Speaker Bio: Lynne d Johnson, FastCompany.com

Speaker Bio – New Media and The Arts Forum
October 10, 2008
www.CWAEN.com

Lynne d Johnson, FastCompany.com

Lynne d Johnson is the Director, Social Media for FastCompany.com, a leading website and community for people passionate about business ideas that also offers the complete content of Fast Company magazine. She also writes Digital Media Diva, a technology blog following web, media, and consumer trends for FastCompany.com, and has also recently contributed to TheDailyVoice, techPresident, Black Web 2.0, and Rushmore Drive. As a consultant Lynne works with technology and Web clients in the areas of content, community, and brand strategy. Lynne also serves on the Board of Directors of the Literary Freedom Project, a nonprofit arts organization, which seeks to empower communities of color through literature, creative thinking, and new media. Prior to joining Fast Company, she was the General Manager, New Media for VIBE, SPIN, and VIBE Vixen where she managed marketing, editorial, production, business development, and sales operations for the magazines’ websites and mobile properties. Her personal blog, Lynne d Johnson || music, media, my life, which launched in July 2001, is the recipient of the 2006 Black Weblog Awards Black Blogger Achievement Award.

See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit

Speaker Bio: Pete Burgeson, crowdSPRING

Speaker Bio – New Media and The Arts Forum
October 10, 2008
www.CWAEN.com

Pete Burgeson, crowdSPRING

Pete Burgeson is the Director of Marketing at crowdSPRING and is the lead equipment manager for the company’s championship ping pong team.

Pete has over a decade of experience in building and marketing companies, both large and small. While at Leo Burnett in Chicago, Pete launched and managed national print, direct, radio and TV campaigns for Marlboro, Coca-Cola, Altoids and Delta Air Lines. He left Burnett to launch his own online businesses where he oversaw the development, branding and marketing of three online graphic design and printing businesses, which eventually became some of the largest printing sites on the internet.

Most recently, Pete was Director of Marketing for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? in Vancouver where, after starting as the only person in marketing, he built the marketing department and led the startup’s international expansion to three continents and helped take the organization from $12M in revenue to over $160M in just three years.

See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit

Speaker Bio: Jim Hirsch, Chicago Classical Music

Speaker Bio – New Media and The Arts Forum
October 10, 2008
www.CWAEN.com

Jim Hirsch, ChicagoClassicalMusic.org

Jim Hirsch has served as Executive Director of Chicago Sinfonietta since August of 2004. During his tenure at the Sinfonietta the organization’s budget has increased by 65% and ticket sales by 63%. In addition, Hirsch implemented a number of new initiatives including Project Inclusion, a minority fellowship program that seeks to address the dearth of minority musicians playing in U.S. orchestras, and a chamber music series that has been presented in partnership with the Adler Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium and National Museum of Mexican Art.

Prior to his work at Chicago Sinfonietta, Hirsch served as Vice President and Executive Director of the Chicago Association for the Performing Arts, managers and programmers of the Chicago Theatre, and as the Executive Director of the Old Town School of Folk Music. During his tenure at Old Town from 1982 until 2000, the organization became the largest institution of its kind in the country. The organization’s budget grew from $300,000 in 1986 to $7 million in 2000. In 1999, Hirsch completed work on a $10.2 million capital campaign that funded the organization’s expansion to the new Chicago Folk Center, a 43,000 square-foot building that the City of Chicago donated to the School, and established a $1 million endowment fund.

Hirsch has served as a grants panelist for the Illinois and Oregon Arts Councils and as a member of NARAS (Grammy) Awards and Nominations committee. He produced a nationally syndicated radio program for NPR and has released three albums. Hirsch has served as a consultant for a number of arts and social service agencies. He was chosen by Crains Chicago Business for their annual 40 Under 40 article that honors Chicago’s up-and-coming business executives under 40 years of age and was named Chicago Arts Entrepreneur of the Year in 1996. In 1998, he was chosen as one of Chicago Magazine’s Chicagoans of the Year. In 2006 he founded chicagoclassicalmusic.org, a website dedicated to audience engagement currently owned and operated by over twenty Chicago-area classical music organizations.

See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit

Daisy Whitney: What Do Web Video Shows Cost?

What Do Web Video Shows Cost?

Daisy Whitney of TV Week has her own blog on the site called Daisy Whitney’s “New Media Minute,” and in recent post she goes through the cost per minute associated with creating an online video series. 

The bottom line: a lot less than on regular television, and it helps explain why there is a TON of VC money going to online video at the moment.

See Daisy talk about it more here:

See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit

NYTimes.com: Social Nets Squeezing Ad Prices

PaidContent.org does a great job of summarizing the New York Times feedback on the pricing and online ad inventory issues for all media, and therefore all media revenues derived from the web and print.

We believe that it’s possible that in the future, overall profits may be down for major media firms, but their profit margins may actually be higher, as they adjust their own internal cost structures and expectations. But then again, that’s just one theory.

Goldman Internet: NYTCo.’s Nisenholtz: The Rise Of Social Nets Squeezing Prices
By David Kaplan

Janet Robinson, president and CEO of the New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT), gave the audience at Goldman Sach’s Internet Conference an overview of the company’s “strides” on the digital side. Among a string of stats, she pointed out that the company took in $330 million in digital revenue. But the issue of price realization for its online properties compared to its traditional print business was picked up by Martin Nisenholtz, SVP, digital operations. One issue Nisenholtz hammered home was the abundance of inventory coming from social networks, which has driven prices down.

— Changing pricing dynamic: Does the migration of print audiences and ad dollars to the web result in a zero sum game? Nisenholtz: It’s not just about print migrating to online, it’s all media. It’s hard to discuss the print revenue streams and the online streams on a linear basis, as these are new businesses. How you compare to a newspaper print ad to an online ad is difficult. The display business at NYT.com is a big part of the revenues. We’re seeing tremendous amount of inventory getting created, mostly from social networks. And they’re being monetized at very low rates. At the other extreme is a highly customized inventory. And that’s what you see at NYT.com. You see Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) ads on our homepage. Those are very high rates campaigns and you can see at one-to-one rate compared to print. Asked about the growth of its newspaper ad alliance, QuadrantOne, Nisenholtz said it was too early to say.

Other key points mentioned in the response:
— Influenced by Yahoo
— Times Select and the paid model
— The death of print classifieds
— About’s display weakness
– Acquisitions

Read more here


See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit

Bloggers chime in about Online Television and Hulu

Hulu is making a big splash among online television viewers, and several bloggers have added their input into why. Here are few choice excerpts from blogs that we like (and may just invite to the next New Media Tastemakers Summit):


Blog: Daniela’s Lair

OhMyHeartness for Hulu.com and Consumer Behavior

Bye bye TV.

My recent consistent usage of hulu.com helps to demonstrate the way young people consume content. I stopped distinguishing between “video online” and “video on TV” a long time ago. The way I watch “video” has nothing to do with air time or brand loyalty. Here are my content viewing factors:

– geography

– mood

– current interest

Blog: From Angel to Private Equity

Hulu

I have used the site and it was pretty impressive. It was clean, easy to use and the video quality was excellent. Venture Beat,in it’s overall severely flawed analysis , strangly noted that “Hulu’s primary problem is that it doesn’t own any of the content on its site and is beholden to its content partners such as NBC and Fox.” . That seems like an advantage to us. In other words because this is a joint venture NBC and Fox are in a great position to become a leader if not the leader in the media driven web 2.0 world. Content is king. NBC and Fox own alot of content. NBC and Fox own 90% of Hulu. They will market the hell out of it. Given the low barriers to entry in the video market Hulu should succeed in a big way. Joost and others will likely end up in the dust. This is the first step in cutting out the middlemen like Youtube and others…..Of course nothing is that simple, Google will “fight back” but the lines have been drawn. Same in the fight with Itunes. Media companies want their content back. And they will get what they want

Blog: The Gadgeteer


Afternoon video break at Hulu.com

I just received an email from Erica Colon about a very cool online video service called Hulu. Hulu is an online video service that offers hit TV shows, movies and clips, is FREE to anyone, anytime in the US. The quality of the video is amazing and has been praised by The Washington Post, TIME, Business Week, the Chicago Tribune, Fortune, and the AP. Hulu allows anyone to embed video on any site for free (any specific part of any clip, movie, or TV show). Content includes main stream shows such as Family Guy, SNL, The Office, NBA sports, classic TV shows, and movies as well as a variety of “undiscovered” shows like Three Sheets, After Hours, Pressure Cook, Test Drive, Wall Street Warriors, etc.

http://www.hulu.com/browse/alphabetical/tv

I just watched the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I forgot how much fun that show was. Hulu has the what appears to be the entire 1st and 2nd seasons. The shows do have commercials, but in that Buffy episode that I watched, there were just 5 ads and each was only 15 seconds long. Didn’t bother me at all. Go check it out… I’m off to watch Buffy episode 2. :o)

What more can we say? Online viewers really do like quality online programming, as well as sometimes the kitten falling asleep videos.

See:
The New Media Tastemakers Summit