For all the talk of Woodward and Miller, plagiarism and bias in recent weeks and months, such journalistic crises aren’t so bad — net net — for the newspaper business.
After all, with millions of blogs linking to newspaper Web sites every day, more people are reading and sharing newspaper content than ever before. And in large part, journalism scandals and controversies are like any other good story; they stir the pot and get more people reading.
When conservative bloggers are furious with a New York Times article, after all, don’t they link to it? Don’t liberal bloggers link to the Washington Times, if only to ridicule it? Don’t scandals over credibility and bias merely serve to remind us that professional print journalists are at the very center of the universe of Web content?
It’s true. And that is the good news for the newspaper business.
The bad news is that the transition from paper-based to electronic news distribution is happening more rapidly than the industry can adapt its business models. Just look at any U.S. newspaper company’s financial statements; online revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough to make up for sluggishness on the print side.
This isn’t happening because newspapers are stodgy and backward (although some are.) Mostly, it’s happening because of what Clayton Christensen, the hero of MBAs everywhere (pictured above), calls “disruptive innovation.”
In navigating the new media landscape, newspaper executives face two potentially disastrous risks:
1) The revenue stream from print will begin to decline (not just grow more slowly, but decline) before the revenue stream from the Web can fill this gap.
2) The revenue stream from the Web will never reach the level of the revenue stream from print.
These are very real possibilities over the long term.
OK, imagine you’re the CEO. What do you do now?
Shut down all your printing presses? Give your content away? Charge for it? Bank on online advertising for your future?
There are no easy answers.
Speaking of Christensen, the American Press Institute has hired his consulting firm, Innosight, for what it calls “an ambitious year-long project to conceive and test new business models to help newspapers thrive in the next decade.”
This is a step in the right direction. (I’m also pleased that Laura Bloom Gordon, the very capable SVP of marketing for The Dallas Morning News, will participate in the API task force.)
Innosight gives an indication of its perspective in a Nov. 8 Wall Street Journal piece, “Newspapers in an Electronic Age,” written by Clark Gilbert and Scott D. Anthony:
As innovative technologies and business models with transformational potential continue to emerge, the world of the newspaper publisher has grown progressively darker. Five years ago, eBay and Monster.com started to slice off pieces of the classifieds. Recently, Google’s news and search offerings and the Web logs began to threaten the hegemony of the traditional media’s command-and-control structure. Throw in podcasts and free commuter newspapers and you have a potent brew indeed.
The newspaper industry is now roughly 400 years old, and, generally speaking, it is confronting a “disruptive” change unprecedented in its history. The emerging challengers can’t comprehensively measure up to leading newspapers’ detailed reporting capability, institutional advantages and deep local reach. All of them, however, feature revenue streams and content delivery models that run counter to those of most newspapers — and they are breaking paths into new territories.
Still, newspaper companies are not standing idly by. Every major player has made a move on the Internet, and their properties — and appetite for acquisitions — are growing rapidly. Knight Ridder, Gannett and the Tribune Corporation built CareerBuilder.com and bought a controlling stake in news aggregator Topix.net. In the last year, the New York Times acquired About.com, the Washington Post picked up Slate, Dow Jones bought CBS MarketWatch and News Corp. acquired Intermix and MySpace.com.
So how, then, do we judge the recent spate of acquisitions? Are these rational choices meant to extend these companies into the online space, or are these the signs of panicked companies reacting to the threat of online media?
The authors conclude that it’s too early to tell — which is the God’s honest truth.
Technorati tags: Journalism, Newspapers, News, Marketing, Innosight, Press
Tags: dallas marketing, newspapers
Can Clayton Christensen Save the Newspaper?
For all the talk of Woodward and Miller, plagiarism and bias in recent weeks and months, such journalistic crises aren’t so bad — net net — for the newspaper business.
After all, with millions of blogs linking to newspaper Web sites every day, more people are reading and sharing newspaper content than ever before. And in large part, journalism scandals and controversies are like any other good story; they stir the pot and get more people reading.
When conservative bloggers are furious with a New York Times article, after all, don’t they link to it? Don’t liberal bloggers link to the Washington Times, if only to ridicule it? Don’t scandals over credibility and bias merely serve to remind us that professional print journalists are at the very center of the universe of Web content?
It’s true. And that is the good news for the newspaper business.
The bad news is that the transition from paper-based to electronic news distribution is happening more rapidly than the industry can adapt its business models. Just look at any U.S. newspaper company’s financial statements; online revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough to make up for sluggishness on the print side.
This isn’t happening because newspapers are stodgy and backward (although some are.) Mostly, it’s happening because of what Clayton Christensen, the hero of MBAs everywhere (pictured above), calls “disruptive innovation.”
In navigating the new media landscape, newspaper executives face two potentially disastrous risks:
1) The revenue stream from print will begin to decline (not just grow more slowly, but decline) before the revenue stream from the Web can fill this gap.
2) The revenue stream from the Web will never reach the level of the revenue stream from print.
These are very real possibilities over the long term.
OK, imagine you’re the CEO. What do you do now?
Shut down all your printing presses? Give your content away? Charge for it? Bank on online advertising for your future?
There are no easy answers.
Speaking of Christensen, the American Press Institute has hired his consulting firm, Innosight, for what it calls “an ambitious year-long project to conceive and test new business models to help newspapers thrive in the next decade.”
This is a step in the right direction. (I’m also pleased that Laura Bloom Gordon, the very capable SVP of marketing for The Dallas Morning News, will participate in the API task force.)
Innosight gives an indication of its perspective in a Nov. 8 Wall Street Journal piece, “Newspapers in an Electronic Age,” written by Clark Gilbert and Scott D. Anthony:
The authors conclude that it’s too early to tell — which is the God’s honest truth.
Technorati tags: Journalism, Newspapers, News, Marketing, Innosight, Press
Tags: dallas marketing, newspapers