BILL GATES WAS RIGHT: NEWSPAPERS DELIVER TOO MANY THINGS FOR TOO MANY PEOPLE

Johanatan Weber writes in The Times of London:

Publishers have been slow to realise how fundamentally their world has been changed by the internet.

Back in the early 1990s, when I was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Bill Gates came to the paper for an "editorial board" meeting, a weird combination of meet-and-greet and press Q&A in which company brass schmoozed the mogul while lowly reporters and editors were supposed to ask him tough questions.

Even then, newspapers were worried about what new technologies would mean for their business, and Gates was hardly re-assuring. In a comment that has always stuck with me, Gates observed that newspapers delivered a bundle of things – national, international and local news, brand advertising, classified advertising, event listings – that didn't logically belong together as a bundle. Why would people turn to the same source for both Iraq war dispatches and used cars?

The answer, historically, was that newspapers alone had the distribution apparatus – trucks and printing presses – to get both of those things to the masses.

But Gates was right: the internet, by changing the distribution equation, would bring about the unbundling of those various services, and that would mean trouble for newspapers.

Yes, Gates was right.

Newspapers can not follow the U.S. model because newspapers with everything to everybody are going to be newspapers for nobody.

Compact, compact, compact.

Focus, focus, focus.