I left the Financial Times for the very same reasons that I joined in September 1999--for the chance to play a part in something large with a global impact.

The Financial Times was the most exciting media story in decades. This 111-year old newspaper was preparing a $100 million plus bid to grab a lucrative chunk of the US market from well-entrenched competitors. And it was pioneering the first integrated newsrooms, combining newspaper and online editorial staffs on the same desks--the first by a major newspaper publisher.

As a journalist you always want to be where the story is, and in 1999 there was a great story in the media industry: Could the FT pull off this audacious venture? With the FT?s ambitions to become the world?s first truly global newspaper, I was hooked?line and sinker. I walked away from running a thriving news agency business, and with great enjoyment, became sucked into the grand ambitions of the FT?s US venture.

I was very fortunate to have been part of what became a very successful venture, and to have had the opportunity to work with many of the world?s finest journalists. Those kinds of opportunities are rare in the media world, and I?m glad to have taken it.

Now, my attention is on another opportunity to play a part in something large, and something that could make a global impact. In 1999, the FT invasion of the US (by the way, guess what the launch day was called[link to a d-day web site or something d-day..!]) was a big media story. In 2004, it is blogging, along with the development of certain technologies and business processes that I predict will quickly change the media business across the board.

New media business models will quickly create a very different media industry, and in this case, I think that few of the established media players will make the transition. I will explain in more detail what I am referring to, and where the business opportunities are likely to be, over the course of the following days and weeks.

SiliconValleyWatcher, and other sites, will hopefully become applications of new media business models that are under development. This web site and others that I will be helping launch, will be the process drivers. It is similar to the way that a chip foundry runs a standard line of chips, such as DRAM, through its manufacturing processes to test its production lines, and fine-tunes the entire process before making other chips.

However, I am not going to reveal some new type of technology, nor do I know of a new type of technology hidden away that will create a new media industry. What my colleagues and I hope to achieve is a marriage between the right technologies and the right business process. And to determine how to do that for many types of media business applications.

Our goal is to figure out the answers to what is one of the most troublesome questions about the internet today (and yesterday): How can content publishers make money?

If content is supposed to be king on the internet, as everyone has been saying for more than 10 years, why is it that many media companies are struggling, losing money, and continuing to lay off people?

It?s not because of the recession in advertising. Those newspaper and magazine publishers that think it is all just a matter of waiting for advertising revenues to bounce back, are waiting in vain. (More on this later?)

For me, this is where things become exciting and where there is a rare opportunity to help create a lot of value and take advantage of what I like to term ?a discontinuity in the fabric of things.? The discontinuity is the opportunity that crops up every now and again, when there is a confluence of trends and technologies, that suddenly provides a new way of doing things, and making money.

We can see the effect of such a discontinuity in the industry being affected. Companies lose money, go out of business, continue rounds of job losses, and a new order emerges. ( I can hear the sound track now-DK)

We are seeing media in crisis: publishers continuing to lose money, newspapers losing the confidence of readers with false stories, journalists continuing to be laid off, and a media industry consolidation trend that is a worry to both left and the right. The new order emerging is media companies such as Yahoo and Google?which are highly effective media companies.

Media in crisis is why I think this is a damn good time to be in the media business.