Warren Buffet Says Newspaper Owners Should be Motivated by “Noneconomic” Goals — Just Like Bloggers

The article Pitfalls Ahead for Social Networks? quotes Mark Jung, former chief operating officer at Fox Interactive (emphasis mine:)

At Fox, Jung was responsible for several Internet properties, including what became the wildly successful MySpace. For all the growth in user generated pages, Jung isn’t sure they’ll be sufficiently monetized. He said publishers haven’t quite figured out how to capitalize on the passion of bloggers and other user-generated content sites. “There’s an assumption that the user publisher “thinks like a large publisher and is after profit,” said Jung. “In general, they don’t. It’s not always about money, but ego, personal fame and having an individual voice, not cash flow.”

Align that with today’s Wall Street Journal article World According to Buffett where reporter Karen Richardson discusses how the Sage from Omaha feels about newspapers as a business (emphasis mine:)

Mr. Buffett blamed the decline of sales and circulation in the newspaper industry on technological and cultural changes, and not on the dual-class shareholder structure of some major media companies. “The truth is, the world has changed in a significant way,” Mr. Buffett told shareholders at the annual meeting. “I think Rupert [Murdoch] would even acknowledge that some part of his interest in The Wall Street Journal is noneconomic,” said Mr. Buffett. He said Dow Jones has a high noneconomic value, “second only to the New York Times,” which includes prestige and notoriety, for example, and he suggested other bidders could emerge for the company. “The last chapter is not necessarily written on that,” he said.

True most bloggers are posting for noneconomic reasons, but many have discovered that they can earn a living from their efforts. At our next event, we’ll have sessions focusing on advertising, affiliate programs, and other revenue-generating options for bloggers.