• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 2, 2009

Happy New Year! How happy are you right now? Not very, I'd imagine, if you've been reading the coverage of our industry's health. It's bad out there, and if the forecasts are right, the media business is going to get worse before it gets better. Personally, I think they got that only half right.

Half the media business is going to get worse, and some of it may actually go away. The other half will actually thrive, and will come out of 2009 in a much healthier position. So now's about the time I'm supposed to tell you which half, or at the very least, invoke the apocryphal John Wanamaker line. The truth is, I don't know. It would be easy for me to predict that one or several newspaper and magazine publishers will flounder, and that the broadcast marketplace will be challenged in ways we hadn't even imagined just months ago. All that is true, but I'm starting to think that all bets are off, and that the economics of 2009 will transform media businesses - indeed, entire media models - in ways that defy narrow categorizations. I was struck last month by the deep dive of Nick Denton, the Gawker Media founder who has more or less become the poster child for successful business models in the blogosphere. As it turns out, Denton's model isn't as successful as some had thought, and it certainly isn't recession-proof. So he's freaking out and writing posts on his blog predicting upward of a 40 percent decline in online ad spending this year. Online? Forty percent?

Denton's wrong, of course, and the sudden bearish shift is more a reflection of his vantage point than of any substantive market reality. I said it here recently, and I'll use the line again: Economists like to joke that a recession is when you lose your job, and a depression is when I'm out of work. The real problem with our industry is that a lot of the people covering its health are either out of jobs or fear losing theirs soon. Look, I'm not so naïve as to say that things really aren't that bad. They are, but there also are huge opportunities at play here. And if you're going to tell me that people are going to stop consuming media, or that people are going to stop paying money to reach people who consume media, well then, I think it may indeed be time for you to get out of the business.

The real problem with the economic recession of 2009 is that it coincides with an even more fundamental shift that had already begun occurring in the economics of media. And unfortunately, it is a shift that nobody has quite figured out yet. What we do know is that the model of largesse and inefficiency that has sustained the economic boom of mass media since the period following World War II does seem to be coming to an end. The problem, of course, is that most of our industry still operates on that model, and we are far too culturally ingrained in it to make the kind of changes we need until we either have no other choice, or the market has made the choice for us.

I find it fascinating to watch the philosophical and cultural shift that has begun tearing the media world apart. It's the tear between a proprietary, "we own or control our content, channel, consumer" model, and a more fluid, open source approach recognizing that in an ephemeral, digital media world, you are only as good as the relationship that people currently have with your content or channel.

I don't need to name any names here. I think you all know who I'm talking about, and who is on which side of that game. And who, I believe, will ultimately win. But I will invoke some advice I first heard from Rishad Tobaccowala, the Denuo CEO, a couple of years ago, because I think it's even more apt today. To survive and even thrive amid times of change, you need to adapt and reinvent on an almost continuous basis. Or as Rishad said, "You need to be iterative."