Interview with Time Inc.’s Mark Ford and Andrew Blau
Sept. 30, 2010 5:05 p.m.
NOTE: The following is an excerpt from a Sept. 29 conference call interview with Mark Ford, president of Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated, Time and Fortune/Money groups, and Andrew Blau, senior vice president and group general manager of the News & Sports Group. The interview was performed as part of the Business of Sports Media class in the Indiana University Master’s of Sports Journalism program.
Q: One of your most famous alums, Frank Deford, recently gave a speech up at Notre Dame at the Red Smith lecture up there, and basically declared the end of narrative sports journalism as we know it, which of course pained me and many others. And Sports Illustrated does narrative sports journalism better than anybody else, on a consistent basis, certainly. … Do you believe that?
Mark Ford: I believe Frank Deford is a brilliant writer. I mean he’s so moving, what he wrote you go, ‘Yeah, that’s right!’ But, who knows what’s going to happen with media consumption habits. Everything in the world is cyclical. I believe that if people do not want to read long—form journalism in the areas they’re most passionate about, then we’ve got a pretty sad future for all of us. I mean, if you’re a news junkie, you want to read about that. And if you’re into sports, you want to read everything about sports you can read. I guess I’m not a good example, but my son is. He’s, believe it or not, a Cleveland Browns fan, because I grew up there, and he reads everything about the Cleveland Browns he can possibly read. Short form, long form, you name it, because he cares. He wants to know about it. And so if you have a passion, if you’re writing about something that’s a passion point that people are interested in, they’re going to want to read about it, and they’re going to want to consume all the information they can.
Andy Blau: You have to really make a differentiation between newspapers and magazines. And newspaper circulation, readership is down dramatically over the last 20 years, and dropping, continually dropping. And magazine readership has potentially stayed flat or grown in the last 10 years. So there’s a major differentiation there. So people generally think Americans don’t read anymore. And the truth is Americans are reading far fewer newspapers. They’re not reading fewer magazines. That doesn’t mean that they’re willing to pay as much for a magazine, so I won’t say the economics have not changed so much. But they’re still reading them at the same rate that they were five, 10 years ago when the Internet started to come into the marketplace and change habits. The other thing is a magazine like SI, which is extraordinarily successful, been around since ’54, Sports Illustrated only — and when I say only, I mean it somewhat facetiously — distributes three million copies a week. You don’t need to find 30, 40, 50 million people to read SI. You need three million out of a population of 300 million. And so, time also, three-and-a-quarter million. You don’t need the entire world to watch or read long-form narrative. And I think that’s what we’ve always done. Time Inc. is about 90 years old and we’ve always found a market. And I think there’s still a very large marketplace in the US and overseas. Sports Illustrated now has an India edition of the magazine, and there’s a great big world of people outside the U.S. who will also read. Obviously China … so there is a very large global population, and obviously there are many people who do want to read that. So, I think it’s just a matter of being smart, differentiating your product, and then finding that market that does want it. They’re there.
Mark Ford: You know what I think is interesting, I think magazines will be around maybe a lot longer than actually what you view as the traditional website. What’s going to happen with that business, if you’re Yahoo!, AOL, you know. WE think about it even with SI.com, Time.com, with the introduction of the iPad and how that’s changing and how that’s going to change the model from one of free to maybe some paid content and the experience will be better, will there be newsweek.com? I don’t know.
Andy Blau: I read a Wired magazine article that Web is dead. You may not believe it. It’s obviously coming from a biased point of view to some extent, but I think Mark and I both agree that the Web is changing dramatically. We’re seeing major changes happening on the Web. The economics of the Web are not that great. What people pay for an ad is continually going down, it never goes up. We’ve got people every single day who come to us and say, ‘I have a way of making your inventory double for advertisements, you can offer more advertising out there.’ And my answer is, I’d like someone to come in here and say, ‘I’m going to reduce your inventory by half,’ because that’s one of the problems of the Web is the economics just continually gets worse, because there’s more and more inventory, which depresses all the ad rates. You know, there’s a lot going on in the marketplace, and things are changing pretty rapidly.
Mark Ford: Yeah, is that a viable business model moving forward? I don’t know. You have free content. You know, things are changing. You’ve got so much inventory out there, advertisers won’t pay for it, they pay cheap ppm, their ad networks, I don’t know.
Andy Blau: Google’s a good example. They’ve figured out one thing, they’re still trying to figure out the second thing. They’ve been able to make most of their money on the backs of free content by offering search and search ads. That’s what works for them. They haven’t really figured out, if anything else works. And I think there are a lot of Internet companies that still aren’t making money. Look at Huffington Post. In a lot of places it’s being, I’m sure, studied carefully. They violate a lot of the rules that we kind of adhere to. And as far as we know they’re not profitable, and may not be for several years, in spite of the fact that they’re very large. So some of these models don’t work very well.
Q: That’s an interesting theory. I do want to let you go, but you’ve just raised one of the most interesting and provocative theories I think I’ve heard recently, that magazines may be around longer than traditional Web sites, or Websites as we know them now.
Mark Ford: As we know them today. I don’t know. I mean, who knows? Frank’s (Deford) talking about what’s happening with magazines and newspapers, we could have somebody talking about Websites that way as well.
Q: Is that why we’ve seen so much interest among the media in devices like the iPad, because it’s kind of the opportunity to reverse the economic model that’s been plaguing people on the Web?
Andy Blau: Well, there’s no doubt that paying for content, getting a consumer to pay for content is critical to the viability of any of these models going forward. And the Web has suffered dramatically from the fact that no one pays for it, and no one’s making money in it. And so it’s very difficult for anyone to make money as a content publisher when you’re giving away your content. And so there are so many other kind of impersonators out there who may believe they’re content publishers, who put out content that is entirely inaccurate or doesn’t have the quality level. And so you’re competing with this en masse, I’m competing with every blogger out there on news, and we’ve got bureaus, and we’ve got people collecting news. Why is that? So I t think people are starting to realize that this model doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work for most people. Does the consumer still want to read an inaccurate, right-wing blogger or left-wing blogger? Maybe. But there are many who don’t. And so these new models that are emerging with the tablet, and frankly with the phones as well, consumers seem to be willing to spend money on good content coming from reliable sources, and that’s clearly kind of what content publishers like ourselves, and I’m sure where all of you will be working or have worked, want to hear. Because that’s the key to having sustainable, viable news organizations, and news gathering organizations. Because the Web doesn’t really provide that."
Q: One of your most famous alums, Frank Deford, recently gave a speech up at Notre Dame at the Red Smith lecture up there, and basically declared the end of narrative sports journalism as we know it, which of course pained me and many others. And Sports Illustrated does narrative sports journalism better than anybody else, on a consistent basis, certainly. … Do you believe that?
Mark Ford: I believe Frank Deford is a brilliant writer. I mean he’s so moving, what he wrote you go, ‘Yeah, that’s right!’ But, who knows what’s going to happen with media consumption habits. Everything in the world is cyclical. I believe that if people do not want to read long—form journalism in the areas they’re most passionate about, then we’ve got a pretty sad future for all of us. I mean, if you’re a news junkie, you want to read about that. And if you’re into sports, you want to read everything about sports you can read. I guess I’m not a good example, but my son is. He’s, believe it or not, a Cleveland Browns fan, because I grew up there, and he reads everything about the Cleveland Browns he can possibly read. Short form, long form, you name it, because he cares. He wants to know about it. And so if you have a passion, if you’re writing about something that’s a passion point that people are interested in, they’re going to want to read about it, and they’re going to want to consume all the information they can.
Andy Blau: You have to really make a differentiation between newspapers and magazines. And newspaper circulation, readership is down dramatically over the last 20 years, and dropping, continually dropping. And magazine readership has potentially stayed flat or grown in the last 10 years. So there’s a major differentiation there. So people generally think Americans don’t read anymore. And the truth is Americans are reading far fewer newspapers. They’re not reading fewer magazines. That doesn’t mean that they’re willing to pay as much for a magazine, so I won’t say the economics have not changed so much. But they’re still reading them at the same rate that they were five, 10 years ago when the Internet started to come into the marketplace and change habits. The other thing is a magazine like SI, which is extraordinarily successful, been around since ’54, Sports Illustrated only — and when I say only, I mean it somewhat facetiously — distributes three million copies a week. You don’t need to find 30, 40, 50 million people to read SI. You need three million out of a population of 300 million. And so, time also, three-and-a-quarter million. You don’t need the entire world to watch or read long-form narrative. And I think that’s what we’ve always done. Time Inc. is about 90 years old and we’ve always found a market. And I think there’s still a very large marketplace in the US and overseas. Sports Illustrated now has an India edition of the magazine, and there’s a great big world of people outside the U.S. who will also read. Obviously China … so there is a very large global population, and obviously there are many people who do want to read that. So, I think it’s just a matter of being smart, differentiating your product, and then finding that market that does want it. They’re there.
Mark Ford: You know what I think is interesting, I think magazines will be around maybe a lot longer than actually what you view as the traditional website. What’s going to happen with that business, if you’re Yahoo!, AOL, you know. WE think about it even with SI.com, Time.com, with the introduction of the iPad and how that’s changing and how that’s going to change the model from one of free to maybe some paid content and the experience will be better, will there be newsweek.com? I don’t know.
Andy Blau: I read a Wired magazine article that Web is dead. You may not believe it. It’s obviously coming from a biased point of view to some extent, but I think Mark and I both agree that the Web is changing dramatically. We’re seeing major changes happening on the Web. The economics of the Web are not that great. What people pay for an ad is continually going down, it never goes up. We’ve got people every single day who come to us and say, ‘I have a way of making your inventory double for advertisements, you can offer more advertising out there.’ And my answer is, I’d like someone to come in here and say, ‘I’m going to reduce your inventory by half,’ because that’s one of the problems of the Web is the economics just continually gets worse, because there’s more and more inventory, which depresses all the ad rates. You know, there’s a lot going on in the marketplace, and things are changing pretty rapidly.
Mark Ford: Yeah, is that a viable business model moving forward? I don’t know. You have free content. You know, things are changing. You’ve got so much inventory out there, advertisers won’t pay for it, they pay cheap ppm, their ad networks, I don’t know.
Andy Blau: Google’s a good example. They’ve figured out one thing, they’re still trying to figure out the second thing. They’ve been able to make most of their money on the backs of free content by offering search and search ads. That’s what works for them. They haven’t really figured out, if anything else works. And I think there are a lot of Internet companies that still aren’t making money. Look at Huffington Post. In a lot of places it’s being, I’m sure, studied carefully. They violate a lot of the rules that we kind of adhere to. And as far as we know they’re not profitable, and may not be for several years, in spite of the fact that they’re very large. So some of these models don’t work very well.
Q: That’s an interesting theory. I do want to let you go, but you’ve just raised one of the most interesting and provocative theories I think I’ve heard recently, that magazines may be around longer than traditional Web sites, or Websites as we know them now.
Mark Ford: As we know them today. I don’t know. I mean, who knows? Frank’s (Deford) talking about what’s happening with magazines and newspapers, we could have somebody talking about Websites that way as well.
Q: Is that why we’ve seen so much interest among the media in devices like the iPad, because it’s kind of the opportunity to reverse the economic model that’s been plaguing people on the Web?
Andy Blau: Well, there’s no doubt that paying for content, getting a consumer to pay for content is critical to the viability of any of these models going forward. And the Web has suffered dramatically from the fact that no one pays for it, and no one’s making money in it. And so it’s very difficult for anyone to make money as a content publisher when you’re giving away your content. And so there are so many other kind of impersonators out there who may believe they’re content publishers, who put out content that is entirely inaccurate or doesn’t have the quality level. And so you’re competing with this en masse, I’m competing with every blogger out there on news, and we’ve got bureaus, and we’ve got people collecting news. Why is that? So I t think people are starting to realize that this model doesn’t really work. It doesn’t work for most people. Does the consumer still want to read an inaccurate, right-wing blogger or left-wing blogger? Maybe. But there are many who don’t. And so these new models that are emerging with the tablet, and frankly with the phones as well, consumers seem to be willing to spend money on good content coming from reliable sources, and that’s clearly kind of what content publishers like ourselves, and I’m sure where all of you will be working or have worked, want to hear. Because that’s the key to having sustainable, viable news organizations, and news gathering organizations. Because the Web doesn’t really provide that."
