News media: Be like GM, except ... different

Perhaps local news media organizations should take a cue from General Motors' most radical attempts to change for the future.

Scott Karp delivers his characteristic high-grade analysis of that prospect, drawing from an article in The Atlantic that describes GM's Volt electric car project.

Karp focuses on newspapers, but I would broaden his argument, crystallized here, to include all locally focused media organizations whose primary consumer service is news:

"All the talk about 'saving newspapers' is focused on finding new business models to keep doing what they’ve always done -- which is like GM looking for a new business model to sell the kinds of cars it made in the '50s and '60s. What the newspaper industry, if it is to survive as such, must find is a radical new value proposition for news — something so audacious, so self-evidently valuable that, if it can find a way to deliver it, would lead to the rebirth of newspaper journalism."

My biggest concern with locally focused journalism -- which I will define broadly to include both so-called "professional" practices in newspaper and broadcast newsrooms, and "citizen" practices via blogs, various interactive forums and social media -- remains demand, specifically intensity of demand.

GM knows, at least, that even radical experiments to improve fuel efficiency in cars still get at a persistent and growing consumer need in most modern economies: fast, flexible, reasonably priced, motorized transportation. People struggle to get by and get ahead without it.

On the other hand, no matter how radically we rethink and redo the gathering, preparation or delivery of local news -- a new value proposition, as Karp says -- we in the news business cannot fall back on any presumption that people need our services that intensely.

News is an episodic want for some people sometimes, not a persistent need for all people all the time. Supply greatly exceeds demand, as I and others discussed years ago. Only our own vain notions of the Fourth Estate as independent defender of freedom and democracy would leave us insisting otherwise.

Further, even if you argue that people need news more than I believe they do, can you argue that they necessarily need the specific news gathered, prepared and delivered by those of us in so-called professional media?

Karp correctly pushes news pros to be more ambitious trying to reinvent their services, much the way GM places a risky bet on the Volt project. I'd add that news media companies must take on even riskier bets, as a proportion, with smaller jackpots. The consumer demand that backs our bets is far more fragile than what GM sees in its darkest hours.