My colleague Matt Kinsman recently asked Alanna Young, president of Technomic, a provider of primary and secondary market information and advisory services to the food industry—and a division of Connectiv member Winsight—what's different between running a data business and a media business? She had been Winsight's chief operating officer and is a veteran of Hanley Wood's Metrostudy data business
"All content is not the same," she continued. "How the content is produced and packaged is not the same. The media audience is coming for news, journalism and insights. People who come for data are looking for more context, translation, instruction and actionable insight. The type of people who run content for media and those who run content for data are different and they have different skillsets. For data, you have to be skilled in research methodology and analytics.
"One of lessons we learned early on is, we thought we could just merge ...
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