Howard Owens has weighed in with his view on what the newspaper industry’s “Original Sin” was in the early days of the Internet:
Alan Mutter says we screwed up by failing to charge for content. I say not only was that not a mistake, but many newspapers did try to charge for content. I have written that the Original Sin was that we “did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers.”
Howard, publisher of the digital startup The Batavian, contends that a greater error was keeping our online units “tethered to the mother ship.” Howard, one of the most insightful people working in digital journalism, makes an excellent case in his blog that we would have done a better job in moving into the digital age by spinning our web sites off into standalone companies.
Howard makes a lot of good points, and I won’t summarize them here. I encourage you to read them yourself. I do, however, take issue with two points Howard made:
- First, lots of organizations did separate their online operations from their print operations. The Washington Post is perhaps the best-known example. My former newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, separated its Omaha.com operation from the newspaper for a while, and its digital performance has been consistently disappointing. I understand the Gazette had a separate online operation at some point before my arrival. I have visited several newspapers that had significant organizational separation between print and online. Howard has some excellent advice on starting an independent online operation and most, if not all, of the online spinoffs from newspaper organizations did not do things the way Howard is saying they should have. My point is that organization is not as important as mindset. And spinning digital operations off did not change the mindset.
- Howard misunderstood and thus mischaracterizezd my Original Sin post. He says I identified “bundling of online ads with print ads” as the Original Sin. Actually, I said the Original Sin “was failing to see beyond our original business model.” The bundling approach was a symptom of the bigger sin. Because we were forcing our old business model on the new technology through bundling and other blunders, we didn’t explore and discover the possibilities of the new medium, such as search and direct transactions. I apologize for any lack of clarity in my original post.
As I noted in my post earlier today, responding to a comment from Chris O’Brien on my original Original Sin post, I will blog soon about another huge mistake (I won’t call it an Original Sin; I think we’re kind of wearing out the Garden of Eden metaphor). Not sure I will get that posted today. Three posts might be enough for a Saturday.
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[…] the 1990s was newspaper publishers’ Original Sin of the Internet age. My post provoked a few other writers to weigh in with their thoughts on what the Original Sin was. Tim O’Brien of the New York […]
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