James Lincoln  moderates a panel made up of  Steven Piersanti      of BK media and    Juan Martinez  of the Knight Foundation.

Lincoln puts up a PowerPoint outlining the double bottom line criteria of his investing.  they don’t invest in the big media;  they look for minority and community media with a social mission they can trust, and economic growth opportunity. 

Panel perspectives on investing in the media.

Juan Martinez, CFO and treasurer of the Knight Foundation.  The Knight brothers made their fortune in newspapers in communities nationwide.  The foundation today follows their principles of quality and honesty, community development.  The Knight Brothers look to journalism to build communities and bring them together.  Talks about the Digital Challenge, a grant competition to open the doors to new ideas to use digital communications to bring communities together.

The foundation supports non profits and for profits to generate new ideas and impact. The view grant making as a investment portfolio with risk return tradeoffs and early and latter stage investments.   For grant requests, they examine them for impact on Knight’s strategic goals, the management strength of the management.  Investment in commercial ventures must meet these requires plus show social impacts and positive commercial .returns.

Steven Piersanti of BK publishing talks about book publishing, a little industry with a big impact.  The US industry is only $30 -$50 billion with low barriers to entry and is highly disaggregated and is subject to fierce competition.  So why invest?

Profits can stream for many years.  If a book works, it sells year after year, after year.  And the company can sell rights deals to the  same property, which enables ta book to serve as an annuity that generates revenue without new costs.

But many investors are  looking for faster returns and the ability to sell the company for a capital gain.  Unfortunately, publishers are often privately held and their assets are book titles, which are intangible assets, which are hard for traditional investors to work with.  Traditional investors want to be able to invest in firms with tangible assets that can go to the bottom line.  Some firms now operate, like the Literary Ventures Fund, have set up investment vehicles that are tuned to book publishers.