Ruminations on the Future of Newspapers
When by happenstance Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times became my 10,000th follower on Twitter, I made a little joke about it; he kindly reciprocated and also asked me about he future of newspapers.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have a perspective coming from 30 years of watching disruptive innovation via information technology overturn old industries and give rise to new ones.
Newspapers as we've known them are doomed. The conditions which supported their business model have disappeared. This is sad for people in the business and those who love newspapers, but it would be a giant mistake to equate the death of newspaper with the death of journalism. This kind of over-identification obscures important questions of how journalism will be reinvented in the Internet era, and what kinds business models will sustain it.
Nothing is certain, but appetite for news continues to grow. Firms do make money using the Internet. We are in a fertile period of experimentation out of which it seems likely to me, workable new forms for reporting the news will emerge.
If experience is a guide, opportunities are more likely to be seized and defined by startups than incumbents. This theme was identified by Clay Cristensen in "The Innovator's Dilemma" and holds true in this case. New cost structures, new use of tools and infrastructure, new ideas about what content bundles are meaningful will all play a major role in what emerges,
It's a difficult and painful time for those in an industry which is failing, and an exciting time for new entrants.
Comments (17)
As regards the newspapers, I've concluded that their apparent assets of integrity and credibility never really existed. The entire notion of 'scientific' objective journalism was a relatively short-term delusion, and now we are moving back to the traditional model of people primarily paying for more evidence of what they already want to believe. In competitive terms, I think that's disadvantageous, so the long-term advantages will shift to those societies that do foster relatively closer relationships with objective (scientific?) reality.
The pressure is on for journalists. In some ways, they're lucky, as they are ahead of the curve: pressure is coming to all sorts of people who have done their jobs competently, but have hidden behind industries unprepared for the (now) dual thrust of ravenous technology and a withering global economy. Technology's relentless march is one challenge; "capitalism"'s relentless failure another. It's going to get tougher to outperform on the job for all of us.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-york-times-dont-die-live.html
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I am working on a presentation for school administrators and am pointing out many parallels between schools and newspapers. I think schools as we know them are obsolete and likely doomed.