The Miami Herald has killed a project to outsource editorial production of a zoned section to workers in India. Good move. It was a bad idea in the first place. Next they should kill the idea of outsourcing website comment monitoring, which is a rich source of leads and perspective that can help journalists reconnect with the real world.
But outsourcing can be a good idea. The criteria for outsourcing are simple:
Disruptive innovations, in the Clayton Christensen model, typically represent a "leap down" rather than an improvement in technology. And sometimes the result might seem to be a toy, beneath serious notice.
We're coming up on the time to post New Year's resolutions. Here's a proposal: Newspapers should resolve to be more like Apple and less like Microsoft.
Just a few years ago, Apple was beaten. Its goose was cooked. It was on life support in the shape of a temporary investment by Microsoft, which feared antitrust action if Apple disappeared.
Facebook isn't journalism. It doesn't even try. But like other conversational/participative media, it's brimming with opportunity for journalism, for community-building, and for commerce.
Facebook came from a university setting and precisely targets a poorly met need in the general area of community and communications.
So why was Facebook created not inside a college of communications, but rather by a computer programmer who briefly attended Harvard?
Alan "Newsosaur" Mutter is one of my faves, and his brain drain post was a classic even before the comments started rolling in.
But the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.
In a commentary for the Pew Internet & American Life project, Susannah Fox writes that she's "struck by a phrase repeated a few times: 'good enough' technology."
The phrase actually is a key to understanding disruptive innovation as laid out by Harvard prof Clayton Christensen, and embodied in the NewspaperNext Blueprint for Change.
While I was traveling Backfence.com suspended operations, and now a lot of people are drawing conclusions, some publicly and some not. At the risk of further muddying the water, here are some of my own fairly random, jetlagged thoughts:
