WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

It’s amazing.

All these recent newspaper casualties and troubles are now being presented by the owners and publishers as “victims” of the financial crisis and/or the Internet.

Bullshit!

The Chicago Tribune has been making money like crazy for more than one hundred years, but in the late 90’s the greedy management wanted to be bigger, not better, and they soon bought the Times Mirror Group.

The McClatchy Group did the same by eating the lost-soul Knight Ridder Group and hoping, again, to make more money by doing business as usual.

Well, now, both newspaper giants are almost out of business.

Because of the Internet?

No.

Because their owners, publishers and shareholders instead of investing in the future, invested in the past.

Imagine if all this money that was wasted on huge, greedy mergers and acquisitions had been invested in a better Chicago Tribune, a better Los Angeles Times, a better San Jose Mercury News or a better Miami Herald …

The Chicago Tribune and the San Jose Mercury were among the first newspapers with editors who saw the future, but they didn’t get the support of their owners.

Just ask Bob Ingle.

As BusinessWeek reported a year ago about this fiasco:

On January 19, 1990, Robert Ingle, then executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a remarkably prescient memo to his bosses at the newspaper chain Knight Ridder.

Typing at night on an Apple II PC, he envisioned that a global information network would emerge, giving rise to all manner of online communities.

And he proposed an online service, Mercury Center, aimed, his memo said, at “extending the life and preserving the franchise of the newspaper.”

The Ingle letter was also signed by Doug Clifton, former Miami Herald executive editor and current editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer; James M. Naughton, retired editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer; and Gene Roberts, retired executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and retired managing editor of The New York Times.

This was nearly four years before programmers created the first Web browser and long before Google and social networking exploded onto the scene, yet Ingle seemed to anticipate much of what would come.

He laid out strategies for the entire chain: Give information to readers however they wanted it, integrate the print and online operations, and dream up new forms of advertising.

“I saw the Internet as a great opportunity, but also as a great threat,” says Ingle, who retired in 2000.

If Ingle’s proposal had been enthusiastically embraced by Knight Ridder’s 28 dailies, perhaps the fate of the chain might have been different.

I was there.

Like many other people, I went to San Jose to visit the Mercury Center.

I went to the Chicago Tribune to see Howard Tyner.

I went to Colorado to see Roger Fidler at the Knight-Ridder New Media Center.

And at Stanford, I met William Dunn, another visionary that Dow Jones didn’t want to hear.

So, don’t tell me about the crisis.

Tell me about the greed.

And the lack of investments in the future.

The innovators were there.

But the owners, publishers and shareholders were not.

They were counting beans.

So, shame on them, and long live William, Bob, Howard, Roger and many other friends who know the truth.