Philip S. Moore

Oh, So Now There Are No Green Shoots?

Although, overall, I agree with the author's assessment of current market cycles, I'm troubled by the lack off realization that this recession is fundamentally different.
This isn't a minor correction, caused by over-optimistic supply exceeding demand. This is a substantial reallignment of the demand curve, itself.
When we begin to emerge from this recession, we will be doing it in a consumer market, easily, 10 percent smaller than what existed, before the collapse.
In fact, the situation could become much, much worse. Unlike previous eras, where gains were the result of rising wages, this economic growth has been entirely fueled by consumer borrowing. Per-capita debt levels have been rising for two decades.
Now they are receding. How far can they drop? Nobody knows.
That's why, when considering which way the markets will go, it pays to be extremely cautious. Until we truly perceive the floor for consumer spending, we should hold of on any bets about when we can expect capital markets to reach the bottom.
This may be the end of the fool's rally, but it's far from the end of the road for the recession cycle. That will continue until supply again can match demand.
Which companies will survive? It's hard to say. Which will suddenly be vulnerable to changing public saving and spending habits. That's even harder to say.

Mainstream Media: Eyes Wide Shut

What Robin Wauters has to say is dead-on accurate, but not altogether novel. Print media reacted the same to the other "immediate" media of previous generations, radio and television.
Asserting that it wasn't real news until it was in print, they spent a generation, maybe two generations, continuing to dismiss the value of immediacy, even as they learned, like everyone else, to turn on the radio and television for the latest bulletins.
It was an irrelevant vanity then, and it's an irrelevant vanity now. With websites, the print media can compete with broadcasters, but nothing beats the speed of rumor, online or in the village square. Whether they did "heavy lifting" or not, they followed up what everybody already knew.
By the way, when it comes to confirmation, they still weren't relevant. For most people, rumor became fact when it was reported on ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN..."and that's the way it is."

Would Newspaper Readers Pay for Digital Content?

I think even a cursory survey of the history of media websites pretty well settles the question of whether people will pay for web content. They won't. However, that's hardly the end of the subject.
It's inevitable that the web will continue to flourish as people indulge their taste for digital content, whatever the latest online fad might be, and its inevitable that the website operators will attempt to satisfy that appetite for free, surviving on various forms of advertising for revenue.
Forget the Wall Street Journal...it's the exception that proves the rule. It provides detailed financial information essential to the creation and enhancement of wealth. People will always pay to get richer.
For everything else, the model that has worked for Google, Yahoo, MSN, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and many, many others will be the model for virtually all websites to come. And, ultimately, this will be good news for newspapers.
Since newspapers aren't going away--no new media has ever replaced old media in the history of the world--they will ultimately need to face the facts of their changed circumstances, drop their websites and get back to what they do best, writing the news and printing it on paper. The income will be more modest, but in an industry that perceived an 8 percent return as obscenely high, only five decades ago, learning to live with less won't mean the end of life, as we know it.
Stripped of their expensive and futile websites, the media companies can finally transform the web boom into the source of revenue have been chasing. They can allow the website entrepreneurs to do what they do best, aggregating large audiences, and they can sell content to them.
The major news services are already doing it, very profitably. More news aggregators will come. Following retailers' "clicks-and-mortar", which expanded the reach of physical stores by linking inventory to the web, newspapers will expand their market, selling news in print locally and reselling it globally.