Nielsen

Last fall Nielsen announced it would provide gross rating points (GRPs) for online ads to mixed reviews.  Most of the criticism focused on  the problem of comparing a 30-second TV commercial to a static online banner ad.  Not an apples-to-apples comparison.  It didn’t seem like Nielsen had really found the Holy Grail of media comparability, at least for media buying and planning purposes.

Then a couple of weeks ago, Nielsen announced a partnership with TubeMogul to provide GRPs for online video ads.  Were digital video GRPs now the Holy Grail?  Were there any winners or losers?

Because the Nielson/TubeMogul announcement comes about a month before the TV upfront market breaks, we can assume that the timing of the announcement was not random, but a strategic maneuver to influence the upfront and attempt to give media planners and buyers a defensible reason to move budgets from TV, continuing to suffer from declining audiences, to online video, which is growing like Jack’s beanstalk, and is now measurable in GRPs.

Who gains the most by the introduction of digital video GRPs?  Obviously, the biggest winner is Nielsen, which now has more data to sell.  The second biggest winner (and purchasers of the data) will be internet sites and apps that serve video, which can now try to get GRP-obsessed media planners at the large media agencies to switch money from TV to online.

The losers will be TV and print.  Poor print; digital video GRPs are just another nail in print’s coffin, as though it needed any more nails.  Radio won’t suffer much, because its terrestrial revenue seems to be rising – slowly, but on an upswing – and radio’s biggest upside is in digital, which is on the verge of substantial growth.

And, if media agencies and planners put too much emphasis on GRPs, another group of losers will be marketers, because a GRP (or a CPM) never went into a store or online and bought anything.  What marketers care most about is selling the most stuff for the least amount of money – ROI.  Return on investment is the Holy Grail for marketers, and you can’t get reliable and valid ROI metrics from multiple-source and panel data such as Nielsen supplies.  Solid ROI metrics can only come from single-source data.

There is one media agency that is trying to take advantage of marketers’ focus on ROI.   This week ZenithOptimedia Group announced that it:

… is refreshing its marketplace branding with the new addition of a “Live ROI” tagline to underscore the shop’s real-time ROI accounting capabilities. The Publicis Groupe-owned media agency network is also sprucing up its logo and redesigning the logos of its specialty units to present a uniform corporate look. The agency network, comprised of media shops Zenith and Optimedia along with several specialty operations, has been positioned as “The ROI Agency” for the last decade. That overarching descriptor will remain in place.

Is the notion of “Live ROI,” “refreshing” its branding that has been in place for 10 years, and “sprucing up its logo” a new approach for ZenithOptimedia or is it merely a PR push for an old idea that has been dusted off to take advantage of the questions that marketers are bound to ask about what benefit digital video GRPs will have for them?

So, it will be interesting to watch the upcoming TV and internet upfront markets to see if money is shifted from TV to the internet, and where ZenithOptimedia places its media investments, in GRP-measured TV or in more ROI-accountable online and mobile  — not that they would necessarily tell anyone, but it will be fun to guess in order to speculate if the ZenithOptimedia rebranding is a stunt or a strategy.

And it will be fascinating to watch and see who gains and who loses with the introduction of video GRPs.

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Media companies would do well to follow the lead of the Walt Disney Company and its top revenue-producing subsidiary, ESPN, and institute rational succession planning.

This past week Disney and ESPN announced that ESPN president George Bodenheimer would move up to Executive Chairman, and executive vice president for content, John Skipper, would become president of ESPN and co-chair of Disney Media Networks effective January 1, 2012.  These moves are significant for several reasons.

One reason is that Bodenheimer, an ESPN 31-year lifer who came up through affiliate marketing, is a salesman.  His primary expertise is understanding the needs of and negotiating with ESPN’s primary customers, the MSOs.  Skipper is a content guy.  More and more we are seeing the shift in forward-thinking media company top executives from sales, legal, and finance people to content people.  But why?

I think it’s because sales, legal, and, especially, finance people tend to focus on profit instead of product.  In his best-selling biography of Steve Jobs, according to Silicon Alley Insider, Walter Isaacson writes:

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products.  The products, not the profits, were the motivation.  Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money.  It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”

Skipper, a product person who launched ESPN The Magazine, and who has ad-sales experience, will  lead ESPN forward.  In launching ESPN The Magazine, Skipper worked closely with “the soul of ESPN,” John Walsh, the often gruff but brilliant content and journalistic integrity cop, as chronicled in the fun read Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales.  You can be assured that content and content integrity will continue to be a focus of ESPN.

In making the announcement, Bodenheimer wrote:

“At ESPN we take great pride in the development of future leaders of the company, people who understand our Mission and Values and who make other people better.  We have many such individuals at ESPN and I am confident that the list grows longer every day.

Secure in that belief and with the support of Bob Iger, today I am announcing that as of January 1, 2012, I will take on the new position of Executive Chairman of ESPN, a position I will hold for at least the next 12 months.  In that capacity I will remain Chairman of the ESPN Board but will hand off responsibility for the day-to-day duties as President of ESPN and co-chair of Disney Media Networks. Succession planning has been a focus of Disney’s for some time, and consistent with that approach, this is a process that I began last spring.  We are in very good shape both domestically and internationally on many fronts, including, distribution, ad sales, ratings and digital distribution and I simply decided that after 13 years as president and nearly 31 years at the company, it was a good time for me to step aside and allow others to lead our continuing efforts.”

Can you imagine Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, Les Moonves, Mel Karmazin, or Jeff Bewkes writing the above?  Those guys are all “I” people, whereas Bodenheimer and Iger are mostly “we” people.  Notice the use of “we’ and “our’ in the above quote.  Bodenheimer sees himself as a team player, not an individual star, as opposed to the typical narcissistic media mogul with an “I” complex.  He’s eager to pass the baton when he is 53 to someone younger, while Redstone (nearing 90) and Murdoch (81 this coming March) defiantly refuse to even contemplate any type of succession planning.  What does that say about the future of Viacom, CBS, and News Corp.?  What might it say about the future of Disney and ESPN?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.  And you can be sure that Wall Street will be placing its bets in the coming months based on the Level 5 Leadership (Jim Collins’s Good to Great and Great By Choice ) of ESPN and Disney, not on the aged moguls who have destroyed over $200 million in stockholder value of their companies, according to The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong With the World’s Leading Media Companies.

Focusing on profits instead of product, destroying stockholder value, and holding desperately on to power is a tradition in old-fashioned media conglomerates.  It will be interesting to see if any of them will learn any management lessons from Disney and ESPN, an organization that does things differently.  Wanna place any bets?

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The FCC announced last week that it is throwing out the Fairness Doctrine along with 80 other rules it considers “outdated and obsolete.”

The Fairness Doctrine was originally put into effect in 1949 by the FCC to ensure that radio stations and, at the time, the few newly licensed TV stations presented opposing views of controversial issues of public importance in an honest, equitable, and balanced way. The Fairness Doctrine was probably a good idea in 1949 to make sure that those who were granted scarce licenses to operated VHF TV stations didn’t use their TV stations for partisan political purposes.

In 1987, under direction from President Ronald Reagan’s administration, the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine. Because of the growth of cable television and the proliferation of both VHF and UHF TV stations, scarcity was no longer an issue in 1987. Also, led by a Reagan-endorsed and encouraged push for deregulation, lawmakers felt the Fairness Doctrine violated free speech rights, especially the rights of a small but growing number of conservative radio talk show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh began airing political commentary in 1984 in Sacramento, and in 1988 his syndicated program made its first appearance in New York, after the Fairness Doctrine was abolished.

The FCC decision not to enforce the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 (it remained on the books until last week), led directly to the huge growth spurt of conservative talk radio and reinforced the conservative view that government regulation – any regulation – was bad.

Furthermore, the conservative movement had been promulgating the myth that the mainstream media had a liberal bias. The liberal media myth was a right-wing Machiavellian strategy implemented so that conservative talk radio and the conservative media could play the victim and have something to rant against. Conservative bloviators began their unchecked trashing of liberals, Democrats, gay rights, abortion rights, the underprivileged, the uninsured, taxes, big government, and, behind a very thin veil, immigrants and blacks.

After the conservative radio and cable bloviators (by the way, they are mostly uninformed entertainers) got so numerous, Liberals and Democrats began whining about this trash talk and started calling for the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine. However, their leader, newly elected President Barack Obama, who was the prime target of most of the conservative, racist bloviators, clearly stated early in his presidency that he was against reinstating the Fairness Doctrine because he inherently knew as a lawyer and teacher of Constitutional law that it was bad policy and that government could not legislate fairness or decency.

Therefore, Obama’s FCC finally buried the Fairness Doctrine because scarcity was no longer an issue in an age of abundant content, opinion, and information outlets. Burying the Fairness Doctrine was the right decision even though it leaves unchecked racist, conservative radio talk show trash talking of a beleaguered president.

But, considering the recent revelations of the corruption of the Rupert Murdoch empire and the fallout that is casting doubt (finally) on the credibility of the Murdoch-owned, conservative propaganda machine, including the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and, especially Fox News, perhaps burying the Fairness Doctrine was as much a strategic maneuver by the Obama administration as a free-speech, legal, regulatory move.

By allowing the conservative propaganda machine to continue to run wild and unbalanced by the Fairness Doctrine, the American public and voters have the opportunity to learn how ridiculous, out-of-touch, simplistic, nasty, theocratic, and racist the conservative positions are, thus making an indecisive and too-conciliatory president look good by comparison.

Whatever, the reason, though, the Fairness Doctrine is gone for good, and good riddance.

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Re-syndicated from MediaBizBloggers.com

On July 25, a headline in Media Post read, “Meredith Teams With Nielsen To Guarantee Sales To Magazine Advertisers.” Joe Mandese wrote in the accompanying article:

In a surprise development that signals how pressed print media is to compete with the ROI of digital media, one of the biggest publishers of consumer magazines, Meredith Corp., this morning announced an unprecedented plan to begin guaranteeing that their magazine buys will yield an increase in sales of their products or services.

On July 26, a headline in Advertising Age read “Why More Media Companies and Agencies Should Guarantee Ad Results: It’s About Creativity, Not Just Pleasing Budget-Minded Procurement Officers.” The accompanying article by advertising executive, Jacki Kelly, global CEO of Universal McCann, praised Meredith for its promise of results:

Ladies’ Home Journal publisher Meredith this week said it will promise some of its biggest advertisers that major ad campaigns in its magazines will achieve certain sales results. It’s time to see more of this — and not only to please the procurement officers squeezing major marketers’ budgets.

It’s true, of course, that clients want to see the real results of their ad spending. And emphasizing analytics can seem like just another way for agencies to push media partners’ prices lower…

…If we want to experience a creative renaissance and give our client partners the confidence to experiment, agencies and media owners must be willing to measure more and be willing to be compensated based on performance.

Kelly goes on to recommend four ways marketers and agencies can partner for more creativity. They were good ideas.

But media guaranteeing results to advertisers is not a good idea; it’s a mask.

If you read the above article excerpts closely, you’ll see the principles playing musical chairs about results from advertising. The last one standing without someone to blame loses.

The CEO of an advertiser can blame the Chief Marketing Officer, the CMO can blame the strategy consultant, the strategy consultant can blame the advertising agency creative team, and the agency can blame the media (especially if a medium guarantees results). Because success (sales) has many parents and failure is an orphan, blame, like manure, gets passed down from the top of the pile.

At least 50 years ago, when agencies still got paid based on a 15 percent commission on placed media, some agencies that were losing clients offered to get remunerated based on the performance of their advertising – essentially based on increased sales. A couple of clients took a few agencies up on performance-based deals, but the concept was not widely adopted. Also, the 15 percent commission system was scraped in the ’70s and ’80s, and a more rational system of time-based fees were widely adopted because time-based fees were perceived to be more equitable to both advertisers and agencies.

Why weren’t pay-for-performance systems adapted over the years? Because they didn’t work for either advertisers or agencies. Pay-for-performance or pay-only-for-results systems didn’t work because advertisers and weak CMOs didn’t take responsibility for results; they pushed the accountability and blame to agencies, thus abdicating their own responsibility.

Think of the logic of placing the responsibility for results on an advertising agency. What a marketer, in essence, is admitting in this case is that the two most important elements in the sale of a product or service are the placement and creation of advertising. They are not giving any weight to the quality of the product, the packaging, pricing, the distribution channel, consumer or trade promotions, publicity, social networking strategy, the weather, the economy, or the cumulative effect of advertising messages, to name just a few factors that impact sales.

Also, think of the logic of an agency taking responsibility for results. What an agency, in essence, is agreeing to is the same concept as stated above. But since agencies cannot control the multitude of variables that affect the final sales of a product, they are hoping and guessing that their media placement strategy and their creative are good enough to overcome the possible screw up of advertisers in all or even a few of the hundreds of variables that impact product sales.

Furthermore, clients always have the final say on media plans and creative execution, so they can turn down an agency’s well-thought-out media plan or an engaging creative campaign. Often agencies execute client-dictated second- or third-rate campaigns because of unimaginative, cautious, penny-wise-and-pound-foolish, CFO-dominated clients. Therefore, agencies are foolish to guarantee results for work they don’t totally control.

So, if an agency offers a pay-for-performance deal when it knows it can’t control the majority of the variables that lead to increased sales, it seems like a Hail-Mary pass: “We’ve lowered our fees as low as we can, so let’s try this.”

Same for the media, which has less control over the variables than agencies do. An advertising medium, such as a magazine, doesn’t control any of the variables mentioned above (as agencies don’t), and it also doesn’t control the creative, so the only element a medium can control is ad placement (back cover, first editorial position, e.g.) and frequency of insertions (it can give bonus insertions to increase frequency).

In the Meredith offer, the magazines set a high level of frequency over a year, so they demand a large schedule that they know from experience will work, all the other variables remaining constant. What Meredith is doing, in essence, by guaranteeing sales results, as monitored by Nielsen Homescan, is getting a very large schedule of ads and discounting their rates by the amount that the Nielsen research costs.

What we don’t know about the Meredith offer is what the downside is. The upside for Meredith is a very large ad schedule at a time when magazine advertising spending is in serious decline. But if we assume that the downside for Meredith is that if sales decline, say 5 percent, after a schedule runs, then Meredith has to rebate 5 percent of the cost of the schedule to the advertiser.

Thus, the value of the deal is based on how Meredith prices and discounts its ads according to its published rate card. If Meredith charges rate card rates (doesn’t discount) for the sales-guarantee ad schedules, it can well afford to pay for the research and any rebates for underperformance.

In today’s depressed market for print advertising, newspapers and magazines are under pressure to discount off their rate cards by 25 to 50 percent. Therefore, the Meredith sales guarantee offer is a mask for an opening offer in a price negotiation for very large advertising schedules.

Meredith is smart enough to know that sales of national advertisers’ products in the beauty, household goods, over-the-counter drugs, and food categories, even in a slow-growing economy, are going to increase by some amount, and probably aren’t going to drop. So, Meredith is taking virtually no risk by guaranteeing a sales increase.

If I’m an agency executive, I like Meredith’s offer because it gets my creative off the hook.

If I’m an advertiser, how much I like the offer depends entirely on the comparative and competitive CPMs of the ad schedule. If I can get the high-quality, highly targeted Meredith content at competitive CPMs, the Nielsen research doesn’t mean a thing to me.

But it does mean something to Meredith because it can run ads that claim that its magazines have proof that advertising in those magazines increases sales, which is nice for Meredith. And as advertisers we like Meredith because they gave us a nice, very competitive CPM on the magazine schedule we bought.

Also, if I’m an advertiser, I don’t want to turn over responsibility and accountability for increasing sales of my product or service to an advertising agency or to the media; it’s my responsibility to increase sales. I want to take responsibility because I control most of the variables that affect sales. I’d like advice from my agency and from the media to help with scheduling and solutions, but I’m not going to pay them for getting results because there are too many variables involved, and media and creative are just two of a horde of these variables.

If I’m a medium, then instead of calling a discount off rate card a discount, it makes sense to put on a mask of guaranteed sales increases. But the mask isn’t fooling smart advertisers, because behind it is a just an old-fashioned discount.

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Last year, the Business Insider ran a feature titled “100 Things You Should Know About People” that included an article titled “Only Seven Emotions Are Universal.”

Those universal emotions are:  Joy Sadness Anger Contempt Surprise Disgust Fear

Rupert Murdoch

The recent phone hacking scandal involving News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, and his son James have elicited all seven of these emotions in the reading public, in journalists, in competitors, and in government.

There has been sustained and masked joy in Murdoch competitors over the hacking scandal that is threatening to reduce the power, influence, and credibility of News Corp. What politician will compete for Murdoch’s endorsement now? And government agencies are almost certain to look at the regulatory favors they have granted News Corp., which will give competitors and those interested in a free press some joy.

There is certainly sadness among executives, managers, employees, and talent of News Corp. subsidiaries because of the loss of credibility of Murdoch and such News Corp. properties as the NY Post, Fox News, and even the Wall Street Journal, Murdoch’s crown jewel. Furthermore, the drop in the company’s stock price since the hacking scandal was uncovered and Rupert and James had to appear contritely before Parliament must deepen the sadness substantially because for a company whose only passion is profit when the profit is threatened, there is nothing else that can bring happiness or satisfaction.

There is massive anger among the victims of the hacking. There is also anger among regulators and police authorities who genuflected to Murdoch and whose groveling is now exposed – they look as greedy as the old man himself.

There is universal contempt among legitimate journalists (some of whom work for Murdoch at such news outlets as the Wall Street Journal) for the debasement of journalistic standards practiced by the News Corp. properties that did the hacking. What self-respecting reporter would now want to be associated with News Corp. now? Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Don Imus are not journalists or reporters; they are entertainers who will continue to be comfortable in the hacking scandal environment – what do journalistic ethics have to do with what they do?

There is certainly surprise on the part of long-time Murdoch watchers like me that the wily, old, evil Emperor got caught. Murdoch has slithered through close examination by regulators for so long, that it seemed he had bullied and bought his way into a Star-Wars-type protective energy shield. But as in all good stories and myths, eventually good triumphs over evil. The hero in this story is not Luke Skywalker but Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, the British newspaper that courageously uncovered and followed the hacking scandal until Murdoch finally had to defend himself.

There is no need to detail the disgust all fair-minded people on both sides of the Atlantic have for Murdoch, his son James, the executives of the now-defunct News of the World, and cooperating Scotland Yard officials who abetted Murdoch’s papers illegal hacking and spying. And make no mistake, it was Murdoch’s profitable newspaper. He talked to its editor daily, as he testified in the Parliamentary hearing, so how could he not know about how they got their celebrity scandal scoops? He assuredly tacitly agreed to the plausibly deniable scheme of hiring outside investigators.

And finally, there is fear. Murdoch ruled by fear, his power was based on fear – the fear of politicians of not getting a Murdoch newspaper endorsement. Fear of regulators of being attacked by the many outlets in his media conglomerate. Fear of not receiving his favors. News Corp. executives and management lived in fear of falling out of favor of the evil Emperor and of profits and, thus, stock prices falling.

I can think of no event or person since, perhaps, William Randolph Hearst, who has elicited so many emotions as Rupert Murdoch. But as Orson Wells’s classic film, “Citizen Kane,” implicitly asked, “is he happy?”

The answer for Murdoch today is, decidedly, “no,” which is like the way a tragic story should end. “King Lear” or “Citizen Kane” anyone?

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According to Advertising Age:

Rupert Murdoch is keeping the throttle wide open on crisis-control efforts in an attempt to limit the damage from the News of the World’s hacking scandal…
Now he is apologizing to Britain via a newspaper ad headlined “We are sorry” — perhaps foreshadowing what he will say when he testifies before Parliament next week.

The ad read:

We Are Sorry.

The News of the World was in the business of holding others to account.
It failed when it came to itself.
We are sorry for the wrongdoing that occurred.
We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected.
We regret not acting faster to sort things out.
I realise that simply apologizing is not enough.
Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this.
In the coming days, as we take concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from us.
Sincerely,
Rupert Murdoch

Do you honestly believe one word of this ad? Do you believe that Murdoch’s News Corp., which includes Fox News, the Fox Business Network, and the NY Post, believes it is “in the business of holding others accountable?” News Corp. is in the entertainment business for the sole purpose of making a profit.
Do you honestly believe that Murdoch or News Corp. “are sorry for the wrongdoing that occurred,” or “are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected?” Can you imagine that Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity or Don Imus are deeply sorry for the nasty insults and mud they sling? That’s why Murdoch hired them.

Can you imagine in your wildest dreams that Murdoch regrets “not acting sooner to sort things out.”
Is it conceivable to you in your most generous moments that Murdoch actually believes that “a free and open press should be a positive force in society?” Do you believe that he really is committed in his soul to “live up to this” concept? Will Murdoch force Roger Ailes to make Fox News “a positive force in society” and make “fair and balanced” a reality rather than a cynical marketing slogan?

Looking at this newspaper ad and Murdoch’s interview in the Wall Street Journal July 14, in which he is quoted as saying News Corp. has handled the crisis “extremely well in every way possible,” making just “minor mistakes,” you wonder what the 80-year-old Murdoch has been smoking or how senile he is.
The suits and scores of MBAs at News Corp. who understand Excel spreadsheets and bottom lines but not journalism are probably advising and prepping Murdoch in this ultimate form of cynical spin, but it’s not working.

The dirty chickens are coming home to roost. Everyone knows Murdoch is lying … bigger than ever. What hair he has left is aflame and his pants are on fire.

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Originally posted at MediaBizBloggers.com

Frank Rich made his debut in New York magazine in its July 11th issue with a brilliantly written, well-reported, and penetrating article titled “Obama’s Original Sin,” and it was a Ruthian home run.

Rich’s theme was: “The president’s failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.” He supported his premise with solid research and a clear reading of historical facts. But is also more harsh on Obama’s probable Republican opponent next year, Mitt Romney, than on the president.

It’s clear that Rich admires Obama and supported him in 2008, even though he was not able to publicly admit it at the time when he was writing for The New York Times, which has a policy against its columnists outright endorsing political candidates because the paper’s management reserves that privilege for itself.

Perhaps this restriction is one reason Rich decided to switch to New York magazine, but whatever the reason, it seems like a reasonable choice based on this first effort. His piece was longer and, thus, more thorough, had more context, and, therefore had more impact than his previous Op-Ed columns in the Times. He has achieved the avowed purpose of his leaving the Times with this longer, more thorough piece.

But was it worth leaving The New York Times with its unparalleled national and international influence and clout, a Sunday circulation of 1,339,462 (tops in the country for Sunday newspapers), and website traffic of over 15 million unique visitors a month for New York magazine with circulation of about 410,000 (undoubtedly more now that Rich is there) and web traffic of about 6 million monthly uniques? Only Rich himself knows the answer.

But I suspect that longer New York magazine pieces are not all the Rich has in mind – more books are probably coming. Like many intelligent, thoughtful, well trained reporters, Frank Rich probably is compelled to get to the bottom of, understand, and explain complex issues and put them in historic context – to set the record straight as they see it. Rich tried this with his 2007 book The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush‘s America.

The non-fiction book was cleverly written, as we would expect from Rich, but critics complained that there was nothing new in it – no new facts were uncovered. These comments must have stung Rich somewhat, and I’ll bet he wants to show the critics and educated readers what he’s really capable of. I think he wants to stake his claim to being a world-class expert, which you do by writing an acclaimed book.

More and more former reporters, whether out of necessity because of being laid off from a newspaper or magazine, or because of a compulsion to publish, or because books are easier to publish in e-book form, are writing books – hard cover, paperback, e-books on multiple devices, including smartphones, and audio books. Technology has created an explosion of distribution channels, including e-book self-publishing, the decline of newspapers has created more time for reporters to write, and less expensive e-books have created more readers. Thus, both reading and writing are increasing, and I believe Frank Rich wants to get in the book boom.

So who are the winners and losers in Rich’s move? Obviously, The New York Times was a loser and New York magazine a winner. Fans of Frank Rich are probably short-term losers because of lower print and website circulation of New York, but are probably long-term winners because they will likely get some excellent books that they can access in multiple formats.

It makes you wonder why the Times didn’t make a counter-offer to Rich to let him do longer pieces in its magazine, agree to publish his books in all formats, and, more importantly, to promote his books aggressively in its publications? I think it looks like another Times management blunder. What the hell are they paying CEO Janet Robinson $4.48 million and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger $4.75 million for in 2010 when the stock is down, revenue is down, and they can’t keep their best writer?

Maybe this stupid inequity in pay and dumb management at the Times is one reason Frank Rich left for New York magazine. Maybe it’s the same reason Babe Ruth left the Red Sox for the Yankees to hit gargantuan home runs.

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Advertising/PR practitioner Jorg Pierach posted a blog titled “Newspapers Should Get Out of the Opinion Business” that got picked up by Romenesko and Jason Hirschhorn’s MediaReDEFined, so it got noticed and created some healthy debate.

Here, in part, is what Pierach of advertising/PR/marketing firm Fast Horse wrote:

If you want my opinion, it’s time for newspapers to get out of the opinion business.Yes, opinion pages are good for civic discourse – but I believe they’re also bad for business. At some point soon, for-profit daily newspapers are going to have to choose one or the other. The conversation has already started at The New York Times.

A column by Executive Editor Bill Keller in last Sunday’s edition laid out plans to make over the Gray Lady’s Sunday opinion section, heretofore called Week In Review. Starting Sunday, wrote Keller, the section will be renamed Sunday Review, “the last vestiges of a weekly summing up replaced by a more general timeliness, and that dividing wall breached, so that argument (which will be labeled Opinion) can appear alongside explanation (which will be labeled News Analysis.)”

I’d argue that’s a step in the wrong direction.

Later in the post, Pierach put forth the heart of his argument::

Amidst … [the]… digital cacophony, I believe newspapers continue to risk alienating partisan readers, who now have the option of turning to other places for news that more closely fits their worldview: Huffington Post, Drudge, etc. The business problem for newspapers comes down to increased competition and branding.

Pierach echoes one Eli Pariser’s main points in his groundbreaking book The Filter Bubble that America is becoming more polarized in part because of Google’s algorithms which show us only relevant search results, which in turn means that we see only what we agree with – also referred to as confirmation bias. So the problem of polarization, also described brilliantly in Cass Sunstein’s book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide is increasing because of technology’s push toward relevancy – giving us what we want and what we agree with.

But, Fox News, MSNBC, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times are not turning off partisan viewers and readers by proffering opinions in the form of opinionated talk show hosts and newspapers editorials. Opinion is good for their business,

The trend toward polarization that is pushing Americans to extreme positions on the right and the left is certainly no reason for newspapers and other media outlets to stop presenting opinions. It is not the editorials and the opinion pieces that are causing the polarization, it is the entire spectrum of more sophisticated technology and the instant availability of diverse information and opinion that allows us, even motivates us, to seek out only those facts, information, and opinions that agree with our view of the world and our own multiple biases.

I can see why someone in advertising or PR would not want newspapers to influence people by editorializing – give management’s opinion on issues – because that is the function of advertising and PR practitioners, to spin the news and the facts to influence readers and audiences. Spinmeisters would prefer bland news to surround their slanted content.

But all media outlets should resist the efforts of PR people to get them to avoid editorializing or expressing multiple opinions. Media outlets should create a public dialogue on controversial issues of importance to the community. Contrary to Pierach’s assertion that editorializing is bad business, editorializing is good for business – it is differentiating content that gives readers and audiences not only an additional reason to read or view but also it is content that gives credibility to the outlet and establishes a perception of expertise for that outlet.

Furthermore, responsible editorializing acts as an important service to a community. For example, who would know what judges to vote for if the local newspaper didn’t do the research and endorse a slate of candidates. Writing editorials isn’t just about spouting opinions, it’s also about doing in-depth research on issues and candidates that ordinary citizens don’t have the time to do.

All media outlets (newspapers, magazines, news websites, radio and TV stations, and broadcast and cable networks) should editorialize and present diverse opinions – create “civic discourse” as Pierach suggests – as a vital public service.

When the only criteria for making decisions in media outlets is what is good for business – the bottom line – and not what’s good for society and the community, not only will greed rule, but the media will abrogate its public service responsibility and leave influencing and persuading to the spinmeisters, which is just what they want.

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