When the first automobiles were introduced, they were considered by both manufacturers and consumers to be "horseless carriages", or – a product extension of the main product which was of course – a carriage with a horse. These early automobiles were designed as a carriage, looked like a carriage, operated like a carriage and even sold as such. It took some time for everyone to figure out that, hey – this car thing might actually be the real thing, so lets start designing it as a car, not as a horseless carriage.
It seems to me like the newspaper industry is now it’s horseless carriage era. The industry is obviously going through a huge transition to the online world, but online newspapers still look and behave too much like a "paperless newspaper" rather than being "online news".
Newspapers have to understand that in the not too distant future, the newspapers (and I mean the actual printed paper things), will sound as strange as driving a horseless carriage sounds to us today. This is not to say that reading news off paper necessarily goes away (it probably won’t, though it will definitely evolve… for example – why not let each reader print their own newspaper on their home printer and save the huge infrastructure going into the daily distribution of lots of wasted paper?).
It seems like the earlier newspapers start thinking of themselves as online news publishers, the higher their chances of surviving this huge paradigm shift. To do that, newspapers must start re-thinking their whole product and design it as if none of their existing operations and assets actually exist. In times of disruption, those assets become a huge drag on an organization’s ability to re-invent itself.
As Clayton Christensen pointed out in the Innovator’s Dilemma, disrupting your own business is extremely difficult (if not impossible…), but it will happen whether or not the newspapers like it (Craigslist ring a bell?…).
There are many things the news publishers should do ASAP, ranging from small to huge (kill the old flat-fee classifieds model, and go for a PPC auction, for example).
I’ll try to cover some ideas bouncing in my head on this blog.