Edmonds: Newspaper Next means newspapers need to be 'indispensable'
By Leah McBride Mensching, Monday 25 February 2008 at 22:43 :: Training & Education :: #1318 :: rss
The American Press Institute's latest project, Newspaper Next 2.0, means newspaper companies “will have to venture farther afield and become the indispensable guide to everything that anyone in their local community needs to know to live there,” The Poynter Institute's media analyst Rick Edmonds stated Monday.
The report, a sequel to the original 2006 Newspaper Next report, was published online last week, and states that despite the problems plaguing the news industry, from circulation declines to online revenues that can't make up for them, newspapers can survive, and even see “dizzying growth rates” j – but not without dramatic changes in the way they think, the strategies they adopt and the innovation processes they use.”
The bar for newspapers keeps rising ever higher, and as time passes, it will take increasingly more than reporting the news to reach it.
For those on the business side, Edmonds recommends paying close attention to the report's 24 case studies, as well as the seven examples the report lists that show how some newspaper companies have organised and financed innovation.
Edmonds states that he has reservations when it comes to some conclusions the Newspaper Next report draws, and is “not persuaded that newspaper people can simply be repurposed into 'disruptive' entrepreneurs. The true disrupters ... come literally from a very different place.” However, he writes, while there is no “miracle cure for what ails newspapers,” the report does its job by asking the right questions, giving new business model examples and urging newspaper companies to take “urgent action.”
The Newspaper Next report states in its introduction that the newspaper industry has “reached a moment of self-examination,” and promises that if newspapers “commit to finding new roles that the public will welcome in their lives, even if these are unfamiliar and challenging ... They will succeed in engaging large new segments of customers, both among the public and among businesses, and they will discover ways to serve them more effectively than ever before.”
To download a free copy of the report, click here.
For a previous article on this topic, visit our partner site, Editorsweblog.org.
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