Writing Hurts

OK, I was being cranky in my last post. There are a lot of things that newspapers are doing to survive. I just worry that we haven’t absorbed the lessons of how to deal with disruptive change from other industries.

Take Polaroid and Kodak. Fifteen years ago, those were the names you thought of when you thought of photography. They both had histories of innovation and were well-positioned to corner the digital market. And Kodak did try early on, producing one of the first digital SLRs used by newspapers. But they were committed to film, and even when thinking about digital, they had a film mindset. Now they’re cutting back on film production and have a line of (mostly) excreable consumer cameras.

Polaroid thought that their photos were superior to digital ones. And they were, for a while. But sensors got better and better and cheaper and cheaper. And gradually, almost no one except artists and the elderly were using Polaroid cameras. The company didn’t plan for such a market shift. And I don’t know that anyone can.

Those kinds of changes are exactly what newspapers are facing today. And the innovation programs that are under way really are a good start. But newspaper companies need to stop thinking like newspaper companies. Easier said than done, for sure, but look where thinking the same way got Kodak and Polaroid.

I had an editor who once asked if we were going to do the same thing differently or something really different. We’ve tried doing the same thing differently. Now it’s time to try something different.

In the fall of 2006, I went to a conference with editors and publishers from the chain I was working at. It was a mix of a few small dailies, like the one where I was city editor and metros. We all paid close attention to a presentation about how we needed to change, restructure the newsroom, our Web sites and our print products. Then we broke up into small groups to think of projects we could do.

When it came time to announce our ideas, every group had the same theme: MySpace for ___. One group wanted to make MySpace for pets. Another wanted to make MySpace into a glossy print product featuring high school athletes. You get the idea.

When we were leaving, I asked my publisher what she thought, and she was pretty pleased with all of the ideas. Her take was that MySpace was so successful, why shouldn’t we use their idea to make money? What she missed was that MySpace (and Facebook, and Google, and Flickr and any number of other successful ideas) succeeded because it did something new and interesting. Taking an idea and barely re-working it doesn’t qualify as innovation. Especially when you miss the point entirely, like the glossy magazine people did.

As I’m writing this, I logged into MySpace for the first time in weeks. In 2006, I logged in every day. If you’d have told me then that things like Facebook and Twitter would have replaced that, I don’t know if I’d have believed you. And I’m sure the reaction at the conference would have been along the lines of “What’s Twitter?”

There are plenty of great ideas floating around out there, and people in the media have them. Instead of trying to just re-purpose things that other people have done, we need to implement those truly new and original ideas.