Having spent the last week reviewing our 2009 budgets, here are some observations that I thought you might find helpful.

1. All of our business leaders seems to recognize that next year will be a challenge, and are keeping their revenue growth goals at a very modest level. Unlike past years, where I have found myself trying to convince people to set higher goals, this year I find myself concerned about whether the goals being set are too high given the state of the economy and its uncertain impact on the markets we serve.

2. Keeping revenue growth goals more modest means keeping expenses very tight so we can protect our bottom-line. And since some cost increases are largely out of our control, eg. benefits costs, we need to be tighter about those costs we do control. So we're looking at our traditional ways of doing business, from how many magazine copies we print and mail, to how we market our subscription publications.

3. We will continue our strategy of investing in and expanding businesses where revenues come from subscribers/users rather than advertisers. Not that I have anything against advertising, which will remain very important to us, but subscriber revenues provide a more stable foundation on which to build the company, particularly during more turbulent economic times. So we'll continue to develop paid websites, new books, business information services, practice centers, competitive research, webinars and other products where the revenue streams come primarily from those who use the information.

4. One area we absolutely cannot skimp on is the development of new content. Monthly and weekly publications will need more original content to keep their websites fresh on a daily basis, if not more often. And our practice centers, court pages and other substantive offerings will need appropriately sophisticated and complete content to justify the prices we'll want to charge those who subscribe to them. I think that means our editors will be increasingly challenged to develop new content sources--contributors, freelancers, expert columnists and user-generated. And we'll need to constantly review our standards for editing--what content needs thorough editing and what can go from writer to reader with minimal intervention.

5. Pricing issues are becoming more acute in the company. Figuring out how much to charge for a newspaper or magazine subscription, or what the rate card for traditional advertising should be, is pretty straight-forward. But how much to charge for access to a database that comes as an add-on to a web subsciption to one of our newspaper sites--well, that's pretty tricky. Or how much a librarian will really pay for a research study or an electronic version of a book--also tricky. Or a combination sale to an advertiser that consists of a webinar sponsorship, an advertising program on law.com, and some print advertising. So we'll be spending more time in 2009 listening to our customers and trying to figure out how they value our products and what that might say about how much we can charge for them.

We're not done yet with the 2009 budget, so I'll let you know if I have any further observations that I think might be worth sharing.