Just a read a post over at Suw and Kevin Charman-Anderson blog on the subject of “rethinking the jobs newspapers do“. They close the post by asking the question: It’s time to radically rethink the newspaper as a product. Where would you start?
So here are my thoughts for those of you who have missed out on them the first time around (Think:Notes on the Future of Newspapers, Will the iPad save the Newspapers and Magazines?, What Google can teach the newspapers about innovation and What’s next now they have lost their ribbons of gold?)
I suspect Newspapers need to ask themselves one very simple question: What if Journalism is the real reason Newspapers are dying?
I say that because I suspect the newspapers are in deep trouble simply because they fell into the trap some time back of thinking they were in the business of journalism (i.e. creating content) rather than being the business of facilitating commerce (i.e. getting paid for bring all the parties together in one place to faciliate the negotiation of the exchange of goods and services).
A century ago newspapers were the undisputed “Find Me, Find You and Let’s Exchange deal space” of the industrial age. If the stock market formalised the activities conducted in the Coffee Houses then the newspapers both published and set the agenda for the daily gossip.
Today newspapers are in the business of counting page hits and eyeballs. They are in the busienss of trying to discover new ways of being sticky on a global media platform where content is both abundant and largely meaningless. They have shifted their position from “Premium” market maker/shaper to “Freemium” news and entertainment provider.
Now that the market is online searching for “real-time” solutions to the commercial realities of buyers trying to finding sellers and sellers trying to finding buyers the newspapers have discovered that their core product (Journalism) is neither sticky or relevent in an age hyper media.
As Groupon, eBay and all those classified advertising engines have proven over the past decade. You don’t need content as a hook to sell advertising when there is an abundance of free market information just waiting out there to be Googled.
Put very simply, and in all honesty quite sadly, the truth is for Newspapers to survive in an online world they need to make Journalism peripheral to their business model and get back to focusing on where the money is made. ie. Helping the market to Find Me, Find You and complete that all important Transaction from the daily Exchange of Goods and Services… both online and in the real world.
Posted on April 19, 2011
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