THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE NEWSPAPER….I was going to write a post about the subject du jour, namely whether or not newspapers could have done a better job of reacting to the rise of the internet, but via Matt, I see that Tim Lee has pretty much done it for me. Nickel version: Yes, it would have been great if railroads had converted into airline companies, if IBM had taken PCs more seriously, and if newspapers had embraced the web, but that kind of thing is really, really hard to do. That’s why it so rarely happens. Cannibalizing your own business is almost impossible for both institutional and economic reasons, and knowing that you’re in the generic transportation business, not the train business (or the generic computing business or the generic information business) isn’t nearly as profound an insight as some people think. Anyone who thinks differently needs to run an actual business first and then report back on how they did converting its core business into something brand new.
In any case, I have my doubts that there was ever a long-term business model that could have successfully transitioned newspapers onto the web. Sure, the print news media could have done more — though simply asserting that newspapers could and should have been way more awesome isn’t very helpful — but the advertising revenue just isn’t there to support the kind of reporting infrastructure that the print version of newspapering supported. This isn’t for lack of trying, either. Everyone and his brother has tried to figure out a more lucrative web-based advertising model for news, and so far no one has succeeded. Bright ideas are still welcome, of course, but most likely even the best newspapers will eventually die off and be replaced by something entirely different. I’m not as convinced as some that the replacement will be as good, but I suppose old fogies have said that before too more than a few times. We’ll just have to wait and see what our brave new bloggy/twittery/decentralized news biz manages to deliver.
