BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Missing the forest for the dead trees: not to echo, but yes, newspapers are their own worst enemies, but I don’t think its because of inertia problems. I think its because of memory problems. I worked in newspapers half my life in some way or another, and saw that there were valid attempts to correct what was wrong with their models, but those attempts never got past a conference room before being mired down in words like “consolidation,” “centralization,” and the dreaded “synergy.” The problem with newspapers isn’t the paper itself, its the CHAIN. The problem with the OC Register isn’t the Register, its Freedom. Freedom went through consolidation and centralization once, and it failed. It tried to spin off its New Media from each paper to a central company, and that failed. And they are doing it again, and it’ll fail too. They have a memory problem born out of hubris and thinking that band-aids will work if applied liberally enough.
Imposing new business models in a legacy environment won’t work. The Internet does not operate in a centralized fashion, and treating it in such a manner is bad practice. You can’t scale centralization.
In order for newspapers to survive, they have to decenter themselves from the core outward to the point where the core doesn’t exist anymore. The paper isn’t so much a center but a consolidation of decentered nodes in a larger system that together makes Information and Content, but apart is loosely coupled enough to be flexible across demography, geography and representational frameworks.
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