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Got a pencil? Time to draw some dotted lines on your ever more convoluted bigmedia map. Connect NBC News and The Washington Post and Newsweek, as well as MSNBC Cable and MSNBC.com, plus washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.com. Reserve solid lines on your map for ownership ties (such as Microsoft's stake in MSNBC). Use dotted lines for "strategic alliances" like this one, an agreement to share "news material and technological and promotional resources" that was announced (jointly, of course) in mid-November.
"We are pleased to be teamed with The Washington Post and Newsweek in our effort to deliver news across all available media platforms," Andrew Lack, president of NBC News, said in the press release. "We are positioning our print and Internet properties for the multimedia world of the future," said Alan Spoon, president of The Washington Post Company, which owns both Newsweek and the Post. Well, okay. But what is the driving force here? Increased impact through joint distribution? Cheap content through sharing? Mutual promotion and hype? A way to offer more options to advertisers, across multiple media platforms?
All of the above, surely. We asked Tom Wolzien, an NBC News veteran turned media analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., to rank the reasons for these and other such alliances, but he declined to put them in any particular order. "It's all a big circle" be says. To compete "in a world of increased [media company] size, you have to have more resources to produce more proprietary reporting. That increases your audience, thereby allowing you to increase your advertising. Which, in turn, allows you to do more [journalistic] stuff." How do you get those additional resources to produce more reporting? "I can either spend more money," he explains, "or I can add more through alliances."
In a Time...