By Larry Lannon

Usually, B/OSS blogs are about your business. After all, communicating about your business is our sole purpose. I want to devote a few lines, though, to looking at our business, and then bring the discussion back home, to yours.

The Internet has changed the media business enormously, as it has so many other businesses. Those changes are not done. A major change has been that opinion, always an important part of the media business, has become more prominent than ever.

There are some concrete reasons for this new prominence. One is cost. Stories that rely on opinion are easier and less expensive to produce than stories that require fresh research. Opinion also provokes reaction. The Internet puts a high value on creating assertion-reaction cycles that attract attention and drive page views. This week’s example is the spectacular scandal Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) managed to create for himself. There is a new example every week, though. Remember the former governor of California?

The same impulses today animate the B2B media business, though thankfully without the salaciousness. Which brings me to my point: Today, there is plenty of opinion available to readers – too much of which is not grounded in a factual basis or presentation. Opinion, not facts, triggers page views. Opinion is less expensive for media companies to produce than fact-based reporting. Unsurprisingly, the B2B industry has shifted more and more toward opinion-based journalism that drives page views.

Consequently, these days even the savviest media consumer is lost “in a fog of opinion,” as the great Bill Moyers recently noted. B/OSS couldn’t agree more with Moyers’ trenchant criticism. Therefore, B/OSS is moving toward a premium-content strategy whose purpose is to cut through the fog and clutter that has come to characterize the B2B media.

Take service assurance as an example. We intend to employ a variety of platforms – including a live event and multiple digital platforms, including Webinars, Reports, Digital Issues, blogs, slide shows, video reports, and news and feature stories – to get at the truth about service assurance. B/OSS’ thoughtful editorial leaders – Editor-in-Chief Tim McElligott and Editor Tara Seals – will work with the real experts in the subject to cut through the confusion that has built up around SA and get at the core of the subject in order to make a difference where it counts: at the point of the customer.

Interpretation will be based on facts. Facts first, interpretation second – the sequence is as old as Aristotle’s empiricism. B/OSS will take a traditionally empirical approach to its work. And the work we are doing around service assurance will be the model for all the work we do in the future.

B/OSS will be doing a series of Webinars this summer around service assurance. B/OSS has done a survey of the current state of service, which Tim McElligott will report on in an Executive Summary next month.

The Service Assurance Forum will be held at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel in Boston, Sept. 22-23. Click here to learn more. The Forum is a live event that will be based around an RFI document – promoting discussion and engagement around a common starting point, yielding comparable lessons for the BSS/OSS community to evaluate.

The Forum will be followed by a Digital Issue that will discuss the subject in a purpose-build digital product that will be organized like a magazine, with short- and long-format feature materials, photos, charts, graphs and columns. In addition, McElligott will write an in-depth Report that will explore the topic in detail, much like an analyst report for the industry.

Fact-based. Intelligent interpretation. An empirical approach. Those are the data points where your business and ours intersect.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO’s Communications Network.