Well put, and this goes to the heart of the problem JJ underscores. The arrogant b@stards at MSM simply tried to graft their old echo-chamber models onto the web with disastrous results. “We went to Ivy League schools…we are reporters and therefore smarter than you…we’ll answer your comments or complaints when we are damned good and ready…we are really the players behind the newsmakers…we don’t care what you [the reader] think”…

Let me illustrate with a true story:
a wire service reporter friend calls me in tears after the New York Times totally garbled her copy on their web site. It made a hash out of a newsmaker’s quote and worse, had her byline, though she had nothing to do with the bowdlerized copy. She called the NYT three times and got automatically dumped into a condescending voice mail. She emailed the web editors at the time whose Outlook generated generic auto-replies. Meanwhile her source is screaming at her, threatening her with libel suits for something she didn’t publish.

It took THREE DAYS for the NYT to do someething. And what did they do? *poof* down the memory hole, they just removed the page. No explanation, no apology, no trashline for correction, no polite note of apology: nothing. Just liuke CNN’s phony Gaza video this week, it simply disappeared. Thank g-d for Google cache and Wayback.

The MSM wants all the benefits of instant news from the web, but fails to acknowledge that there is a concommittant responsibility to be responsive to all readers with just as much speed and transparency.

“It’s a tribute to newspapers and their keen sense of the future that they quickly determined that the online services would never attract the masses they desired.”

No, actually, they missed a big lesson because they weren’t paying attention. Having been at CompuServe, and knowing a lot of AOLers, it was no mystery to us at the time that the core attraction for early users of the online services was communications. If a newbie started using e-mail, bulletin boards, chat, and user generated file libraries – in other words, all the things we now lump under ‘community’ – they were likely to be a long term loyal customer. Reading published content did not predict user retention.

The papers and other MSM going online thought that Content was King. It wasn’t, it was bait. Consumers might sign up thinking they were getting sports scores, breaking news, stock prices and homework help online, but the operators knew they had to be switched over to community functions as the core value. (That may sound bass-ackwards today, but imagine the marketing costs of trying to convince Joe and Jane Doe they should pay for e-mail and chat when they didn’t yet know what it was.)

The value proposition hasn’t changed from old style online to the Internet. Community and communications are still the core values, which is an idea Jeff’s being trying to get across here for a while. The newspapers walked away from online without ever figuring out that fact, or how they fit into such a world.

It would be great to hear some personal reflections of your time back then Jeff.

wonder where a ton of the gmac bailout $$$ are going? floor planning the zillions of cars parked on lots throughout the us.

how’s that for econ 101, a-wipe?

hell yes!

the cost of a new car is so f’in inflated because no one has allowed market forces to take the dozen or so deadweight links out of the sales chain.

who needs ‘dealers’ nowadays?

i mentioned “nearly 1000 completed vehicles simply gathering snow” the other day when we past a SINGLE ford factory. extrapolate that over the entire number of detroit3 mfg’s and their “network” of dealers and you’ll have a quite a number of unsold hoopdies!

JIT (just in time) delivery of parts is mandatory in the industry today (mostly supported by computer programs), but once the iron is built, the company(s) have them “on hand” for roughly 70 days before they are sold (that days-to-sale figure is bound to rise!).

why can’t i order the specific car i want online and have it delivered?

there’s probably $10k in cost savings there.

as for those who say corp. execs. “don’t get it”, i disagree. they get it, but it’s more convenient to actually build their approach to the future (internet) to fail so they can say to their shareholders at their annual meeting “see, that damn internet thing is not going to work”. which might explain why mr. jarvis was canned from nj.com way back when.

I fail to understand the logic behind the mentality mindlessly supporting industries which instigate their own downfall. The only reason these industry even begin to experience failure is that they begin to lose their competitive edge. More often than not, this is brought upon themselves. Whilst I have nothing against these industries, I find it incredible that they continue to ignore obvious electronic developments, attempting instead to energise their reader base into resisiting the inevitable future. Why not simply focus their efforts on regaining their competitiveness?

How can we not be frustrated by these failings?

TLR