Newspaper Next: Innovate the right way to flourish
By Leah McBride Mensching, Friday 31 August 2007 at 21:26 :: Management :: #507 :: rss
The American Press Institute's Newspaper Next team spent a year researching patterns of disruption in the newspaper industry, resulting in the team's latest report, Blueprint for Transformation, which gives newspaper companies a practical innovation process, a strategic game plan and the field tests of those approaches.
The most basic roles of newspapers – fulfilling a civic mission to create an informed society, facilitate civic dialogue and be public watchdogs – has not changed. What has changed is the addition of more ways to disseminate that information and the ways to financially support it. Newspaper companies that cling to old ways of doing things will “sink into irrelevance,” as will newspaper companies that innovate poorly, the Newspaper Next (N2) report tells us.
“The future of journalism and the civic mission of newspaper companies will be much easier to maintain if newspaper companies can develop profitable new business models to support them,” the report states.
Although newspapers are feeling threatened, there are huge opportunities outside the industry that, if seized correctly, mean newspaper companies can flourish if they are innovated properly.
“Successful new business models are emerging, providing new ways to get and give information, buy and sell, create and maintain relationships, and convene communities. Many of these offerings supplant traditional newspaper functions, adding new dimensions of value, convenience and interactivity,” the N2 team writes. “The innovators creating these solutions are seeing dizzying growth rates. Why can't newspaper companies do the same?”
Newspapers can have the same successes new innovators are currently seeing, but not without “dramatic changes to the way they think, the strategies they adopt and the innovation processes they use.”
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