Time for the news business to get its head out of the 20th century

The Newspaper Association of America has been having a well publicized conference this week where it has been making Google the bad guy, the source for all of the news business' woes. The Associated Press in particular has been taking pot shots at the search giant. Google is the same company that has a multi-year, multi-million dollar deal with the AP to distribute its content. Google provides links to the newspapers' web sites, and you know, drives traffic to them.

That's the way the game works these days, but for some reason nobody sent AP, or any of the other dinosaurs in the room, the memo. It seems, they couldn't be more ignorant of 21st century publishing models and there doesn't seem to be any way to drag them kicking and screaming into the modern era.

The Internet is not the enemy, folks

I wrote a post recently for DaniWeb called The News Buiness Declined Due to a Lack of Vision, in which I wrote, "Video didn't kill the radio star and the Internet didn't kill the news business." The fact is that we are more than decade beyond when newspapers should have realized the game was changing and in the last five years, Web 2.0 has changed it even more. The idea is to generate quality content and let the readers find you. Google helps the readers find you.

Newspapers have always done two things well: They have generated content and they have sold ads. Well, that's what they should be doing online, but while embracing the new models. I know it makes little sense to the old guard, but when you generate good free content, you raise your search engine rankings, people find you, they come to your site, and that traffic can translate into ad dollars. Businesses go where the readers are and if your readers are online in sufficient numbers, you can sell ads just as you always have. You can also look for other ways to generate additional revenue creatively.

Mono cultures spawn simultaneous failure

The problem is not the new business model, as I wrote in my DaniWeb post, it's the way the business has changed. Instead of concentrating on what they do well, newspapers have become monolithic and brittle. In his Keynote speech last week at AIIM, Andrew Lippman, Founding Associate Director at the MIT Media Lab was talking about the issues related to mono cultures: "I think the institutions are out of scale, past the point of their design," he said "Another problem is they are mono cultures. They are all the same." This means, Lippman pointed out, that when it goes south--as happened last year in the financial sector--all the businesses fail at the same time because they are all doing the same thing. What he said applies to the news business.

Lippman added that our institutions (and that includes the news business) have lost their mission. "They have grown past the point, where simply sustaining them becomes more important than the reason they were founded." And that is the key to the problem right there. When stock holders become more important than reporters, and the website and content management systems are not in place to help you build new business models, then the business has lost site of its core purpose. We shouldn't be surprised when it results in a meltdown. The Newspaper Association of America (and the RIAA and MPAA) may all disagree, but they have nobody but themselves to blame for the situation they find themselves in today. They are trying to simply sustain the old pecking order instead of looking at the new models as opportunities to for their businesses to evolve and grow. - Ron