I haven't blogged much lately because, well, I got tired of repeating myself. How much more can be said about how the media landscape is changing, and how traditional media companies are missing the boat? At this point it seems better to just let the situation play out. So I've been holding my fire. Besides, I've been busy with GrowthSpur, trying to find solutions to the problems with the media that I've been railing about for years.
But there are a couple of great pieces today from other commentators about what's going on in the media business, and I wanted to point to them, from a "couldn't have said it better myself" standpoint.
First up is Slate's Jack Shafer, going after the overly romanticized notion that non-profit models are the miracle answer to what ails the news business. Shafer nails it in my favorite quote in a long time:
We're substituting one flawed business model for another. For-profit newspapers lose money accidentally. Nonprofit news operations lose money deliberately. No matter how good the nonprofit operation is, it always ends up sustaining itself with handouts, and handouts come with conditions.
Spot on. It's arguably a lot easier to raise money from people who hope they'll get a return on their investment than it is to beg it from foundations who can only expect that you'll be back next year asking for more. And the investor expectations force a level of management discipline, I believe, that is very healthy for the long-term future of an organization. Just ask Geoff Dougherty, who's leaving ChiTownDailyNews behind because it was too hard to make a go of it as a non-profit, and immediately starting a new local news site in Chicago on a for-profit basis. He realized that non-profit isn't a magic formula. Far from it.
Today's other great post is from the always terrific John Temple, who was editor of the Rocky Mountain News until it was shot out from under him early this year. Temple, who's found that getting away from the daily newspaper editing and management grind does wonders for one's perspective, gives a no-holds-barred account of the repeated mistakes the Rocky made over the 15 years it spent fumbling away its online future.
We thought we were in the newspaper business. It seems like that’s what too many still think. They’re not. They’re in the news, information, knowledge and connection business.
Temple's post is long—it's the text of a speech he gave yesterday at the UC-Berkeley/Google Media Technology Summit—but it's well worth reading. It's actually kind of surprising—and sad—that these sorts of revelations about the incompetence in the belly of the media business beast are news, but it just illustrates how far legacy media companies have to go to make the transition to What Comes Next.
Because such realizations come so slowly, I increasingly despair that those traditional organizations will make the transition. But it's good to have smart commentators like Shafer and Temple (and others listed in my Essential Reading list in the right column) continuing to illuminate this transformation.
As for me, I'll be back when I have something original or provocative to say. I hope it won't take long. Watch this space.
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