Dave Morgan, founder of MediaPost Publications has written an interesting blogpost titled “My Last Column on the Newspaper Industry”, which is really a treatise on what he reckons went wrong with US newspapers’ attempts to transfer their success online.
Some quotes:
I no longer believe that the industry is very relevant to the future and things digital. Since I prefer to write about those topics, and am also becoming more interested lately in how the Internet will reshape the television and video industries, I plan to focus my attention there.
And:
those who believe that newspapers came late to the Internet are wrong. In fact, they were very, very early. Rather, newspapers’ abysmal failure to build great businesses online was a direct result of their incredibly narrow-minded focus to make online work within the same “locked-down” look, feel and content control paradigm of their existing print distribution model.
Newspaper executives chose to sacrifice the interests of their readers and their advertisers by their stubborn refusal to embrace the Web for what it could be — a better and lower-cost platform for interactive delivery of local news, information and commercial communication (think Craigslist or Google) — as compared to what they wanted it to be (a way to sell and deliver “locked-down” content products in “walled gardens”) which neatly fit in their “trees to trucks” vertical monopoly mentalities. That was their death knell.
And:
The notion that the purity of newspaper journalism is the cornerstone upon which today’s great metropolitan newspapers were built is revisionist history. Most of today’s great newspapers were built through achieving dominant distribution in their markets, not through delivering better journalism.
The comment thread is worth reading, too.
