As if radical change on a daily basis weren’t enough for one industry …
It’s either almost or well-past trite by now to predict the imminent demise of traditional media at the hands of the Internet, but sometimes one can’t help commenting on the death throes. This time its Dvorak, commenting on some specific examples of the impact blogs etc. are having on demand for newspapers. For many bloggers this reaction is old news, but the money quote, out of Wired, is instructive:
Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.
So here’s the problem – your newspaper business is dead or dying, because you can’t give it away, so you need to feed the content to your online distribution arm instead – but the ‘net is already full of similar content, better and worse, sure, but a lot of it being offered for free, and much of it increasingly being delivered in interactive or collaborative formats that readers find more interesting – all of which is entirely alien to your business.