To be expected (since the people writing them are writing about themselves), there have been many words spilled on the future of newspapers. The best thoughts have been from Clay Shirky. But most words have been by clueless newspaper proprietors, so scared, they are re-hashing decades old ideas that have empirically failed before and will fail again if given the chance.
Mark Cuban’s most recent post got me thinking: Newspapers have not so much failed on the Internet, they have failed to be ambitious enough.
Newspapers hold fairly good usage position in local markets online. They have set out what they aimed to do: build an audience for their news online that is many times larger than in print. It’s just that advertisers couldn’t care less and pay them fractions to reach the person vs print.
But people quickly forget that advertisers much less consumers never paid very much to be alongside stories on the war in Iraq or political coverage of the latest ruminations in Washington. In Internet-less times, as much as 50% of a paper’s revenue and nearly all of it’s profit came from classifieds. That’s right, even in the controlled vacuum of print only distribution, the news was only a break even proposition. So what can they reasonably expect now on the Internet without classifieds?
The newspapers missed the boat on eBay. They missed the boat in not becoming more aggressive in online classifieds in all categories. They missed the boat in trying to create Wikipedia-like resources on everything in the local community. They missed the boat on creating Citysearch/Yelp/Zagat for their local markets. This missed the boat in going deeper on coverage and stats on things like local sports. And so on and so forth.
In each case, the company lacked ambition or desire despite having huge profit margins to help them experiment and enter those markets. And it’s not even as if they recognized they lacked ambition and paid out huge dividends to share holders. No instead they built skyscrapers and largely acquired other companies just like themselves. They quite simply lacked ambition.
