MEDIA FUTURES?

By Chris Daly

The ferment continues. More and more people are thinking in new ways about the crucial issues involved in the future of the news business.

Here is a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (by a former Fortune staffer) about new forms of ownership of the media that are most committed to original reporting, beginning with the NY Times.

Here's the lead:
The time has come for the nation's wealthiest colleges and universities to rescue its leading newspapers — resources almost as vital to higher education's purpose as libraries, laboratories, classrooms, and concert halls. The plan I have in mind would call upon the richest institutions to set aside 3 percent of their endowments to buy The New York Times. That's for a start. Additional purchases of other newspapers by other endowments should follow.




Here is a piece from the Times itself today, touting the virtues of paperless publishing. It tells the story of the very successful IDG group, which is going on-line-only.

Any more ideas?

A MEDIA PORTENT?

By Chris Daly

There's a story by the AP today that may point toward one path to a new future for news. It reports that the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc., is abandoning its print version and going mainly on-line instead. An excerpt:


MADISON, Wis. - The Capital Times, the feisty afternoon newspaper that helped define this city and championed a unique brand of Midwestern progressivism, publishes its final daily today after a colorful 90-year history.
The paper that battled Joseph McCarthy, former senator of Wisconsin, and crusaded for decades to build a Frank Lloyd Wright convention center could no longer survive after decades of circulation losses.
But the self-described champion of the little guy isn't ready to quit. Next week, the paper starts publishing two weekly tabloids and transitions its daily coverage to the Internet with a smaller staff in a first-of-its-kind move being watched closely in the industry.


Despite the gloomy, elegiac tone of the piece [who says the AP is always neutral about the news?] and its heavy reliance on quotes from readers in their 80s and 90s, the real news is that this newspaper is finding a way to survive by going entirely on-line.

As I have argued before, newspapers are at a crossroads. Part of their legacy from the 19th Century is manufacturing. Almost every newspaper is committed to manufacturing (and distributing!) a product every day. This is a giant anchor they are dragging into the 21st Century.
Newspapers are also, of course, in the information industry. In that field, almost all the work and profits are digital.

Newspapers are like the emblematic case of the folks who used to make buggy-whips for people to use in driving horses for carriages. Those buggy-whip makers never realized that they were in the transportation business. Instead, they thought they were in the horse business, and they went the way of the farrier.