I moderated an interesting panel yesterday at the Argyle Executive Forum’s Market Trends in Media conference in NYC yesterday and had Chris Ahearn, President, Media, Reuters; Josh Berman, Founder and COO, MySpace; Neal Goldman, Partner, Goode Partners; Andrew Heyward, Senior Advisor, Marketspace LLC/Monitor Group; Lincoln Millstein, Sr. VP, Digital Media, Hearst Newspapers as panelists. Overall a good and fast paced discussion on the general state of the media market. I brought up a point of running the media businesses as data businesses these days. Then the most controversial point came when Millstein picked up his theme that newspapers should reconsider their back-of-the-book feature sections and turn them over completely to the readers/users. He also mentioned about sports coverage, and a quote paraphrased: Do we really need 2,000 journalist converging on Beijing to wire back stories back on events 36 hours after the fact? MySpace COO mentioned that MySpace’s goal is to launch a video product that will be better than YouTube.
And then, in the evening, I landed up (courtesy Alan Patricof, our investor) at the HBO premier party of its movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, at the beautiful Museum Of Natural History. The movie’s great, though too long, and the premier was star-studded...well, with the movie and Law and Order stars (Dick Wolf is an exec producer): Anna Paquin, Aidan Quinn, Ice-T, and bunch of others. Not that you should care, but some pics here.