I don’t have time for a detailed exploration of the New York Times beta620 project.
But, since I have been critical of the Times on multiple occasions, I’d like to say that on first glance this looks like an excellent work of innovation, journalism and transparency. It’s a place for the Times to show off projects in the works and to seek feedback from them. I love the idea and will follow its projects with interest. Mathew Ingram and Megan Garber have written nice pieces about it and I commend them to your attention.
The Buttry Diary 
Hey Steve – Good stuff you’re bringing to our attention, as always. Now let’s provide some free (and most likely unwanted) help to the NYT in terms of the importance of conhesive strategy development.
The presumption on wihch the following is built is that the NYT is initiating these type of projects as a hedge against potential (or perhaps further) Disruption (capitalized here to signify the Clay Christensen’s definition).
If that’s the case, then the critical (with respect to expecations of success) questions to ask at this point would be:
– Is this something that could develop sufficiently to displace the paper itself
– If so, would the paper ‘like’ to see that happen, and
– Is there a business plan in place (or even in mind) which could be expected to result in successful monetization of these (or these types of) efforts, independent of the subscription-based business (which is unlikely to be or defend against Disruption simply because it IS the current business model)
If the answers to any of the above questions is ‘no’, then I would suggest that what we’re seeing here may be nothing different than failed efforts of previous incumbents which also understood full well the need to move into the next century, but really didn’t understand the need (or perhaps how) to fully build a business around a new job-to-be-done which, with development, could and would grow to become a “good enough” (if not superior) replacement for the incumbent job-to-be-done.
What’s more – because there’s always a chance of failure in business, even when your heart and brain are both in the right place, unless there is a plan in place to integrate the learnings from failed (or more probably in this case – half-baked) efforts into the incumbent business model (as Google does with its failed efforts), these efforts will simply distract and detract from the current business, making a weakened business even more vulnerable to disruptive competition from entrants and sustaining competition from incumbents.
There’s more, of course (I suspect after reading this a lot of it is already in your thoughts), but at least here we’ve been given an opportunity to send them off with a good start.
LikeLike
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Rick. As I didn’t have time to dig into beta620, I won’t have time to respond in detail. Legacy media face a difficult challenge in innovating. I don’t think we should give up just because the odd of success in being truly disruptive are long. I like this effort to test and adjust (part of Christensen’s disruptive process).
LikeLike
[…] NY Times beta620 seeks feedback on innovative projects(stevebuttry.wordpress.com) […]
LikeLike
[…] I praised the Times’ beta620 project. […]
LikeLike