Though it’s focused on the newspaper industry, the lesson in this poignant news update applies to any traditional business attempting (or resisting) re-invention to survive in the Webbed world.
The Associated Press, seeing their empire crumbling because of the shift in content distribution from print news to the Internet, is fighting back:
Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that Web sites that used the work of news organizations must obtain permission and share revenue with them, and that it would take legal action against those that did not…. They said they did not want to stop the appearance of articles around the Web, but to exercise some control over the practice and to profit from it.
Share revenue? Get profits from aggregators? They want people who use their work, even headlines and blurbs, to compensate them. Fair use copyright policy allows these short postings, but the AP wants to get paid when they’re not putting forth the effort to take a chunk of the Internet market that they gained in the print one. Jeff Jarvis tells them in his blog how they missed the opportunity to transform and profit from the new information-linking age:
You’ve had 20 years since the start of the web, 15 years since the creation of the commercial browser and craigslist, a decade since the birth of blogs and Google to understand the changes in the media economy and the new behaviors of the next generation of – as you call them, Mr. Murdoch – net natives. You’ve had all that time to reinvent your products, services, and organizations for this new world, to take advantage of new opportunities and efficiencies, to retrain not only your staff but your readers and advertisers, to use the power of your megaphones while you still had it to build what would come next. But you didn’t.
You blew it…. You still expect [a young reader] to come to you – to your website or to the newsstand – just because of the magnetic pull of your old brand. But she won’t, and you know it. You lost an entire generation. You lost the future of news.
Sobering thoughts, but realistic. The AP and other newspaper giants have a huge amount of resources available, but because they didn’t innovate enough to catch the Web wave, many of them are doomed.
The print newspaper industry’s potential demise shows what could befall any traditional company that doesn’t try to adapt and transform with technology and culture. That includes everything from jumping into Web advertising to exploring the potential for streaming movies and songs online, to altogether new business models.
In the February 9, 2009 issue of Radio Ink Magazine (Cover Story, p. 30), Guy Kawasaki said a good brainstorm for innovation in the radio industry would start with this question: “If I wanted to destroy the radio business, what would I do?” The founders of the Web began a process that eventually nearly destroyed the print media industry. Whose sights are you in? Beat them to the punch.
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- You: Newspapers look for ways to profit in Internet age (france24.com)
- Journal Register Rethinks News (newspaperdeathwatch.com)
- Will the paywall work? Thanks to Murdoch, we’ll soon find out (guardian.co.uk)
