As a Bostonian, I have followed the negotiations between the Globe unions and the New York Times with a lot of interest. I grew up reading the Boston Globe, and a few of my good friends served as paper boys, waking up at obscene hours to bike or have their parents drive them around to deliver papers.

Of course, if you have tuned into my radio show over the last few weeks or talked with me about the situation, you will know that for once in my life I am actually rooting for NY to take it to Boston. This is not an easy thing for me to admit, because when you grow up in the Boston area, everything that is New York is despised.

Never the less, the Boston Globe has until Friday, May 1, 2009, to slash $20 million or it faces closure. I am hoping they do not find the money and the New York Times management decides to close them down. But part of me really wonders if the NYT has the guts to go through with it.

For starters, the Globe lost about $50 million a year ago. This year it is reportedly on pace to lose around $85 million. The very idea that $20 million in cost cuts is going to help save the paper or keep it running for more than another year or two seems ridiculous.

To add insult to injury, the union is refusing to eliminate benefits to reach the $20 million figure, including lifetime employment guarantees to a large number of people in the Globe’s workforce. The NYT is refusing to simply integrate newsrooms between the two papers or find other ways to reduce expenses.

For a company that was remored to have only $30 some-odd million in the bank to $1.1 billion in debt (enough cash analysts predict to last 4 more quarters), one would think the New York Times would cut its losses and let the Boston Globe turn into dust.

One of the first lessons I had about the new media world dealt with the issue of content. At the time I was coming into social media, quite a few experts told me that the whole concept of content ownership was passé. In fact, I was told that charging for someone to use my content was the antithesis of what social media was all about. The goal is to spread and share your content, and increase your visibility.

Sound familiar? These are the typical buzz words to describe activities in the social web: engage, visible, share, viral, and… free…

But it was about more than just words. We all grew to hate the recording industry for going after people who downloaded music off the Internet. The same became true of video. In short, the Internet and all of us helped to create an ecosystem where content was king, great content was supreme, and all content was free.

Of course, not ALL content is free. If it were, musicians would not make money, authors would not sell books and Hollywood blockbusters would be measured strictly in audience and not in terms of ticket sales and dollars.

Enter the newspaper industry (or print publications a whole if you will). Advertising revenue for newspapers is disintegrating before our very eyes as segmentation means there are too many channels and so companies need to spread-out their advertising dollars. With the economic downturn, even less advertising revenue is headed towards newspapers. To make matters worse, newspaper circulation is declining and their readership going online.

Yet, the newspaper industry is angry and looking to strike back against villains it sees as part of the reason for their falling revenues: websites that use their stories without paying for them.
In a way, I totally empathize with the newspapers. Bloggers and others in the publishing business should not be allowed to steal content from others. The acceptance that exists in the marketplace for theft in some cases and not others is a direct result of how we are being socialized.

However, the issues plaguing the newspaper industry go far beyond some of the content copyright issues being complained about by newspaper and association executives.

According to the Newspaper Association, 2008 was the worst ever for the industry with print advertising revenue falling 17.7 percent and even online advertising revenue dropping — by 1.8 percent. Some newspapers have seen drastic declines in circulation and advertising revenue – some losing as much as 20% or more. Of course, newspapers have been losing ground for years as online and mobile technologies have grown at tremendous rates.

While defending copyrights is an important step for newspapers (and probably something they should have done a long time ago), the real issue at stake for newspapers is that they are often too one-dimensional. They need to develop multi-platform strategies in order to survive. In short, they need to be less of a newspaper and more of a new media company.

Also, while in many copyright cases they may have legal ground, the question ultimately becomes: will there be enough newspapers after cases work there way through the courts to have made the battles worthwhile.

It seems as if a lot more people are talking about Twitter, its lack of a business model and how the service can be monetized. One idea is to charge users a small fee. I’ve heard various proposals around this, including – a charge up to your first 1,000 followers or a charge after you reach 1,000 followers.

The truth of the matter is – if Twitter were to charge anything for its basic service, people would stop using Twitter and jump onto another free service. Or another service would evolve and take Twitter’s place.

For the company as a whole, it’s time to start thinking less about advertising or a fee-for-service model for all Twitter users and think more about an enterprise model for Twitter’s corporate base. I recognize that on the surface this may seem contradictory to Twitter’s overall purpose or what many in the Twitter-sphere like about the microblogging platform. But the core reality of what Twitter is and what makes Twitter strong is the opt-in / opt-out nature of its user base; and the ability of people to find other people or companies that have something interesting to say. The truth of the matter is that if a corporation were to ever abuse its audience – its audience would essentially disappear. Twitter is not ABC – so mass appeal is not required – however appeal is absolutely necessary for success.

In my view an enterprise level application or SaaS for Twitter would be fine, but it would need to encompass a few key attributes:

1) There would need to be better management of each person a business account user had as a follower. This means Twitter users in general would need to offer up more data about themselves, such as a valid e-mail, website, and greater description of who they are. In turn, Twitter would need to develop a better system to allow for organizing followers by geographic information and other identifiers.

2) Following a business account with an enterprise-level profile would have to include more opt-in features. Followers would need to be able to specify their preferred method of contact beyond Twitter, and outline how they do not want to be contacted.

3) Similarly, business account holders would be able to offer information to a user that goes beyond Twitter feeds, such as discount coupons, targeted product placements and better customer support.

These are just a few items that would be needed in an enterprise version of Twitter.

Whether or not Twitter goes down this path, I think the alternatives offer Twitter less longevity in the market. Developing a more business-friendly solution would accelerate its adoption and allow for greater interaction to take place between a consumer and a business.

Posted by: Michael Hackmer, Social Media and Online Marketing Manager, BIA

The question of what is a “winning media strategy” and what is working for your business online are two important questions being posed to media executives leading to BIA’s Winning Media Strategies conference, May 20 – 22, in Washington, DC.

In the embedded video within this blog post, BIA’s Chief Strategy Officer and WMS Program Director, Rick Ducey, poses the question to all of you. Watch the video and submit a video response (or submit a comment to this blog post) of how you would define a winning media strategy. We also are interested in knowing what is working for you online?

All results will be shared at Winning Media Strategies – click here to learn more.