Business Insight Zone

Here’s a simple thought I’ve been mulling for a while as I’ve watched the unfolding horror of newspaper circulation declines:

People in the newspaper business have made the fundamental error of thinking that they’ve always been in the news paper business. In fact, they’ve always been in the news delivery business.

The confusion is understandable, since it’s only been in the past 15 years that there’s been any viable alternative for mass delivery of printed news. When the Web came along, newspaper people saw it as inferior — inherently, unalterably, permanently — to the newsprint they had always so dearly loved.

I can sympathize: when I edited my high school’s newspaper, it never got old seeing my byline there on the pulp pages. Once it was printed it was real, you know? The same thing happened when I was all grown up and wrote some pieces for the Austin Chronicle.

But as a news consumer? Naah, I was pretty much hooked on the Web from the beginning. Much as I love the idea of sitting at the breakfast table or in a cafe or in a park reading the newspaper, I’m pretty easy about how I get my news. How well I remember sitting in the computer lab at St. Andrews in 1995, tracking the fortunes of the Chicago Bulls online because none of the British newspapers reliably carried basketball news.

What about you? You must take in some of your news and commentary online, or you wouldn’t be here. What do you think newspaper companies could do to stem the tide that has been flowing so strongly against them?

(Photo by Hamed Saber.)