A colleague forwarded me a recent SmartBrief poll regarding the NY Times decision to erect a paywall for portions of it’s content.  The respondents were fragmented, the highest proportion (31%) saying the NY Times can do what they want.  Though a good percentage said they would simply go elsewhere if the NY Times wasn’t easily accessible.

What the newspaper industry has not yet realized (or refuses to come to grips with), is content is no longer king.  I bet we’ll see more media houses  focus on a freemium model.  Basic content (e.g. breaking news, sports scores, etc) are free.  Those are the tickets to ride the Google train.

That freemium model will be subsidized partly by advertising (today’s model) and partly as a cross-subsidy from products they try to upsell.  Want to read Thomas’ Freidman’s blog? That’ll be a $1.50 a month.  Want a commerative book of the best NY Times stories of the year?  How about an electronic edition delivered straight to your Kindle/iPad/gadget every morning?  They’ll sell premium content and convenience.

The content focus of these places will narrow as well.  Things like the stock prices in the WSJ will be eliminated. Why go to the WSJ when Google Finance, Yahoo Finance, or even my online broker has up to the minute pricing?  If it isn’t core to their offering, then it won’t be provided.

On reflection, it may be too sweeping a generalization to say all the media houses will all shift the way I suggest above.  However, I would bet that is the model for any new entrants into this space – especially with a focus on social media.  Topically focused blog networks (e.g. SBNation.com) are going to be an interesting contender in the media space.  They naturally aggregate a particular demographic on a topic (more attractive to advertisers) and build communities (due to participatory nature) that are more engaged and possibly more likely to consume an upsell.

The building block of a great team is trust. Everyone knows it – that’s why there are ropes courses, executive retreats, and hundreds of books about building trust amongst co-workers.  In my MBA Leadership class, my teacher shared an amazingly simple and effective technique for building trust on a new team.

We have broken out into teams for a class project. She asked us as a team to go off and answer three simple questions:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have and where are you in the birth order?
3. What was the most difficult thing you had to deal with as a child?

The increasing personal nature of the questions astounded me – I went into the exercise skeptical.  Would anyone really share anything personal for question 3?  My group (and I) surprised ourselves.  We spoke about issues about dealing with our parents, to self-image problems as a young child, and even someone shared how a serious childhood illness affected their personality to this day.  I was blown away. (You’ll have to ask me in person about my story .)

Since then the results have been remarkable.  Our team meetings are more efficient and we trust each other more.  We move quickly from debate to decision, and move on.  I feel closer to these people, these “strangers” that I barely know, than I do some of the people I have worked with for years.

Try the exercise with your team.  I bet you’ll be surprised by the results.

Image Credit: notsogoodphotography, Creative Commons