Sometimes the problem with strategy execution is well, strategy. Case in point is the current hand-wringing about the demise of journalism or at least the demise of newspapers. Frank Rich’s headline in the May 10th Sunday NY Times was “The American Press on Suicide Watch”. Maureen Dowd in her column on the opposite page took advantage of the new Star Trek movie fever to wonder if we could “kling-on to our newspapers in the galactic age?”
I grew up on newspapers. My dad was the quintessential newspaper man. We were constantly surrounded by multiple editions of multiple papers. Funnies were shared at breakfast, we checked the weather, Dad shouted out the latest gory rapes and murders urging us to be safe as we left out the door. As we got older we ventured from the funnies into Dear Abby, and then on into the news. Today there is much talk about the internet disrupting the newspaper business model. It is interesting, though, that Dad had put newspapers on suicide watch long before the world wide web. They’d lost their local focus, and lost the culture of reporting the news. He thought they were doomed as a consequence.
What is strategy? Strategy is about who you are. It is a contract between you and your customers about the value you deliver. There is a lot of trust and understanding in that contract. If you mess with your customers’ trust and they can no longer understand who you are, well, they find alternatives. Dad saw newspapers veering away from their contract, a contract delivering meaningful content to people’s daily lives, and instead chasing the superficial. They forgot that a newspaper, like politics, is local.
Newspapers got away with it for many years because newspapers were our information portal. They were the TV program listing, the movie schedule, the sports scores, the classified ads. But the internet arrived and offered lots of alternatives for these information services. Craigslist makes money on classified ads. Fandango not only gives you the movie schedule but sells you the tickets. TV programming is now on your cable box. Most newspapers have nothing left but largely undifferentiated content.
I subscribed to my two local papers for many years out of loyalty and habit. I couldn’t imagine not eating breakfast dripping coffee all over the funnies, skimming the headlines, reading the news after work. So what did the local papers do? They cut the number of funnies, filled more and more space with copy and paste stories, reprinted PR releases from whoever was handing them out, and wrote huge page one headliner “human interest” stories. I would read two papers and James would come off the internet and say “ hey did you hear…?” and I would say well, no, but I learned a lot about the plight of the working class in downtown San Jose, or the struggles of the homeless in San Francisco. Now these are all fine things, but this is not the stuff of daily news! How could I read two papers and not get any news? I finally gave up and called to cancel my subscriptions. The guy on the phone said, what’s wrong? We’ve won so many Pulitzer prizes! And I replied, but you don’t have any news!
I wasn’t ready to give up on newspapers completely so I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Great reporting, great journalism. But I don’t need to read all about the boroughs of New York! And where are the funnies? And, oh no Murdoch bought the WSJ. Then there’s the liberal guilt of killing all those trees for mounds of NY news I don’t read, and the pollution from burning the opinion page of the WSJ. So now I am newspaperless, and I am sad.
But there is hope. And Shai Agassi points the way. Shai is hoping to turn the transportation market on its ear by recognizing the simple fact that escaped us all: people buy miles not gas. He called his vision a Better Place.
Is there a Better Place for newspapers? I want to buy content, not a newspaper. I want to read funnies, news and get the information I need over my breakfast. Or sitting on my couch, working at my desktop or on my mobile device while commuting. I don’t want to spend hours researching the hardware, and I don’t want to take the hardware risk or have the hardware hassles. I don’t want to buy an e-reader any more than I wanted to buy the delivery truck to get the print edition! I want some smart entrepreneurs to use smart software (text mining, predictive analytics, business rules) to get me the content I want. I want them to both ask me what I want and figure out more based on my choices and reading patterns.
How many big national brands are there in any space? I want the kind of sharp reporting of national and international news I get from the NY Times, LA Times and WSJ. But I want to buy those bits of these papers, not the whole enchilada. I want to pay for good editing and fact checking. But let me buy the sections that are relevant to me. Then I want to buy real local news from a new breed of a news source, one that rediscovers its local roots. A news source that doesn’t just repeat what the political and business PR machines crank out. A news source that builds a meaningful strategy around commitment to their local community, and partners with like-minded state and national information brands. A one size fits all newspaper product doesn’t make sense in the age of the internet.
The internet is the end of newspapers as we once knew them. But when the internet closes a door, it opens a window. There is a huge opportunity for a Better Place for news and information. The technology exists to make meaningful, personalized “newspapers” that offer differentiated, edited and fact checked content. And on that day, Dad will be smiling from the great newspaper morgue in the sky.
I’ll be at VLAB’s event tonight on news in the 21st century. Hope to see you there.
