Shots Across the Bow

Newspapers are over.

TV didn't kill them but the internet will. I can get my news from internet sources quicker, easier, and more accurately than I can from a piece of paper that was printed 12 hours ago and has been sitting in a box for another five or six. Newspaper can't give me audio, or video, or any interactivity that isn't limited by the 24 hour publish cycle. But that's not the crucial problem. Newspapers can establish an online presence and give me all of those things. What they can't give me, and what I can get from the internet, is knowledge and expertise.

Newspapers are limited by the simple fact that most of their employees know very little about anything other than reporting. Sure, some are specialized. In the sports department, you've got a football guy, and a basketball guy, and the business department will have a guy who knows a lot about stocks, but what happens when the big story of the day is about Jai Alai, or real estate backed derivatives that are so esoteric that most of us have never heard of them?

The newspaper has to go out and find an expert and interview him, and hope that the reporter knows enough on the subject to intelligently convey what the expert said.

Usually, they fail.

Think about it. How many times have you read a newspaper article dealing with a subject you are very familiar with, and the story has a key piece of information wrong? Yet you trust the paper to get it right when the story deals with a topic you are unfamiliar with!

The new media is run differently. It's made up of millions of people, all of whom have areas of expertise, so when the story is more complicated that "My dog has fleas" or more esoteric than covering yesterday's Kiwanis Club meeting, there is somebody online who knows the subject backwards and forwards and is able to write about it intelligently, accurately, and even more important, quickly. In order to survive, newspapers will have to tap in to the strength of the new media, that endlessly expanding group of experts and somehow harness and brand that knowledge. Rather than an aggregater of news, they will have to become an aggregater of knowledge.

The worst part is that they have to do it without imposing a cost on the viewer because their are too many of us out here doing it for free.

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