Neil Thurman and Merja Myllylahti of City University in London have published a study "Taking the paper out of news" in the academic journal Journalism Studies, examining the case of Taloussanomat, a Finnish financial publication that responded to the economic failure of its print product by shifting to a Web-only, advertising-supported strategy.
The responses to my post last month, "Please stop calling print the 'core product' (explained)," continue to pop up here and there on the net, and a common theme is "but I'm not sure I agree or want to accept what he says is the core - helping others sell their goods and services."
All the recent grunting and saber-rattling about stopping those evil Internet sites from stealing content strikes me as bizarre. Who are these bad actors?
Tampabay.com's shiny new Mug Shots gallery has sparked a debate: Is it the proper role of journalism to publicize everything?
In an email to several journalism-related lists, Nora Paul of the University of Minnesota declared: "I think it borders on journalistic malpractice! ... Journalism should be about putting important events in a community into context. This doesn't."
The usual curmudgeonly complaint about online interaction is that it's banal: a bunch of bloggers (or Twitterers, or whatever) in pajamas (or whatever) blathering on about what they had for dinner (or whatever). But mark me down as one of those who's not bothered by occasionally reading a Tweet about something good to eat.
Perhaps there is a time and place for everything. The era of newspapers operating wholly separate online divisions clearly has ended, and the era of integrated newsrooms has begun. From that union we're all learning some things.
With all the hyperbolic, ill-sourced and often self-serving End of Days coverage of the newspaper industry lately, we shouldn't be surprised to see any number of really bad ideas surfacing -- and I don't just mean paywalls.
I say: Let the bad ideas flow. Sometimes bad ideas spark good ones. Just don't drink the Kool-Aid.
Here's one that might smell good but bear poison: Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin's proposal to let newspapers dodge taxes by declaring themselves to be nonprofit charities.
There are still a few family-owned newspapers in America, but only a few. Most were gobbled up by corporate consolidators -- newspaper chains -- decades ago. The reason, I think, has to do as much with the dynamics of a family business as with corporate finance and the peculiarities of newspapering.
There are four cycles in the life of a family business. Often they align with generations:
As I observed Friday, newsrooms are categorically blind to the underlying business realities of their own employers. This leads to needless shock and amazement when an overleveraged newspaper chain falls on hard times, a lot of pointless hand-wringing about the future of journalism, and a parade of kooky ideas about how "we" are going to "make them pay" for all the really great content that Google, et al, are "stealing."
I twittered an offhand remark yesterday: "Please stop calling print the core product." It was retweeted quite a bit, and I received some "please explain" queries. Here's my explanation.
If you're still thinking your core product is a newspaper, you're misleading yourself and maybe even killing your business.
Your core business is not print.
And this may dismay the online news crowd, but your core product isn't news.
