John Temple, formerly editor and publisher of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the US, wrote a great post discussing the lessons he learned from the experience of the Rocky. (Thanks to Mirko for pointing me to it.)
Temple talks a lot about missed opportunities and not understanding at first that the web is a different beast to print and can’t be approached in the same way.
He offers up ten lessons:
Know what business you’re in.
Know your customers.
Know your competition.
Know your goal.
Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
Measure, measure, measure.
Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
Let the people running a new venture do what’s best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
Invest in R&D.
Temple writes chronologically about the Rocky’s engagement with the web and the paper’s ultimate demise. He has an interesting story about the Columbine shooting and how the web producer at the time asked the print newsroom for stories and was told ‘“I’m not giving you anything for the Web site… They’ll steal it.” They, in this case, was The Denver Post.’ It’s an all too familiar story.
It’s a cracking post and very much worth reading from top to bottom. Here’s a few quotes that grabbed me:
You have to have a strategy and you have to be committed to pursuing it. We perceived the Web site as a newspaper online, as a complement to the paper, not as its own thing. That’s not a strategy.
Craigslist had come to Denver four years earlier, but we still couldn’t get the classified advertising leadership to agree to compete with Craigslist by offering free classifieds on these community sites, even private party under a certain dollar amount. The argument went on for almost a year, a year when we sent the message to users that we didn’t understand how they wanted to use the web or that advertising content was valuable to them.
Without R&D, how are local news companies going to get out on the edge and develop new offerings? Now that newspaper companies are filling the bankruptcy courts, they’re scrambling to find ways to survive on the Web. But their efforts seem mostly about making money off their current offerings. You don’t see them developing Yelp, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Newspaper companies have to look for ways to answer the needs of the people in their communities. They have to know what business they’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. It seems like that’s what too many still think. They’re not. They’re in the news, information, knowledge and connection business.
The I-phone APP model is something newspapers should explore. Apple built a platform and lets others use it. Couldn’t newspapers work together and with others to benefit readers and users of their services the same way?
Newspapers should stop looking longingly in the rear view mirror at 30% margins. It sometimes seems the whole game of the industry leadership is trying to find a way to get back to their old margins.
Newspapers should stop making decisions about new business opportunities based on how they’ll affect their legacy business. The main newspaper cannot dictate the shape of the future.
The rest of Temple’s post is here.
All Evolving Newsroom
‘Your main newspaper can’t dictate the future’
John Temple, formerly editor and publisher of the now defunct Rocky Mountain News in Denver, the US, wrote a great post discussing the lessons he learned from the experience of the Rocky. (Thanks to Mirko for pointing me to it.)
Temple talks a lot about missed opportunities and not understanding at first that the web is a different beast to print and can’t be approached in the same way.
He offers up ten lessons:
Temple writes chronologically about the Rocky’s engagement with the web and the paper’s ultimate demise. He has an interesting story about the Columbine shooting and how the web producer at the time asked the print newsroom for stories and was told ‘“I’m not giving you anything for the Web site… They’ll steal it.” They, in this case, was The Denver Post.’ It’s an all too familiar story.
It’s a cracking post and very much worth reading from top to bottom. Here’s a few quotes that grabbed me:
The rest of Temple’s post is here.