Here’s why I get so angry when smart and influential people in journalism and media operations about charging for content or seeking government subsidies or trying to protect and control their content: We keep falling further behind.
Everything you do takes time and energy and communicates priorities. You can mouth lip service about innovation, but if you spend your time and energy seeking ways to move backward, you don’t really innovate. Your own staff doesn’t take you seriously and the people trying to innovate get discouraged and don’t get the resources you need.
While the news business is trying to figure out how to get people to pay money they don’t want to pay, Google has been figuring out how to serve its voluntary visitors better. Read Danny Sullivan’s post, Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results.
I won’t try to summarize it here, except to say that I am trying to remember any time a news organization did anything that innovative. At the same time Google considered how to serve customers better, delivered a better user experience with smart use of technology and considered (and delivered) a way to let customers opt out of the new service if they preferred the old way. For all the time news organizations spend fretting about those evil Google schemers, we haven’t paid enough attention to learn much from them.
News organizations spend waaaay too much time and energy treating Google as the devil and trying to protect ourselves from it. We should instead learn innovation lessons from Google and focus our energies on moving forward instead of trying to preserve our comfortable past.
Google’s kind of success takes a disciplined full-time focus on innovation. And you simply can’t achieve that if you are trying to prop up an old model with government subsidies, protective measures and paywalls.
[…] I det hele taget burde alverdens medievirksomheder gøre det samme: Sætte sig ned og forsøge at blive inspireret af andre, der gør det godt. Indse at innovation ikke er mulig, når man skuer bagud med beskyttelsesbrillerne på, men kun er mulig når man skuer fremad og i princippet lader alle muligheder stå åbne. Ganske som Steve Buttry argumenterer for. […]
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