WHAT'S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

Earl Wilkinson writes in his INMA blog:

Reading through the inevitable year-end looks back at 2009, it’s amusing to see how the pundits have just now “discovered” that the worst economic pounding in eight decades didn’t actually kill newspapers after all.

That hardly makes newspapers a growth industry. That hardly means there aren’t more cutbacks to come. That hardly means we shouldn’t double and triple efforts to regain key advertising categories. That hardly means we shouldn’t shift budgets toward business-building activities such as sales, marketing, research, and digital. That hardly means it hasn’t been one hell of a ride.

Yet it does mean that what INMA has repeatedly said this year has proven true:

• There is no pending death of the newspaper industry.
• Second-tier newspapers in the best of times would die in the worst of times.
• Debt-laden corporate parents stole the headlines, while the newspapers they owned quietly scaled operations and maintained profitability.
• Newspapers with generic missions positioned in the middle of their markets will be at-risk for the foreseeable future.
• Newspapers were dramatically over-staffed with journalists, a bubble inflated by advertiser demand and not reader demand.

Despite continued cutbacks in the vaunted Washington Post newsroom, for example, the newspaper still employs more than 800 full-time journalists – roughly double the number that worked there in the halcyon days of Watergate…

Spot-on.

President Obama, a Blackberry addict that, I am sorry “media terminators“, reads print newspapers and thinks that good journalism is “critical to the health of our democracy”:

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,”

(Via http: Huffingtonpost)

My Finnish friend Jussi Tuulensuu,  the great designer of Kauppalehti Optio magazine drills on  some INNOVATION ideas and goes to the point with this Journalism 101 post:

JOURNALISM

HOW TO DO IT

1. Based on your knowledge about what the reader is interested in, decide what you want to tell and then tell just that.

2. Form follows data. Show, don’t tell.

3. Interesting is the new important.

CURRENT FACTS

1. Life is too short to read boring newspapers. Thanks to the Internet, people have noticed this.

2. Media are not that much in crisis, but journalism is.

SOLUTIONS

1. Stop repackaging the news, start creating them.

2. Edit more. Create better concepts. From newspapers to newszines, from magazines to mooks.

3. Our core business is selling interesting stories – not colour processing wood fiber. From great papers with websites to great websites with great papers.

Bravo!

David Sullivan thinks that the old department stores fate is a good reminder  for newspapers.

And the same lessons can be learned by newspapers from the railway industry.

Today, The Guardian presents the ambitious plans of the British transport secretary Lord Andrew Adonis with this lead:

There was a time when all the world firsts in rail took place in the UK – the first modern locomotive, the first intercity line and the first train-travelling monarch. That time, however, was the second quarter of the 19th century, and for very many years now Britain’s railways have, as it were, been stuck on the slow train. No principally domestic mainline has been built in over a century, and the spread of high-speed services – from Japan in the 1960s through France in the 80s to Spain in the 90s – has all but failed to reach these shores.

Yes, there was a time… when railways ruled the transport world, like newspapers ruled the information business.

But cars and airplanes came as more fast and convenient options.

And the railway industry didn’t react,and died in many markets and in many countries.

Until the fast trains resurrected the old business.

It took time, money and courage… and the results are here.

Fantastic and very comfortable new trains rule again in many European countries.

Investing in fast trains is like investing in the new “online-centric” news organizations of the future.

And as The Guardian says:

The lesson is plain: build it – and they will come.

(Picture by Getty Images)

INNOVATION’S Chris O’Brien writes:

One of the great tragedies that I see in the current debate about the future of journalism is the way the discussion continues to be framed around a series of binary choices. Newspapers or blogs. Print or online. Journalists or algorithms.

In each case, there seems to be a simple-minded belief that the future will inevitably be one or the other. I consider this tragic because the result is a lot of dead-end debates that devolve into spitball fights about whether one will replace the other. My belief is that the better conversation is about how these things should complement each other and extend and enrich our journalism. That is the great opportunity of this moment.

Amen.

First rule to run: sleep well and get a newspaper.

A rolled-up newspaper could save your life.

A newspaper will help you to keep your distance from the bull horns.

See what the “divinos” do as they are the real local expert runners.

And as you can see in this poster from 1909, the young runner uses not a newspaper but a fancy handkerchief.

So, today, buy a newspaper and run!

My comment on this lousy new story in this week’s The Economist:

Gentlemen,

Sorry but this is too much space for very little new information and few original ideas.

The crisis of many traditional mono-media (print publications and radio outlets: text or audio) and bi-media operations (television: audio+video) is that they offer very little unique and relevant content.

I read and I pay for The Economist because 90% of the time (sorry, not in this case) it adds value to the news.

It’s different, and it’s worth my money.

But 90% of what many newspapers, magazines, radio and television news operations produce is just recycled news garbage.

They are repackaging-news operations.

So, the Internet is better, faster and cheaper.

Regarding the “financial crisis” of many of the best U.S. newspaper companies (Tribune, NYT, etc.), let’s not forget that they are paying the consequences of very bad management, terrible M&As, and an irresponsible leadership that didn’t re-invest the huge profits of the recent past in their own core business.

Only the best will survive, yes, but at the same time only if they are able to re-invent themselves as “online-centric news organizations.”

That’s the real challenge.

Not the one from outside, but from inside.

What we need is more Innovation and change: more demos and less memos, more doing and less talking, more prototyping and less conceptualizing.

As always: too much analysis = paralysis.

Read David Sullivan’s comments after another simplistic post about the “death of newspapers.”

He end ends with the solution:

The best way to help print is to Put Ideas on the Table.

Lots of them.

Counterattack can be the best defense.

Yes, more innovation and less status quo.

More change and less status quo.

More new ideas and less status quo.

(Picture by  lkurnarsky/Flickr)