The Modern Journalist

The Innovator’s Dilemma: How You Know When You’re Screwed

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Part of my lectures on the future of media are spent railing against newspapers companies inability to innovate in publishing, the very field they are the so-called experts in.

How, I ask, could a newspaper not have invented one of the first blogging content management system? These are simple software applications designed to help people publish on the web. How could a company dedicated to publishing, embracing technology to publish online (whoops) and constantly looking to talk to its readers NOT come up with that software?

The answer is simple: newspapers aren’t the experts in publishing, they did not embrace online technologies and the could care less what their readers have to say.

That’s a flip answer, I know, although I think there is some truth to it. But I also know reporters and editors who do value all of those things, so it can’t quite be that simple.

The answer, I think, is that newspapers as institutions aren’t set up to encourage innovation.

As I was scanning my RSS Reader this morning, I came across this blog post about innovation and newspapers, which got me thinking about this topic.

To be forward-thinking, you have to be in tune not only with what your readers want, but also with the options available in the future. I’m good at understanding what is going to come next with technology and publishing precisely because I spend a large part of my day interacting as an early adopter.

The ideas I have — right or wrong — are innovative because my life is set up to poke around with the edges of modern technology.

Which, by the way, is a flipping horrible way to run a business. The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book everyone should read, tracing exactly when a business should listen to its customers and change and when it should ignore those customers and continue forward.

The story is really about disruptive technologies and what you can do to survive in a world where the new, new thing is always around the corner. The idea is to find the sweet spot where you are continuing to cater to a low end group of consumers who want a cheaply priced solution all the way up to the high group who want the latest, greatest everything.

Now, it’s a bad idea to cater only to the high-end user (which I have to remember), but it’s an even worse idea to cater specifically to the low end user, which is what the newspapers have done.

Newspapers it seems have gotten themselves into trouble by believing that the low end group of consumers are their ONLY constituency. They have stopped looking down the road with an eye towards radically transforming their business models and instead looked to placate the print readers they have now.

That’s a short-sighted and short-term solution to a problem that in just a few years will certainly spell the death of many papers.

It’s not that these companies need to innovate on the latest social media software tools (although that should be a consequence of innovation), it’s that they need to be actively thinking — and implementing solutions — about how the next-generation interacts with news.