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The Business Side of Media
(February 15, 2005 Honolulu, Hawaii) A luncheon panel discussion at the Pacific Club on February 15 featured key spokespersons from television, radio, and print media in Hawaii talking about the business challenges print and electronic media face in this market.
Mike Fisch, Honolulu Advertiser President/Publisher, Mike Rosenberg, KITV President/General Manager and Michael Titterton, Hawai’i Public Radio President/General Manager (right to left in the picture) all agreed that the business realities of garnering advertising and maintaining readership in this small market were particularly tough. Growth often meant stealing market share from others because the overall pie was not growing any bigger. Public or private, media organizations are all operating under the pressure of who owns them, who advertises through them and who reads, watches or listens to them. Revenue from consumers alone cannot meet the cost of producing a newspaper, said Fisch. Despite the dependence on advertising revenues, Fisch pointed out “You have got to be in a position to be able to lose your largest advertiser in order to defend the principles of journalism.”
Mike Rosenberg felt that
TV faced even greater pressures than newspapers and that even a year of flat
revenues was something to be thankful for in this environment. In that sense,
the existence of big corporate owners has allowed some stations to keep
operating when they otherwise might have gone dark. Mike Titterton’s observation that 10 percent of the population listen to Public Radio and that about 10 percent of that group contribute to it provided one indication of why this station operates on a very lean shoestring. Like buskers of old, Titterton likened HPR to providing service first and begging for payment later. Still, it performs a vital public function as a forum for robust debate, he added. It was clear from the panelists’ remarks and the attendees’ questions that followed, that the suspicion of being tainted by the desire to keep advertisers’ happy is something all media organizations have to deal with. That and the question of how effectively they are addressing the challenge of reaching younger people remain issues that will provide fuel for continuing discussion especially in the month ahead. Look out for Freedom of Information events coming up in March.
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