over the most popular sites on the
Internet, and that is something that I think should give us pause, at the
same time I feel that the Internet remains an extremely effective way of
disseminating information. It remains an extremely democratic medium, in at
least its potential, and in many cases in practice. I have, I guess you could
say, a fair amount of faith in the creativity of people who still believe in
news value, who still believe in the First Amendment, who still believe in
free expression and the importance of discourse in a democracy, that those
people are going to use the Internet as a very effective tool too. The same
sort of struggles reassert themselves in a new medium, but it's the same
thing we've witnessed with television and the same things we've witnessed in
print.
Michael Wolff, columnist and author:
I see a trend that all content is becoming data, which in a sense is more or
equally worrisome than it becoming entertainment. It's really two opposite
spectrums. Now I think we're in this world where the big focus on content is
business information, for instance. So, what I think that we move away from
is having an appreciation of all the different roles that content should be
assuming.
MediaChannel: Change remains a buzzword across the Internet landscape, but what, in terms
of finance, makes today different from, say, three months ago? And how is it the same?
Jeanne Meyer, VP of Marketing, Pseudo.com:
Well, the thing is, I think that the established media companies have the
resources and the budgets, but I don't know that they've been able to really
harness the way of thinking. They haven't really been able to shift their way
of thinking and their way of approaching things. And there is this whole
breed of thinker and creator who is using everything available, every tool
under the hood of the Internet engine, to really build that experience. It's
not a cookie-cutter experience, it's sometimes messy, not always safe, and
the two groups of people are going to have to combine resources and delivery
mechanisms with a new way of creative thinking. I don't think one can exist
without the other.
Megan Smith, CEO, PlanetOut.com:
There's a lot less openness in the venture capital world to just funding the
next site, the next pet site. There's a couple of great pet sites: maybe
those can stand alone, maybe they'll merge with some other things; but
there's not a lot of openness in the venture world to fund, you know, the
seventh, eighth and ninth one, which has been sort of free money running
around. I think for people who have really solid businesses in the lead
space, of course — AOL, Yahoo, Lycos, Amazon, E-bay — some of these really
strong companies, and then in the vertical space, C-Net ... Star Media has made
a very interesting product instead of services that hopefully will be strong.
Some of the women's sites; there's three of them, there's a big battle going
on. There's a lot of customers too. And then in our space, it's a $450
billion consumer buying power, so the gay and lesbian market is a little
larger than the Hispanic market in terms of buying power. There's lots of
space for several companies to reach this market.
MediaChannel: Is the cable television clash between Time Warner and Disney about anything
other than money?
Thomas Rogers, CEO, Primedia Inc.:
Well, it's highly substantive. Distribution of programming is ultimately
about someone's ability to earn money, and distribution of programming come
with some kind of cost to the person distributing it. The underlying issues
are analog cable distribution, digital cable signal distribution, Internet
distribution and broadband content distribution. And the issues in
re-transmission consent have only got more and more weighty. At one point, it
was simply carriage of a broadcast television signal by a cable system. Today
you have the whole future of the telecommunications landscape being caught up
in this discussion.
Next Page: Storytelling And The Summit's Value
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