Don't spend too much money trying to make money
There's a section of this story on how media companies are struggling to make money that I think is important:
After spending millions of dollars to buy digital media companies, online advertising firms and search engines, only a few of the 350 magazine and newspaper companies represented at the conference said, in a show of hands, that they were making more than 3 percent of their sales online.
Combine that with all the chatter about whether or not Google essentially wasted its money in the YouTube acquisition and I think you have a clear picture of the problem. Companies spent tons of cash to buy their way into the online game and they're now finding it hard to actually make up that money. They felt they had money to burn and did so accordingly. Now they're finding that, since a news organization's brand name isn't exactly a guarantee it will win in head-to-head combat with citizen media, it's a bit harder to make that money back than they thought it would be. It takes more than that brand name to compete. It takes user relevance and usability, two areas most media publishers need to make dramatic strides in.
