Comments on: What has prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age?

By: Bradley J Fikes

Bradley J Fikes — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 18:00:44 +0000

I am helping the editors at my paper get blogging right, not just in principle, but in execution. What to do with trolls, how to encourage good commenters, etc. (To their credit, I’ve been intensively blogging on my own time for more than a year, and they’re fine with that as long I include a disclaimer).

And I’m reminding editors of the need for speed in posting Web stories. They should be immediately read by an editor — any editor — when completed, instead of waiting for the designated editor to emerge from a meeting. We need to take full advantage of the nimbleness of the Web, which few newspapers do because of their legacy infrastructure.

Reporters can be great conversation leaders and networkers online among those interested in their stories. But they have got to lose their fear of the public, and not let some trolls dominate the conversation. That means being engaged with the audience, something reporters need support from their editors to do.

By: Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:34:27 +0000

John and Steve, thanks for the comments. Yes, legacy is a hindrance in so many ways. Often, projects that look like what we’re doing are the easiest to achieve politically but not necessarily the moves that we need to make.

Steve, didn’t you mention looking at how other businesses dealt with their legacy models for the Newspaper Next project?

I guess it’s current projects like Viewtron that I worry about the most. Large, expensive, slow-to-market projects that cost a lot and are already behind the market before the planning, much less when they launch. It’s bad enough that the projects have to make so much to break even, but after they fail (predictably), they are then used to argue against innovation.

By: yelvington

yelvington — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:07:55 +0000

As I read this and think back to the videotex era, it strikes me that great energy went into advancing visions that turned out to be not quite on target, when the smarter move might have been to spend less and listen to the marketplace a little more.

The K-R loss on Viewtron was just staggering in that era, and I think it frightened a lot of news companies away from experimentation.

And I recall a quote from a K-R executive in the wake of Viewtron’s failure. He was disgusted — I think that’s the right interpretation — that people ignored the great newspaper content that was made available to them, and gravitated toward services that let them talk about sex. I read that quote in 1993 when digging through Newsbank doing research for the Star Tribune that led to our own online project.

And I thought to myself at the time: “Only a newspaper guy would find that surprising.”

So after K-R failed, who was next? Sears, CBS and IBM with Trintex, which became Prodigy. The network was 100% architected on a “we tell you” model, not a “you interact with others like you” model.

Slow learners.

This ain’t just another channel. The new players, coming into the game without any frame of reference other than what’s right in front of them, are much more able to recognize that than those of us from legacy media.

By: John Yenne

John Yenne — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:19:26 +0000

Joe Kraus of Excite, from the book Founders at Work, says it best — even though he was talking about Excite in its failure to recognize the business value of search: “Existing companies biggest problem is legacy. Period. They can’t focus on new businesses because they’ve got to manage their old ones.” That’s been the big issue for the newspaper industry. Their problem is the economic, structural, even institutional, model of newspapers. Not necessarily a “lack of vision.”