An interesting followup to my last post was in Sunday's LA Times titled 'Where Does The Times Go'?. The author is a former jounalist who correctly points out that there are many talented journalists at the LA Times, which is true. And then lays out certain newpaper based strategies to fixing the LA Times, which are not true.
He wants to focus the paper on Tech and Entertainment, "go after a demographic slice of the market instead of a geographical one." and finally, "Buying a newspaper is different from inheriting one. These men all made their fortunes in businesses in which the notion that owners should keep their hands off the product doesn't even have the status of an abstract piety."
There is that notion again that in America the role of newspapers is to deliver the truth and build communities. Those things can be done now differently. And they will be done by the next generation of journalists. In a similar vein the USC School of Cinema is expanding. That seems like an odd thing in a shrinking industry, except when you learn that they believe they are teaching story telling skills that cross mediums. The talented story tellers (aka film makers) will be fine, just like the talented journalists will be fine.
A more important link is:
Newspaper Industry Faces $20 Billion Revenue Shortfall by 2010 (Warning this is a for sale industry report - but I think it's direction is true).
"The perfect storm of print circulation decline, accompanying pressures on print advertising, and the rapid growth of lower-revenue-producing online news media is eroding the industry. The business of news faces an unprecedented transformation as these trends likely accelerate over the next five years," said Outsell lead analyst Ken Doctor.
I think it's interesting that the solution to problems often comes from outside the perceived parameters of the problem. The journalist thinks the problem is in where the paper is sold, what the paper emphasizes and who the paper targets. The real issue is that papers had a strategically strong position by concentrating activity geographically. They were protected by a lack of alternatives for both consumers and advertisers once they built a critical mass. It's interesting times that we live in that because the this geographic source of competitive advantage is unbundling. It's the real life example of the internet, or more precisely the increasing lack of importance to geographic constraints, is cracking open one particular business model.
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