OLD NEWS FOR TODAY´S NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS AND EDITORS

Vin Crosbie reports about the "Newspaper Next" Project of the American Press Institute (API):

Innosight’s explanation and recommendations costs the American Press Institute $2.5 million. I’m currently writing this at a Starbucks café inside a Barnes & Noble in Syracuse, New York, where Christensen’s The Innovator's Dilemma book costs $17.95 per copy. Had API simply send a mailed a copy of the book to all 139 attendees of Innosight’s presentation, it could have saved approximately $2,497,000 and saved a lot of time.

The advice Innosight gave would have been excellent advice for the newspaper industry in 1995, shortly after newspapers first began publishing online, before their printed product’s circulations began precipitous drops, and before the newspapers’ businesses began being eaten by small and then unknown competitors whose innovative and cheap new products and services newspapers initially ignored as flawed or not lucrative enough -- new competitors named Google, Yahoo!, CraigsList, etc. Innosight’s advice has come ten years too late.

However, the presentation's audience was largely comprised of newspaper corporation presidents and publishers. Not just suits, but expensive suits, inhabited by bodies in their late 40s through early 60s. People for whom 1995 was just yesterday. People who are still exercising unchanged whatever skills learned in the 1980s or early 1990s had brought them to prominence in the industry. The people who continue to exercise those skills unchanged despite their industry having lost nearly a fifth of its users since 1995 and nearly one-half of its market equity since 2000. Chief executives who still inhabit their offices but for all practical leadership purposes are lost in 1995.

Innosight’s outdated advice is still new to them.

Well, better later tan ever.