This is a presentation given in 1999, best guess. It looks at the changes, internal and external, being caused by new digital technologies. It includes a couple of my favorite slides:
As vice president of CNI Ventures, I was charged with looking for and understanding new technologies that might impact the newspaper industry and, more important, Central Newspapers, Inc. I gave a presentation to the Interactive Newspaper Conference in early 2000 that explored a few of these new tools, including:
Of all of the technologies discussed, E-Ink has proven the most successful.
As head of Central Newspapers‘ venture capital investments, I sent quarterly reports to the CEO and other senior executives. This one — dated July 12, 2000 — went to Chip Weil, Tom MacGillivray, Eric Tooker, Bill Toner, Karen Feldkamp and Chris Mitchell.
Attached is an updated Investment Summary and an updated Investment Matrix, which include current CNI Ventures’ Internet and technology investments to date. New to this list are JobScience, Legacy.com and Everstream
The memo also notes that indirect investments — the Sandler Capital funds, assets received as a result of the Homefair sale — are included in the summary.
The attachments are the interesting part. The Investment Update Summary lists the portfolio company by company: EntryPoint, WaveShift, Event 411, E-ink, BrightStreet, StreamSearch, GAMUT [SmartTV], JobScience, Everstream and Legacy.com, with $8,882,998 in invested capital against a current valuation of $9,119,411. Add the realized, partially realized and publicly traded holdings — Microsoft, Homestore and the Sandler funds — and total investments come to $25,613,452.
The Investment Matrix, which I created, is the most interesting document because it asked more than “what is it worth?” Each company was tracked against its target market, its relationship to CNI’s businesses, our working relations with the company, and which other media companies were in the deal — Knight Ridder, McClatchy, Tribune Ventures, Cox, Hearst, Gannett, the Washington Post. On E-Ink:
Development of an electronic newspaper and the business models to support product[s]
And the entry for EntryPoint, our oldest holding, is a reminder that not everything worked:
Dormant. PointCast technology; assets were purchased by an IdeaLab company
A $200,000 investment carried at $13,571.
In January 2000, Editor & Publisher ran a short item announcing that Central Newspapers Inc. had created a new business unit to handle its investments in internet and technology companies. The story was only a few paragraphs, but it marked a real shift in how the company — publisher of The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star — thought about where the future of news and information might be built.
Central Newspapers Inc. (CNI), publisher of The Arizona Republic and Indianapolis Star, has created a new business unit – CNI Ventures – to handle the company’s investments in the Internet and technology sectors. CNI Ventures will focus primarily on investments that develop delivery methods for news and information.
The distinction E&P drew was an important one inside the company. The existing newspaper websites were not going into the new unit; they stayed with the newspapers, where they belonged as part of the core business.
Central’s existing newspaper Web sites, such as Arizona Central and StarNews.com, will not become a part of the Ventures division, but remain a part of Central’s core business.
The investments that did move under the Ventures umbrella were a good snapshot of what looked promising at the turn of the century: BrightStreet, described as a provider of online promotions management solutions; E Ink, a developer of electronic display technology; Event411, a creator of online event-planning tools; and WaveShift, a creator of systems and software for new media. Incpad, the company’s high-tech job site — until recently called Westech Virtual Job Fair, as the item notes — stayed with the main internet activities alongside the newspaper sites.
E Ink is the one that still makes me smile. In 2000, electronic display technology was an article of faith, a bet on a future device that would carry news and information without paper. It took a while, but that one worked out.
And then the last paragraph, which is why this clipping is in my files:
Howard I. Finberg, director of technology and information strategies, has been given the added responsibility of vice president at CNI Ventures in order to coordinate the investment committee.
Coordinating the investment committee was a different kind of work than anything I’d done in a newsroom. The timing, of course, is part of the story — January 2000 was very near the top of the market for this sort of enthusiasm. The idea behind the fund was sound: newspaper companies needed to understand and have a stake in the technologies that would deliver news next. The trick, then as now, was picking correctly.