New Business Model: Killing Papers Once And For All

“The Wash­ing­ton Times Tries to Rein­vent Itself,” New York Times Jan. 27, 1992
via Bill on Capi­tol Hill

…well at least as they had been know.

Before, “pub­lish­ing” meant print­ing infor­ma­tion on sheets of paper.  The Inter­net, in par­tic­u­lar Google and social net­work­ing sites, dis­rupted this model. A fact that has been explored end­lessly, so instead lets look at what’s possible.

The tra­di­tional rev­enue model was based on sell­ing space. In par­tic­u­lar ad space, typ­i­cally mea­sured in pages. The equa­tions was very sim­ple; higher con­sumer demand (cir­cu­la­tion) cre­ates greater adver­tiser inter­est, which results in more ads sold at higher rates.

The con­tent, in this con­text, is viewed more as a binder.

side­bar: My jour­nal­ist friends don’t bom­bard me with tweets and emails. I know that the value of jour­nal­ism is inform­ing, edu­cat­ing, and elic­it­ing reac­tions. Hope­fully one that makes the world a bet­ter place.  I never have and never will dis­count the ben­e­fits soci­ety reaps form your efforts.

One doesn’t have to step back far to see that pub­lish­ing is an infor­ma­tion busi­ness, much like credit scor­ing agen­cies or teach­ing. All of which have three fun­da­men­tal busi­ness processes; col­lect­ing, fil­ter­ing, and con­nect­ing. Of these three it is the two ends that are under the most pres­sure.

Col­lect­ing
Let’s first explore the col­lect­ing process. This has tra­di­tion­ally been under­taken be a staff of reporters that go out into the cov­er­age area to dig-up poten­tial sto­ries of inter­est. Yes reporters were able to derive some lever­age from tips to reduce wasted time, but that was noth­ing com­pared to the cur­rent lever­ages derived from tech­nol­ogy. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion dri­ven lever­age increases their abil­ity to har­ness and process an expo­nen­tially higher num­ber of story oppor­tu­ni­ties. In fact, this seg­ment of the process has been flipped on its head. Reporters are able to be highly effi­cient because poten­tial sto­ries are now com­ing to them. Their activ­i­ties now include fil­ter­ing, some­thing that was done fur­ther down the pro­duc­tion line. Sto­ries don’t fly under their radar screen, with more timely and numer­ous connections/perspectives they deliver richer insights, and more arti­cles can be deliver in the same time span.

Con­nect­ing
For many decades the desired action from an arti­cle was to elicit a reac­tion. This is still true today but pub­li­ca­tions, to be more pre­cise reporters, are being look upon to take the role of tour guide — facil­i­tate the dis­cus­sion. Dia­log that spills beyond the edge of the pub­li­ca­tion and extends the story beyond a tra­di­tional life cycle. Media is no longer just about con­tent, but rela­tion­ships and link­ages between content.

This is hap­pen­ing in all information-based busi­nesses, as exem­pli­fied below.

“The impor­tant busi­ness model idea here is that the role of the per­son putting the course together is not nec­es­sar­ily to cre­ate con­tent, or to trans­fer it into the heads of the stu­dents. The main jobs here are aggre­gat­ing and fil­ter­ing – com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion, fig­ur­ing out what is essen­tial, and then cre­at­ing a frame­work within which stu­dents can explore this knowl­edge using all of tools (men­tal, phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal) at their dis­posal.“
– Tim Kastelle

Even­tu­ally, pub­lish­ing will mean dis­trib­ut­ing rel­e­vant, con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion when, how, and at what qual­ity (value) level the end user wants it. A dynamic future awaits pre­mium con­tent cre­ators if they can jump the print-to-digital chasm.

If incum­bents are to be suc­cess­ful in the dig­i­tal realm, they will need to inte­grate medi­ums and develop new skills. It requires new thinking.