Newspaper’s Value is in the Channel
I once had an editor tell me that the value of our newspaper’s organization was in the process we had created for producing good journalism.
Not so.
For newspapers, the business value was that they owned a press, and therefore a distribution channel, not in any of the journalism that resulted.
Read that carefully. I’m not saying there was no value in the journalism. It held tremendous value. It still does.
That editor, though, was not giving due credit to the medium. The product which is created is a direct result of the medium which it is created for. Remember your Mcluhan, folks.
Now there is a new medium, so the old product cannot just move into the new channel. We need a new product that reflects a a real-time medium, not a daily or weekly, and which takes into account the fact that information is a commodity, and so is the distribution.
A well-crafted newspaper article gathers information from various sources, fact checks, and bundles it all into a length appropriate for the given story and the space available.
A well-working internet community post will link to various sources, gather the necessary fact checking from comments and trackbacks and leave the information in a distributed format.
If you follow the links from many good posts, gather all the distributed sources, check the level of trust a user has in that particular community, and bundle it all together with the appropriate credits, you have something similar to an article.
One is not necessarily better than the other, but each is appropriate for it’s own medium.
The inevitable conclusion is that media will move to the edge of the value chain, if not completely disappear. The tools to create and distribute will be valuable, as can be seen with blogging software, and photo-sharing sites.
The question is not how a traditional media company can monetize content that was formerly only monetized because of the distribution channel. That content is innappropriate for the new medium.
The question is how a company can monetize being part of this new, distributed community. What value can it add, now that the value of the distribution channel is gone from the equation?
The idea of a new medium being causal for a new business model cannot be greeted with a nod of the head while clinging to the baggage held from an extinct value chain, one which is hard to mentally dismiss since it engulfed society for many decades.
Most likely, the whole debate will resolve itself, with those contributing value to a given community receiving due compensation, in one form or another. Good night and good luck.
[…] That means that you need to change the way you create content and do business. I hate to quote myself, but I think an old post of mine was on the right track. I once had an editor tell me that the value of our newspaper’s organization was in the process we had created for producing good journalism. […]
[…] As I’ve said before, much of the value of old media was in the distribution mechanism, not the content, and now that distribution is free, content is a commodity. […]