Yesterday, Tech Crunch broke the news that media giant Condé Nast was shutting down Men.Style.com as CEO Chuck Townsend said it was time to “re-think” their current business model. With talks of a unified print/web model, could this problem have been solved/foreseen earlier? While the faltering economy is an obvious point of focus for any stagnant/failing businesses these days in the media industry, one must wonder to what extent are these problems of adaptability linked to the so-called “old guard”? I’m talking about the old-wigs at the corporate level who grew up in a framework that was largely devoid of the Internet. For an exec in their 50s, they realistically only have a decade or so of online experience under their belts but having said that, they had to re-learn and function under a new system and a new institution which required an emerging set of rules and approaches. Yet in ten years, the incoming generation of top-tiered execs and decision-makers (me??? haha) will have been part of the first Internet generations who downloaded music, as well as Tweeted and Facebook’d on the regular… a generation that fully understands the inner workings of this massive beast.
Sometimes I feel that within our particular industry, we get viewed with a different lens than our print counterparts. Chalk it up to a handful of different elements as to why ad dollars and various features are still driven to print despite the medium’s decreasing numbers which see no improvement in sight, but as I see it the crossroads are essentially upon us. By crossroads I mean that in terms of fashion-related media (I’m careful to say “fashion” as I’m sure other less-branding intensive industries run differently), the true potential seems like it’s beginning to be recognized. This of course is just my own overview and insight as I feel that within the last 2 years, we’ve made leaps and bounds in how big companies want to work with us more so than ever.
Not sure what necessitated this eventual “changing of the guard”, was it brought on prematurely by stiff economic climates or the fact that just by virtue of timing, an incoming group of execs are starting to loosen their love affair with print and making the move towards online?