Reluctant Blogger

I originally wrote the below as a response to Scott Karp’s idea of saving newspaper’s by “donating classified advertising.” and I wanted to post a copy here as a placeholder for a longer, future essay on the topic.

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Very interesting brain-storming going on here, but I feel like your Hybrid and Napster examples both overlook a key element: network effects in the marketplace.

As a classifieds customer, the single factor that matters most to me (more, even, then where the money goes) is how many qualified people will see my ad in a given marketplace. Free is a nice side-benefit of Craigslist, but it’s not the reason people post ads there. We seem to be assuming that a newspaper classifed ad gets me the same amount of exposure for my ad as a Craigslist post (or an Ebay listing for that matter - this is not just a Craigslist issue,) and I’m not sure that’s true. If it is, they’re doing a very bad job of publicizing that fact.

Old school newspapers are at their core, aggregators - - and as we know, the internet is, among other things, a disaggregation machine. Rather than try and figure out ways to put that genie back in the bottle, I think most newspapers will need to consider some combination of the following:

• Cost-cutting (this one will undoubtedly be the least popular, but how much overhead do you really need to run a cutting edge _news_reporting_ operation in 2007? I don’t know the answer, but I suspect it’s less than many newspapers are currently still spending on rent and utilities alone.)

• Patronage, and especially micro-patronage, opportunities. (I would happily donate to my local news organization - although I should also note that I would expect *real* reporting in exchange for my patronage - not the ever expanding Style section that currently constitutes much of the “news”-paper.)

• Ancillary revenue opportunities. These will vary but could include advertising and information services. There are still cases where the local paper is probably the best advertising conduit. There are also a lot of opportunities coming up in mobile (which is inherently local) that a smart local news organization could jump on.

• Participatation in & enablement of “The Conversation.” Dave Winer’s suggestion of offering blogs to anybody who is featured in a story and wants to comment or otherwise continue the discussion is a good one. Hell - I’d help set it up for free, and I’m sure lots of folks with CMS/blog/publishing platform experience would offer to do the same.

I’m taking the time to write all of this up out of affection - I like the newspaper, and I like professional journalists. That’s why I _really_ want to see them step up to the challenge - - we’ll all be poorer for it if they don’t.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 8:26 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.