Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

Yesterday we saw some of Jeff Jarvis’s thoughts on this topic, which is a pressing one for newspaper companies given their steady declines in readership and profits. One of the savvier students of where newspapers are and where they could go in the future is Doc Searls, who offers some keen insights in his piece, “Still at Newspapers 1.x.” Choice tidbits follow — but do read the whole piece if this subject is important to you.

1. Stop giving away the news and charging for the olds. [...] Today we see the networked world through search engines. Hiding your archives behind a paywall makes your part of the world completely invisilble. If you open the archives, and make them crawlable by search engine spiders, your authority in your commmunity will increase immeasurably. [...]

4. Start following, and linking to, local bloggers and even competing papers (such as the local arts weeklies). You’re not the only game in town anymore, and haven’t been for some time. [...]

5. Start looking toward the best of those bloggers as potential stringers. Or at least as partners in shared job of informing the community about What’s Going On and What Matters Around Here. [...]

9. Get hip to the Live Web. That’s the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that’s growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They’re the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what’s needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).

My take — and I’m hardly alone in this — is that the next few years will decide the fate of many newspapers and newspaper companies in the US. When I say “few,” I’m guessing some number under ten. Some of these companies will grasp that the newspaper business is no longer playing in the Dead-Ball Era.* There are now strange prodigies in their midst, unusual players who hit towering home runs and don’t care about striking out. In this analogy, Babe Ruth’s name is Google and Rogers Hornsby’s name is Craigslist, but there are other sluggers already active, and still others just coming into the game.

The new era — which isn’t coming, but already here — won’t kill all the old papers, not by any means. Ty Cobb throve in the 1910s, when the ball was dead, and in the 1920s, when the ball was lively. Quality players can thrive under various conditions . . . but not by remaining stuck in the old ways. It remains to be seen which of the major (and minor) newspaper companies will figure this out, and how long it will take them.

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* Thanks for your patience with this baseball analogy: it’s the middle of August and the major-league races are heating up, so I’ve got baseball on the brain.