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.
Dan Gillmor has reproduced a wonderful speech by Tom Stites, delivered last weekend at the Media Giraffe Project conference in Amherst, Mass. His dissection of the Boston Globe is particularly on point. If readership is declining, maybe it's not the Internet's fault.
Tim Porter takes a look at the remains of Knight-Ridder Digital and fires an early torpedo toward a rumored Bay Area megasite:
"Whatever happens eventually, the first inklings of what's to come from the MediaNews-Hearst partnership look disastrous: An idea to create a website built on the combined products of the Chronicle, the Mercury News and Singleton's other local papers like the Oakland Tribune. ...
Peter Krasilovsky and Jay Small have some thoughts about local online revenue growth and the inflection point at which a web operation outsells the print operation.
I'm still catching up on good items that were posted while I was traveling. Vin Crosbie has a detailed look at who's using newspaper websites, based on data from Greg Harmon at Belden Research.
Among the key findings is that newspaper website users are growing older. We all are, of course, but this is collective data. It's not surprising; Web activity by people aged 40 to 65 has noticably surged in the last couple of years.
Last week in Moscow at the World Editors Forum I had a chance to hear details of Microsoft's so-called "Times Reader" electronic newspaper vision of the future. A lot of the conversation I've heard about this reader has assumed Microsoft is reinventing PDF. That is not the case.
I'm quoting economist Paul Romer at the top of my presentation Monday to the World Editors Forum in Moscow. Romer has said many smart things, but one of my favorites is this: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
