By Joe Pepe
President and publisher
The Commercial Appeal
Memphis, Tenn.

. . . How we deliver content will change and evolve and change some more and evolve again. What we should anticipate from now on is that "whitewater" change will be a constant in the media business for the remainder of our lives.

New platforms to deliver appealing and useful content to different groups of people and interests must be developed with the same quality and values that we apply to our newspapers.

Content will eventually be completely individualized with the aid of ever-changing and emerging technology. It then becomes critical that we make all of the news and information that passes though our organizations available for consumption every day.

In the short term, it is essential that we invest in research and development of new distribution vehicles, train our staffs to work with the new technologies and develop local search and search aggregation. These are all paramount in remaining timely and relevant to the new world.

Just as important as developing multiple channels of content delivery will be how we change our business models: How we measure readership/viewer ship; how we price for advertising; how the relationship between advertiser/business-media company-consumer changes; and how an advertiser measures results.
 
The day of the paperless newspaper is at hand (PDF files transmitted to a receptor screen) as is a greater dependence on the Internet and more individualized news customization.

Extremely important to our future is the leadership we provide the organization.  Leading through change, chaos and emergence of new technology will make our jobs more challenging. Long term, we must change our cultures from reactive to anticipating, from a few channels of distribution to many and from space charged advertising to lead generation, demographic-targeted, absolute-measured, results-based advertising.