• by Joe Mandese , October 29, 2008

Here I am sitting on a balcony high atop the Century Plaza overlooking Hollywood and thinking it’s been about 15 years since I stayed at this hotel, and then it was for a CBS network affiliates conference. The hot buttons back then were about conventional broadcast industry issues like programming, scheduling, promotion and affiliate compensation. So it seems an apt starting point for me to jump into this morning’s OMMA Online conference at the very same venue â€" where the hot buttons (and the conversation) will be very, very different, but will be affecting similar players: Video programmers, video distributors, video sponsors, and of course, video consumers.

The big news coming into this morning’s meetings (if you put aside macro events like the economy and the presidential campaign) is about how the migration to online is impacting some other traditional media: print. And it’s not all that great. And that makes me think that there is something fundamentally different between the way analog print publishers and analog video distributors are adapting to online media. Read on. (Sorry, there is no video to accompany this post. I am a scribe and “publisher” after all.)

So think about this. The aptly named Christian Science Monitor will now only be available on, well, your monitor. That monitor may be the one connected to a PC, a laptop, a hand-held, or some other kind of set-top device, but the bottom line is that after 100 years of printing, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected newspapers is scrapping print and going direct to the cathode ray tube, or LED or plasma screen, or whatever screen technology comes along next. The CSM team is positioning this as a proactive positive, not as a negative, the way the headlines blared this morning (including on MediaPost) about big magazine publishers like Time Inc., McGraw-Hill and Wenner Media slashing their organizations because they have not been able to adapt quickly enough to a digital publishing model, and because current economic conditions are crushing analog print economics. I learned all this by reading stories written by publications like the New York Times â€" and MediaPost â€" on a hand-held, wireless digital screen (but that’s another post for tomorrow’s OMMA Mobile conference here).

Why am I harping on the turmoil among print-based publishers as a lead-in to a video programmer’s conference? Because there is a very important lesson here about the future of media and how various platforms are adapting. And it all comes down to â€" apologies to the CSM â€" the monitor. Call it what you want, but it is fundamentally a TV screen, and the migration of video distributed online is fundamentally television programming. More on that later when I moderate the “Season 1 of TV on The Web” panel at  3:45 today.

My point is that it’s a lot easier for TV to migrate to a monitor than it is for newspapers and magazines â€" for all the obvious reasons. It’s cultural, yes, but it’s also the way our brains are wired. It could be that this next generation, or perhaps the one after that, will truly think of screens as a proxy for print, but the big dilemma for print publishers that I’m talking about has less to do with the consumer, than it does for the trade. It’s not in the culture of Madison Avenue to treat print on a monitor the way it treats video on a monitor. Online video is “television” in their minds, and everything we’ve seen over the past couple of years â€" and especially during “season 1” â€" proves that. The big trick is figuring out marketplace models and programming and advertising formats that everyone can live with, and which preserve the economic structure that enables Hollywood to keep doing what it does best.

The problem for print, is that the segue is far more awkward. The framework is different, and it’s had to reinvent itself in the process. So keep an eye out for more “print” publishers scrapping their print-only editions and going straight to the monitor. In the meantime, video will make that transition seamlessly, as part of an organic evolution of the video medium from rabbit ears to coaxial cable to satellite transponders to broadband backbones to mobile technologies â€" and whatever comes next.

RIP: A jpeg of today's CSM's print edition.