News You Can Lose
What Zell failed to mention was that his acquisition of the company had buried it beneath such a heavy pile of debt that any storm at all would likely have sunk it. Full Story »
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Review
This short essay takes the long view on why newspapers are foundering in a sea of digital red ink, using a 20th century railroad metaphor that posits if owners then realized they were in the transportation business (rather than the rail business), those companies would have moved into trucking and other kinds of transport. Conversely, if publishers realized they were in the information business, rather than the print one, they'd have had a better chance at survival.
Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.
Again, this is an attribute of the convention of the platform that eventually will doom many newspapers.
The convention of Internet hates timely information that sells once and loves information about information that sells via subscription--a marketer's dream--and a publisher's nightmare.