creamy

The failure of the CD-ROM demonstrates in miniature the difficulty of translating one media form into another. But it’s not the only example. Early TV news was often just a newscaster reading a script into a camera—essentially radio on TV. But even modern attempts to extend a media brand into a new technological form have proven disastrous. The New York Times lost millions trying to create a cable channel—Discovery Times—with the Discovery network. Closer to my corporate home, the Washington Post stumbled in its more modest effort to create Washington Post Radio on an AM station in D.C. (See Marc Fisher’s postmortem of that venture.) Attempts to morph People magazine, Wired magazine, and USA Today into television shows likewise cratered. Time Warner famously squandered millions on the mistaken belief that its ultimate Web portal should be populated with the magazines it published. The site was called Pathfinder.com. It’s obvious to us today that what Time Warner should have done but didn’t is start a great search engine.