Online Media, After the Shakeout

I've started to make a list in my head of the American media outlets that interest me, that will have relevance and resonance after the shakeout that I think will probably come from a prolonged recession. So the premise here is that we are having a deep recession, and that not all media companies are going to come out strong and relevant.

This list is not exhaustive, and to illustrate this let's leave Yahoo! and Flickr (my truly humble employers) out.

This is a working list, in no particular order full of bias based on what interests me. And it's full of jargon because I frankly can't help it.

1. The New York Times. Not the biggest, but among the best. Hopefully the terrible year that just ended for the New York Times Company will lead to a new period of innovation around how to make money from their readers.

2. Gawker Media, editorially driven blog networks et al. This is not user generated content, but content edited by people who know how to write about interesting things. When well run, I think low cost high quality scalable editorial media will thrive.

3. Facebook. Say what you want about their user experience or their photo sharing wishy-washiness, they matter because they've managed to tap into the fact that people care about what their friends are saying, doing and reading on the web.

4. Twitter. Not a perfect product, in fact a little bit abstract for some people, but one that seems to scale to allow people to do lots of things. Besides the fact that it's being used by an increasing number of celebrities and digerati, I think some big shots see this as possibly a cleaner, nicer, more scaleable version of the next big thing, where facebook is now is in the mainstream mind.

5. Google. I keep forgetting them, but they're strongly positioned to do more cool things, though perhaps none of them ever as big as what they've done in search.

6. NBC Universal. These folks aren't dummies, and in spite of the financial market explosion I think they're still going to be well-funded by their owners at General Electric. Even though the local advertising market has apparently exploded in the last 6 months, look at how they're reinventing their owned and operated local stations.

7. News Corp. Say what you want about Rupert Murdoch and Myspace (irrelevant), but if his children can pick up where he leaves off this media conglomerate should try and double down in the online world with force.

8. Some magazine publishers. I'm hesitant to put Conde Nast, Time inc, Hearst or anyone else up here because they're struggling online so. But some of them will figure out an approach to the web.

Who else? And who new is emerging?



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The less relevant:

* Microsoft. I continue to be baffled about what Microsoft is trying to do on the web.
* Newspaper companies without deep national brands (Hearst, McClatchy, Gannett, etc)
* Ebay. Not really media, but deserving of being on any list of irrelevance.
* Viacom. Kind of lost, made rudderless by Sumner Redstone's ego.
* CBS. Also a Redstone play. They bought CNET but I still think they're unlikely players.