When I changed majors two weeks into my freshman year at Kent State, almost everyone asked why I went from magazine journalism to electronic media management. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand print was something I had lost interest in doing for the rest of my life; almost every person just didn’t understand what media management actually is. When I would explain my new major, I usually said it was understanding the business of media, and that was enough.
Now, in Prague, I feel like I’m getting the most well-rounded sense of what is entailed by my major. I’ve had my media management classes, but I’m seeing people who manage media in action – and that’s not always an easy opportunity to come by. This especially resonated while sitting in a conference room at Dnes and iDnes.cz, one of the newspapers and online news sources, respectively, in Prague.
Our class spoke with Michael, the news editor of Dnes. While he had plenty of interesting insights into a number of our class topics (including an incredibly helpful segment on entertainment reporting!), he started our discussion by talking about how Dnes is changing and how advertising revenue is changing what the newspaper is capable of. He talked about how they, too, are experiencing a drop in circulation numbers and how they are seeing more readers transition to the online space.
“Forty percent of ad revenues come from digital,” he said, and Michael acknowledged that this is an exceptional number. However, he also pointed out that that 40 percent “cannot compensate for print losses.” He said that the technological revolution occurring in the Czech Republic paired with a poor business model for the print medium makes for difficult times. Dnes and iDnes.cz are owned by Mafra, a media company that owns a number of publications and is facing similar problems to many of our own companies at home in the United States.
Managing media is more than just having a basic understanding of a media business model. So much of what Mafra is going to have to do, and what companies in the United States are going to have to tackle, is the problem of changing the business model in media. These are all things that have been discussed in previous media management classes at Kent State, but the international instability of various traditional media outlets was definitely eye-opening. With stories of traditional print media continually struggling at home (just look at recent stories about Cleveland’s own Plain Dealer), it was equally disheartening to hear similar stories in this major international hub.
It’s also exciting, in a way, as there seems to be a universal shift to the Internet. While print may be fading, there are still people who want to read – they are just going to the Internet, and that means more advertising opportunities. It also offers new opportunities in writing, content creation and accessibility for people everywhere. Knowing how to handle all of these changes, and embracing the evolution of journalism as a whole, is a key component of media management. How can you manage if you aren’t innovating – something that is being demanded of journalists everyday? It’s the only business model that stands a chance.