'The Web's become a much faster place to get the news you want'

Larry Kramer, President of CBS Digital Media, talks about why cable news networks probably wouldn't launch cable news networks if they had it to do over again, the lessons he's learned from his days with The Washington Post and CBS MarketWatch, and how the changing attitude of advertisers will affect how news operations work in the future.

He spoke during The Media Center's Cross-Platform Media Teams event in Reston.

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TRANSCRIPT: Larry Kramer, interviewed by Chad Capellman

CC: I wanted to ask you first. You’ve been in a unique position with a newspaper background, a Web site that didn’t have the restrictions of a lot of big Web sites with MarketWatch, and now your role at CBS. Could you talk about the lessons you’ve learned about the other ones and what you bring?

LK: Sure. I think certainly in the early days of the Internet it was very beneficial to be independent. We were able to do things at MarketWatch that – even though it was CBS MarketWatch, they owned part of it – we could never have done if we were part of CBS. The amount of attention we spent on specific things we were doing. The ability to change our business plans and move and be flexible is something that big, larger corporations had trouble doing with their Internet units or even when they tried to do Internet units.

I also think the advertising world has moved heavily into the interactive media and understands it a lot better. And they speak to the big companies in a big way -- of course, there’s so much advertising money that flows to the major media companies – that they’re now driving a lot of the interest in the media companies to get into the interactive world. The advertising world is saying we need to be in this world, so where they go, the networks are going to go. CBS is actually extremely reception now to new innovation on the Web, almost the way the public markets were five, six, seven or eight years ago.

So it’s an exciting time. I think that the newspaper and television news operations are all coming to grips with the fact that their readers and viewers are finding bits and pieces of news in many other places now. And they’re struggling with, you know, how do we get into that world? How do we get our news everywhere, and our news into a position where it can be and is being read or viewed by larger audiences?

CC: You mentioned that a lot of cable news operations, if they knew then what they know now, you don’t think they would have necessarily started to go in the direction they did.

LK: They put huge investments in creating cable networks, large financial investments. The audiences for those networks are still pretty modest. As a group I don’t think they’re growing all that much because I think the thing that made them most attractive – which was that it was the fastest place to get news – has really started to fade because the Web has become a much faster place to get the kind of news you want.

Also, with the movement of video into the Web environment, with broadband being as prevalent as it is, it takes the edge off of the value of having a cable network to deliver video. Video can now be delivered multiple ways. Just the fact that a news story has broken generally can be conveyed in text almost faster than anything else. So on the Web you get the combination of text and video, and the storytelling process is much more robust. The ability to tell the story through words, video, audio, exists on the Web. Each of the previous mediums each have their limitations. Cable was still television, and text didn’t work there. Newspapers obviously didn’t have video. So this is a medium where you can reach an audience quickly with all forms of media.

So I think the investment would have been better tied to a Web investment or an investment of bringing all of the elements to the Web. It would have been a lot better investment in the long run. But you had no way of knowing that 10 years ago. The Web didn’t exist, for all intents and purposes of a media company, 10 years ago. I think they did what they did to grow news divisions, and I think many of these networks make money so I’m sure there’s value in them. But I think the growth trajectory they were on slowed quite dramatically with the advent of the Web.

CC: Speaking of 10 years ago, what one or two things have you changed your perspective on in that time from when you first started with MarketWatch?

LK: Well, that’s a good question. We believed we would be part of the storytelling process 10 years ago. We believed we would be part of the media landscape 10 years later. I don’t think we thought we would be as dominant a part. I don’t think we believed that people would, as quickly as they have, carved out their time they’re spending to come to us.

One of the things we worried about with the advent of the Internet was that there would be a plethora of sources, and that people would have a harder time sorting out where they’re getting news from. I think that occurred for a little while, but I think the Internet’s matured faster than we thought, and the quality content sites are dominating people’s time, grabbing people’s attention and time. People are still, in the end, going to quality news organizations to get their news; they’re just going on the Web instead of somewhere else. They’re not going to sort of fledgling start-ups that don’t necessarily play by the same set of rules or have the same credibility.