How the newspaper industry tried to invent the Web but failed.
It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry's proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.
But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise...
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Having lived thru these lost opportunities by management, I have some very bias feelings on this matter. Working for a national news organization I had numerous contacts with other print organizations, we were the young bulls and upper management was cautious since they had seen so many other technologies over the years that would drive them to their graves. These were the same people that fought to keep hot lead over offset. They still didn't get that the average price for a newspaper or magazine didn't even cover the cost of the paper, much less its cost of production. The first thing each published asked is how much revenue can we get for access, rather than how will we sell ads, because they KNEW no one would want to be associated with this geek tech. There mentality was to still go after their core, which was a 52 year old that read the paper at breakfast or on the way to work. This mindset was best shown by the NYT experiment with charging for its most popular content, which ended when people just stopped accessing the things they charged for and cut into ad revenue because people just stopped coming to the site. Thinking outside the box has not been a hallmark of the print industry, and when it has occured, too often it has been restricted by trying to make it fit inside the box rather than expanding the box.