The analogy with the newspaper industry is striking if not perfect. Newspapers (and much of what we call the MSM) are the old IT Departments seeking to maintain control of the data. They scoff at blogs and try to ignore their impact.

The IT staff who adapted to the PC and a networked IT infrastructure survived and even thrived; even IBM finally saw the light and transformed. The same seems to be happening with the MSM.

Mainframes are indeed back. IBM, in particular, resurrected them from the almost certain doom they had been lumbering towards for years. How did they do this?

By destroying the mainframe priesthood culture that had surrounded the computer and impeded access. The advantage of an IBM eServer mainframe today is that you can pack hundreds of virtual servers — all pretending they are PC-like servers — in the same space. In other words, mainframes survived by becoming efficient and synergistic means of doing what everyone was doing outside mainframes.

This is typified by IBM’s ad series, where a panicked group rushes into a server room, to discover the entire computer farm replaced by a single mainframe. The mainframe, it is implied, didn’t muscle the PCs out. It’s doing what they were doing, just more efficiently. This is in opposition to the old ways of using mainframes, which were (because of the priesthood and its restriction of user access) *less* efficient than the PCs.

What would be the analogy at, say, Knight Ridder, or the New York Times? What about a stable of high-profile, well-regarded, quality-controlled journo-bloggers, with a group of “public editors” accepting a raft of submitted tips, story ideas, and corrections, and using the connections of an old-school newspaper to become a simultaneous dead-tree and webcrawling powerhouse? Can you see a “Best of our Blogs” section of the op-eds? Or “Stringer’s Corner” where the up-and-coming get to print 200-word stories?

Step one, of course, is to convince the priesthood that change is needed… but we all know that process is in the works. Newspapers, like mainframes, will be reborn when the newsroom monastery walls come down.

In fact, there’s a blog dedicated to the Mainframe:

http://mainframe.typepad.com/blog/

Mainframes and Apple II’s were both computers, they were used for different things, but they were fundamentally the same thing. I have some perspective on this because I was an active software developer at the analogous time in the evolution of PCs.

I think the relationship between blogs and newspapers goes like this. The bloggers are the former sources of newspaper reporters routing around the reporter-as-aggregator. In that sense there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about the transition that’s going on. Reporters are like travel agents, we can do it for ourselves now, where before, it was economic to have an intermediary.

I guess if you want to follow the mainframe analogy, the newspapers are like the IT Managers of the past.

BTW, I did two illustratons of this a few years ago, one entitled Mainframes are computers too, and Apple sparked a revolution.

Both are exactly on-topic for this discussion.

http://radio.userland.com/archive/stories/mainframesAreComputersToo

http://radio.userland.com/archive/stories/appleSparkedRevolution

Has he ever run a years worth of display ads? Has he ever written, produced, merchandised or paid (out of his pocket) for any? Has he ever lived or died by the results? It doesn’t appear he has. How then can he begin to grasp the customer’s need, desires, and dissatisfactions?

He says move from a push model to self-service. Newspapers are doing $40 billion dollars in local and regional advertising. Do some test runs of that “self-service model” and see how many of those clients are satisfied enough to buy again and again.

That said he does make some good points too.