Barry Parr suggests that Los Angeles presents a great opportunity to a disruptive innovator who can see that it's really a patchwork of neighborhoods, each underserved by the troubled Los Angeles Times. And he suggests the answer is Web first, print second, with the Web a primary news platform and print the primary advertising/marketing vehicle.
Paul Graham documents 18 mistakes that kill startups. I particularly like this one:
5. Obstinacy
In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.
Writing for editorsweblog.org, Rory Satran makes "A Case for Measured Integration" of print and online newsrooms.
Last week I attended the yearlong NewspaperNext project's unveiling of the final report. Not surprisingly, it's getting mixed reviews, depending on expectations and predispositions. Jeff Jarvis and Susan Mernit go negative.
John Burke has a thoughful commentary on editorsweblog.org in which he observes:
In my job as a strategist I often use a fairly simple trick to get the process going: Turn the problem over. What if all your assumptions are wrong? Flip-flop them and see what you learn.
Recently I was on panel at the annual Society of Professional Journalists convention Chicago. Here are three examples I gave of "bad" that have "good" aspects if you change your point of view.
Presstime, the monthly magazine of the Newspaper Association of America, asked me to write an opinion piece for Back«Talk, a column inside the back cover. It's on page 60 of the September issue. Here is the text.
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I once worked for a major newspaper that didn't have a news obituary page. So the newspaper formed a committee to draw up standards. It met for six months before a dead person could get into the newspaper.
We can't work that way any more. The world is being remade by people don't form committees that meet for six months to avoid making mistakes.
