August 25, 2008

And the Newspapers will be the First to Go!

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

In the late 1990s I attended a convention where the keynote address was titled (in part) Roadkill on the Information Superhighway. Nearly 10 years later I can proudly declare one species as roadkill: the newspaper. But they weren’t killed. Instead, they ran out into traffic and got squished.

The key to success in any business is understanding your business. The great example is the railroad industry.

The once-almighty Railroad Barons thought that they were in the railroad business. Nope. They were in the transportation business. (More precise, they were in the logistics business.) When interstate highways came about, as well as air travel, railroads lost their prominence. The Barons failed to adapt. They got squished.

Newspapers are owned by barons, just as the railroads once were. Owning a newspaper can be a highly lucrative business. Anyone ever hear of William Randolph Hearst? And just like the railroad barons of old, today’s newspaper owners apparently don’t know what it is they sell. That’s my guess of course, but it’s based on the fact that so many newspapers are downsizing and going out of business.

The Internet is not the enemy of the newspaper. People still read the paper, despite the presence of radio and later television news. Yet as the Internet gained prominence through the web, newspapers suddenly started losing their audience. That’s when they forgot what business they were in and began obsessing over the Internet. It was a panic.

Understand that the Internet is not about information. The Internet is about the timely delivery of and access to that information. Any company that’s in the business of information distribution must accept that the Internet is not competition, but merely a way to improve delivery time. Put another way, the Internet does not improve the quality of the information, only its speed.

Newspapers, and to a lesser degree radio and television news, obsess with deadlines. They cannot compete, at least not using their traditional model, with a news delivery service that is instantaneous. Yet they try. Not only do they try, they act like fools and give away something valuable — their content — at no cost. What kind of idiotic business model is that? It’s just plain dumb! So it’s no wonder that newspapers are failing.

As long as the newspaper concentrates on writing about current events and providing advertising, it is possible for them to flourish in the Internet age. I’ll explain more next post.

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