Today is the final day of a symposium in Washington to brainstorm the future of the newspaper. The symposium is part of the “Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project” of the American Press Institute. API, a creation of the newspaper publishers, has as its mission providing “training and professional development for the news industry and journalism educators.” “Newspaper Next” is a $2 million year-long project that seeks to “conceive and test new business models to help newspapers thrive in the next decade” It has hired some high priced Harvard Business School professors as consultants to collaborate with the “25 industry innovators and thought-leaders” who will produce the report later this year.
The members of the task force include mostly individuals who are associated with traditional newspapers as well as a handful of leading edge digital pioneers, such as Steve Yelvington. Creating a task force to try address the future of the newspaper industry would be ho-hum. The unique innovation of this effort is that the model will be tested at an operating daily newspaper, probably starting early next year.
This is all well and good, if not unconventional or even a bit weird. With 1457 daily newspapers in the U.S. alone—not to mentioned the thousands of others globally—one would expect that there is plenty of opportunity for experimentation in real time. And in fact that is happening. Some newspapers, like the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World, have been trying out new approaches to both their print product and their online sites. Editorial techniques such as encouraging citizen journalists, running photographs uploaded by readers, focusing on neighborhood-level articles and more are being tried somewhere at any given time. Business models that include reducing (New York Post) or even eliminating the price of the papers (Metro) are in play.
Among the pushing-the-envelop goals of “Newspaper Next" are
Where have these folks been for 20 years?
I’d be curious to see how many “models” the API group promotes. Or do they expect the same model that may be appropriate for a 26,000 circulation daily in a homogeneous North Dakota town can be applied to an 800,000 circulation paper in a metropolis? One size isn’t going to fit all.
The players in the newspaper industry carry the burden of being the incumbents. As such they have been afraid to innovate if it might cannibalize their traditional product or stray into a competitive area they wished to avoid. It should have been one of the major dailies that initiated a feature such as Yahoo’s Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Any of the major chains could have teamed up with a Lycos or Overture five years ago to create a service that Goggle pre-empted with Google News. The New York Times Co. bought About.com in 2005 for $410 million. Why wasn’t About part of a portfolio of $5 and $10 million start-up venture investments?
To be sure, there were some pockets of foresight. The Tribune Co. did have a venture portfolio dating back to the 1990s that included early investments in AOL and Excite. The Raleigh News & Observer started its Nando Times online site in 1994 (though it was shuttered in 2003 in favor of local newspaper-branded sites by McClatchy.) Knight-Ridder pioneered an early videotext service with AT&T in the early 1980s. However, it often seemed that many of the investments were of the CYA nature, rather than as part of a strategic plan to reinvent themselves for a changing environment.
It is easy to look back and groan over what should have been. Reality is, there were plenty of signs a decade or two ago of where the information industry was headed and a gaggle of analysts interpreting them for the industry. Many listened, fewer heard and only a handful acted in a committed way. The inflection point was then. There’s nothing wrong with API’s $2 million experiment. Better late than never.
The members of the task force include mostly individuals who are associated with traditional newspapers as well as a handful of leading edge digital pioneers, such as Steve Yelvington. Creating a task force to try address the future of the newspaper industry would be ho-hum. The unique innovation of this effort is that the model will be tested at an operating daily newspaper, probably starting early next year.
This is all well and good, if not unconventional or even a bit weird. With 1457 daily newspapers in the U.S. alone—not to mentioned the thousands of others globally—one would expect that there is plenty of opportunity for experimentation in real time. And in fact that is happening. Some newspapers, like the Lawrence (KS) Journal-World, have been trying out new approaches to both their print product and their online sites. Editorial techniques such as encouraging citizen journalists, running photographs uploaded by readers, focusing on neighborhood-level articles and more are being tried somewhere at any given time. Business models that include reducing (New York Post) or even eliminating the price of the papers (Metro) are in play.
Among the pushing-the-envelop goals of “Newspaper Next" are
- Assess the threat to newspapers in the next decade, including emerging competition
- Determine opportunities for newspapers, including implementation of available new technology
- Suggest executable new business initiatives – products, services and strategies – with detailed rationales
Where have these folks been for 20 years?
I’d be curious to see how many “models” the API group promotes. Or do they expect the same model that may be appropriate for a 26,000 circulation daily in a homogeneous North Dakota town can be applied to an 800,000 circulation paper in a metropolis? One size isn’t going to fit all.
The players in the newspaper industry carry the burden of being the incumbents. As such they have been afraid to innovate if it might cannibalize their traditional product or stray into a competitive area they wished to avoid. It should have been one of the major dailies that initiated a feature such as Yahoo’s Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Any of the major chains could have teamed up with a Lycos or Overture five years ago to create a service that Goggle pre-empted with Google News. The New York Times Co. bought About.com in 2005 for $410 million. Why wasn’t About part of a portfolio of $5 and $10 million start-up venture investments?
To be sure, there were some pockets of foresight. The Tribune Co. did have a venture portfolio dating back to the 1990s that included early investments in AOL and Excite. The Raleigh News & Observer started its Nando Times online site in 1994 (though it was shuttered in 2003 in favor of local newspaper-branded sites by McClatchy.) Knight-Ridder pioneered an early videotext service with AT&T in the early 1980s. However, it often seemed that many of the investments were of the CYA nature, rather than as part of a strategic plan to reinvent themselves for a changing environment.
It is easy to look back and groan over what should have been. Reality is, there were plenty of signs a decade or two ago of where the information industry was headed and a gaggle of analysts interpreting them for the industry. Many listened, fewer heard and only a handful acted in a committed way. The inflection point was then. There’s nothing wrong with API’s $2 million experiment. Better late than never.
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