PUBLISHING: EVOLUTION, DISRUPTION & THE FUTURE #pubconf

I managed to watch / listen to one of the sessions via the live webcast of the Edinburgh Publishing Conference.
PUBLISHING: EVOLUTION, DISRUPTION & THE FUTURE #pubconf

http://www.edinpubconf.net/index.html

The session was: Can Blogs, Apps and Newspapers Co-exist in Harmony?

The first talk was by Bill Jamieson of Scot-buzz & The Scotsman and was entitled Media: Digital or Death?
It was interesting to hear about the drop in circulation and readership of print newspapers.  The readership has dropped dramatically in the last 5 years and the number of journalists employed by newspapers has decreased.  Bill Jamieson called the cycle that means that some businesses survive in recession, Creative Destruction.  This is part of the process of recreating the newspaper industry.   But news continues to reign supreme - the demand for news has increased and the 'Have you heard?' question will never disappear.

The second talk was by Alex Porter, Scottish Times Digital News: Trust and Profit. Opportunities & challenges for digital news outlets in a time of collapsing trust & revenues in traditional media

The basic question that was posed was how is it possible to make money from digital publishing? 

They created surveys to ask their 'readership' – I'm not sure whether there was a theme to the questions as they seemed random but presumably it was to generate a story.  They then sell the results of the reader surveys to companies.  Create joint ventures. Looking for collaboration.