Mark Potts takes us back 20 years to digital opportunities lost

Wow. This is going to be a short blog post because you shouldn’t be reading me, you should be reading Mark Potts.

Mark’s A Vision for the Future of Newspapers — 20 Years Ago is one of the most insightful pieces you will read on the history of news online and the opportunities blown by newspapers.

He tells the story of a memo Post Managing Editor Robert G. Kaiser wrote 20 years ago after returning from an Apple-sponsored conference in Japan. Awestruck by the upcoming developments he heard forecast (nearly all of which are old hat by now), Kaiser wrote:

None of this is science fiction — it’s just around the corner.

The memo, which quaintly notes “Hook” as a movie viewers might want to see, and Mark’s reflection 20 years later provide insights into a sincere effort by a great newspaper to get ahead of the digital curve that it clearly saw coming.

Mark also reflects on the industry’s failure at digital efforts:

The history of the past 20 years of newspapers and digital media is, unfortunately, a legacy of timidity, missed opportunities and a general lack of imagination and guts to leap into the future.

But stop reading me. Go read Mark. I can’t remember the last piece I read that was this good about the history of digital news.

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Mourning my drowned iPhone

Buttry at son Joe's wedding rehearsal

That moment of silence for my iPhone was not mourning. I was just stunned. The sobbing, that was mourning.

For three years now, since the first iPhones came out, Apple’s mobile meth has been at the heart of my innovation pitch.

At the first Newspaper Next symposium in February 2006, Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen used phones as an example in explaining disruptive innovation. I understood instantly. At an intellectual level, I understood Christensen’s story of how Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone disrupted Western Union and the telegraph business. At a personal level, I understood deeply Christensen’s story of how the original mobile phones – though barely good enough by such standard measures as reliability, audio quality, battery endurance and size – changed communication forever because they offered mobility.

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