And it’s a good thing. Since the newspaper industry, much like the music industry, resisted the Internet rather than embracing it, they shot themselves in the foot. Rather than proactively identifying opportunities they missed the boat entirely and are now suffering badly. Reminds me a bit of how Kodak could have OWNED digital photography if they had a bit of vision a few years ago. Instead they are playing catch-up, too.

In the newspaper’s race to play catch-up, they started giving it all away for free since that was the culture. We all grew up on a free Internet (I even remember when we used to think there would be no ads. HA) and that is being threatened in various ways.

The opportunity now is for newspaper’s to collectively demonstrate their worth by asking people to pay for the content they provide. Everything business has to do this, they have just been around so long they took their status and distribution model for granted.

I’ve been a little hard on mainstream media and probably sound like I want social media (blogs, etc.) to replace it. That’s not quite right. I believe they are complementary and both necessary. We need in-depth reporting and someone who can afford to put a correspondent in Iraq. We also need citizen journalists who are not influenced as directly by big business.

Here is a good explanation of why media must charge for web content. I think the key to pricing lies in micropayments, which use new technology to charge a very small amount of money (cents not dollars) for each piece of material you consume rather than paying full price for a newspaper you only read part of anyway. We just need to find a way to make it work on a small, local level.

Read this great article describing some real world ramifications of a future without mainstream journalism from The Atlantic. Kinda scary.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, General, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web