There is no magic bullet

We're always looking for easy answers to complex questions. Tom Mohr's piece in E&P strikes me as a case of that.

There is no magic bullet, and binding together the newspaper industry's generally misdirected online efforts into a single effort is unlikely to provide one. Bigger is not better.

There's no question in my mind that the newspaper industry ought to be working together constructively.

But we differ on the purpose of that work. I think we ought to work together to fix the broken interface with national ad buyers, and stop there. And get it right. National advertising will not "save" local newspapers, but local newspapers ought to be able to compete effectively for it.

Here's what we should not do: force newspapers onto a single publishing platform. That would lead to catastrophic failure by killing what little creativity we have.

Change doesn't come from the center. It works its way in from the edges. That's why you see companies like Yahoo and Microsoft constantly acquiring startups. Neither has much of a track record of invention. Big established companies suck at creativity. If they didn't, Vignette would have invented "Web 2.0" instead of contributing so well to a depressed housing market in the Austin suburbs.

Tom points, correctly, to a weak feature set on the typical newspaper site: no blogs, no comments, no RSS feeds, et cetera.

But these ideas did not come from big corporate technology centers. They came from small shops and startups and individuals. I can download free code from the Internet that gives me all these things. If we are lacking in these things, the fault is in ourselves.