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Newspapers' online 'Marshall Plan'
Tom Mohr's manifesto in Editor and Publisher strikes a chord with me:
"To win, [newspaper] industry leaders must adopt a Marshall Plan embodying two key objectives: the migration to common platforms, and the acquisition of the ability to sell top-quality online product to our advertisers. To fulfill these objectives, the independent companies of a proud industry must aggregate into an industry-wide network. In this network, each company must cede some control over its digital future into a “Switzerland�? organization that manages the network."
Mohr, ex-Knight Ridder Digital executive and now head of a university media lab, is right when he calls out newspapers as being short on technologists and tech-savvy executives. And most of his strategic recommendations about building relationships in key verticals are dead-on right. But I disagree with one thing:
"Online is a technology play first, a media play second. The truly breakthrough online successes -- Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Amazon.com, Monster, eBay, Wikipedia, Shopzilla, etc. -- have emerged from teams led by internet-savvy visionaries and loaded with tech DNA."
First, let me express shock that MySpace would be lumped into a group of examples of technology prowess. :-) Everything about MySpace's architecture just feels so creaky, so poorly crafted, that I think luck and timing had more to do with its rise than having "loads of tech DNA."
And second, how are we measuring "online successes"? Traffic? OK, all those brands get plenty. Money? Not so fast. Where's the pile of cash flowing from Wikipedia and MySpace?
But the bigger point is this: I don't believe online success has been necessarily linked to pure technology prowess for at least the last five years. The building blocks of good interactive customer experience -- whether in content, commerce, social tools or myriad combinations -- have not been hard to come by in that time.
Just look at all the so-called "Web 2.0" companies built on foundations of service-oriented architecture, open database application programming interfaces, or open-source site management systems.
It scares me to think what would happen if publishers tried, at this point in our history, to engage online as a technology endeavor before anything else -- ramping up local development posses and engaging in random "build" projects with our usual deadline-cowboy approach, revenue-now-or-die orientation and lack of strategic rigor or long-term vision.
Aren't those bigger problems than a missing tech gene?
Maybe Mohr is just trying to get us all to admit we can't win that way. I agree we can't. But I don't agree that we should just lump all innovation prospects under the "geeky stuff we don't know how to do" category, then engage in deals from the very weak, demoralized point of view that remains.
Update (11:30 a.m. EDT 9/5/06): Terry Heaton puts a dent in Mohr's network-aggregation strategy: "This strategy is already being practiced in the television station arena with companies like WorldNow and IBS. Nobody argues with the network clout that these companies bring to the advertising table or how their use of verticals makes money, but the model centralizes control, and what that produces is neither lightweight nor flexible -- two absolutely essential attributes necessary to compete online in a 2.0 world. And the money these networked portals bring in is nickels and dimes compared to what the local contributors need to offset loses in the 1.0 world."
Update (5:30 p.m. EDT 9/5/06): Don Dodge riffs on Mohr's manifesto and asks, "Are newspapers and magazines dying?" I say under the weather, maybe, but sometimes it takes a bad stomach bug to start a cycle of much-needed weight loss and body reshaping.
Both blogs
Hope you don't mind ... I'm just going to copy and paste the same comment I left on Greg Sterling's site:
Yes, let’s all get together and sing Kumbaya.
What does he mean: “Local isn’t defensible�? That sounds more like rhetoric than a deep philosophy. Local may be the last defensible outpost.
Knight-Ridder tried centralization and look where it ended up. Meanwhile, Scripps and McClatchy have been growing online operations sans heavy centralization (only where it makes sense, such as a common CMS and key verticals, but still giving individual properties latitude to innovate).
The problem with the newspaper industry isn’t the failure of New Century Network. It is a failure to invest heavily in R&D and deeply disruptive product ideas, such as craigslist, YouTube and MySpace. Those are failures that fall at the feet of individual corporate leaders. I don’t see how some conglomerate approach is going to solve that problem.
I would also add that something like Lawrence.com is great evidence of newspaper companies doing some things right. It doesn’t get the headlines of YouTube because its purely local and not easy to duplicate in other markets, but there are examples out there of newspaper sites doing some good things  all which will fall below the radar of large national initiatives, but that doesn’t make them any less worthy of praise.
How will a common platform deliver more traffic and more revenue? I don’t see a point A to point B connection. What’s the evidence that, as a blanket statement, is true? There are probably some worthy experiments within that notion, but I’m not sure corporate newspaper companies are ready to throw in the towel on their own efforts and embrace a conglomerate approach (if anti-trust laws would even allow it).
I actually think there is some hope in the Yahoo! Local approach and Google’s archive search to help extend the reach of individual paper content, but when I think about national and international news  I’m not sure I see a clear path to Tom’s strategy. That’s already a crowded market. What is unique is local news. So the challenge remains: Driving traffic to local news and information. How does Switzerland Inc. help with that?